The executive said that it is necessary to create a regulation that provides the same tax treatment when cryptocurrencies are used for exchange.
The Secretary of Economic Reforms of the Ministry of Finance, Marcos Barbosa Pinto, defended in an interview with the newspaper Folha de São Paulo a tax rate of 17.5% for transactions with cryptocurrencies and specifically mentioned issues related to the use of stablecoins.
The executive said that, in a scenario where companies use stablecoins to make dollar remittances, it is necessary to create a regulation that provides the same tax treatment when cryptocurrencies are used for exchange operations.
Regarding the general tax rate of 17.5% for all financial applications, Barbosa Pinto said that this will create more equality in the market: 'We standardized the rates to allow the investor to decide what the best form of investment is, according to the merits of each alternative, and not force the investor down one path or another through taxation.'
Public consultations from the Central Bank
The Central Bank opened a public consultation between the end of 2024 and March of this year to gather the opinion of the crypto market and other interested parties about the stablecoin sector.
In the proposal presented by the Central Bank, the most criticized measure by the market was to prohibit the self-custody of stablecoins: '[It is] prohibited for the provider of virtual asset services to transfer a virtual asset denominated in foreign currency to a self-custody wallet.'
What the market understood in practice is that, if the rule is approved, it would be prohibited to send stablecoins like USDT from the broker's account to the client's self-custody wallet. With market pressure, the expectation is that the Central Bank will discard this measure.