“Today’s announcement of co‑ordinated international action on cryptoassets is a major step forward, marking another important milestone towards the widespread and co-ordinated approach to combat tax evasion through greater transparency and exchange of information,” Secretary-General Cormann said.

“We strongly welcome the extensive support being shown for quick action to make the international exchange of information collected under the OECD standard on cryptoasset reporting a reality. The international community can count on the OECD and the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes to ensure that the tax transparency architecture remains both up-to-date and effective going forward.”

The Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) is a key component of the International Standards for Automatic Exchange of Information in Tax Matters developed by the OECD under a G20 mandate. It provides for the automatic exchange of tax-relevant information on cryptoassets and comes against the backdrop of a rapid adoption of the use of cryptoassets for a wide range of investment and financial uses.

The speech focused on valuable lessons from monetary history and scholarship, and touched upon some of the key implications for the assessment of future types of money, covering central bank digital currencies, stablecoins and unbacked cryptoassets.

The DTA said that this is the first time the council has allowed it to get access identification information on cryptocurrency traders, including names, address and central person registration.

The three unnamed exchanges will now have to provide information to the agency on all purchases and sales of cryptocurrencies made by their customers between January 2016 and December 2018. 

In its application to the Tax Council, the DTA said it sought to “obtain information on unexecuted taxpayers’ and companies’ virtual currency transactions”.

The agency is in the process of contacting the exchanges to agree on the process of disclosure. 

Once the information has been received, the agency will check that citizens who have trade cryptocurrency have paid the right amount of tax.

In addition, information on transactions made by foreign nationals and companies will be exchanged with the respective countries'' authorities. 

Karin Bergen, personal tax director at the DTA, said:

"Without going too far, I think you can say that this is a big market that we need to look into. When we recently received information from the Finnish bitcoin exchange, it gave us a small tab of a larger picture, which we now have the opportunity to uncover even more of. However, how many traders it is about, or how much money has been traded, is still too early to tell about yet."

The DTA said it had received information from the Finnish tax authorities that around 2,700 Danes buy and sell bitcoins on a bitcoin exchange in Finland. This is the first time the Swedish Tax Agency received specific information in this area. The preliminary review shows that more than 2,700 citizens have bought and sold bitcoins for more than DKK 100 million over the years 2015-17, the vast majority in 2017. The tax authorities are now reviewing the information to ensure proper taxation. There may be either profits or losses that could affect the traders' taxable income and result in a proposal for a new annual statement.

The FSA found that:

• the ICO is covered by the prospectus regulation; and
• the token in question is covered by e-money rules.

The FSA said:

"The Danish FSA has assessed that the token offered in the specific case is not a transferable security. The reason is that the token in question does not involve any financial or decision-making rights over the company or the company's earnings."

"The token in question cannot be equated with e-money either, as the precondition for being covered by the rules for e-money is that the holders of them have a claim against the issuer, which is used as a means of payment. This is not the case with the token in question , because payment with the token on the platform neither initiates an underlying payment to the payee nor can be redeemed with the issuer. In other words, the token in question is the actual means of payment on the company's trading platform, and the payment thus takes place independently of an underlying claim between the e-money holder and the issuer."