Moscow Edges Closer to Legalizing Industrial Crypto Mining

cryptonews.com:

Moscow is edging closer to legalizing its fast-growing industrial crypto mining sector, following intensive lobbying from some of the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) miners in Russia.

Per the newspaper Izvestia, the nation’s finance ministry is ready to sign off on a draft bill that proposes granting mining official recognition as a form of entrepreneurship.

If approved by the State Duma, the bill will mean that miners must start paying taxes on their earnings. They will also likely be required to pay higher energy bills.

However, most Russian industrial miners have welcomed the move after years of pleading with Moscow to take their industry out of the so-called “grey” sector.

Crypto has no legal status in Russia. The only existing piece of crypto-specific law to have been introduced to date merely bans the use of crypto as a form of payment.

As such, despite the fact that Russian Bitcoin and altcoin mining firms have grown rapidly in the past few years, these companies are essentially pseudo-businesses.

The bill reportedly proposes including “the mining of cryptoassets” on the All-Russian Classifier of Economic Activities (OKVED). The latter is the Ministry of Industry’s list of government-recognized business activities.

The finance ministry stated that it is “not opposed” to granting miners OKVED recognition.

The deputy director of the ministry’s financial policy department Osman Kabaloev said the Ministry of Energy was mulling whether to create a new OKVED code to miners, or add their sector to an existing OKVED category.

The industry ministry has previously suggested classifying crypto mining as a form of manufacturing-related activity.

While OKVED approval would force mining firms to pay higher bills, it would also grant the sector