Buenos Aires planning crypto initiatives

Buenos Aires has become another major city willing to embrace crypto.

This week its Mayor Horacio Rodriguez Larreta presented a program called Buenos Aires+, destined at ” building a modern, efficient State that takes advantage of technology to accompany all the potential that the citizens of Buenos Aires have.”

The project notably contained crypto-friendly initiatives:

? paying city taxes in crypto

? partnering with local payment processors to convert this crypto to fiat

? using the blockchain to store citizens’ documents to allow people really own their own data

Of course, on a municipal level Mr Larreta could hardly do more to promote crypto. However, every step in a city that counts almost 13 million residents does matter, and it may contribute to swaying the whole country’s crypto attitude, which has so far been ambiguous.

Since last year different Argentine politicians have submitted pro-crypto proposals, and even the President has expressed a positive view of crypto in general.

However, the IMF has recently used Argentina ’s debt to strong-arm it into “discouraging the use of cryptocurrencies in prevention of money laundering and informality”. Not long after, a project of law presented to the Senate laid out a proposal to tax all properties the Argentines have in foreign countries, including cryptoassets, to collect funds to pay the debt to IMF.

Then the country’s securities authority set up an “innovation hub” to link crypto/fintech investors with regulators in order to get control over crypto investments, which would also help in collecting taxes.

Officials behind these initiatives must understand that there won’t be any taxes to collect if the industry is being “discouraged”, which could lead to believe that despite the IMF’s blackmail Argentines won’t quit crypto.

Buenos Aires’ move only confirms that.