It’s been two years since most people have thought about what Kristin Smith says will be the “biggest regulatory item for the year.”
The executive director of the Blockchain Association was referring to the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden signed into law on November 15, 2021. With it, he created a new tax rule that redefines a “broker” as “any person who is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person.”
At the time, the crypto industry worried that that would include miners, developers, stakers and others who don’t have a typical customer relationship with the people whose transactions they help facilitate.
In 2021, tax experts said there wouldn’t be much the crypto industry could do until the Internal Revenue Service figured out how it wanted to implement the rule. At the time, they estimated it would take at least two years before anything happened.
Now, here we are.
“We do expect the IRS to take this up this year,” Smith said during an interview on the gm from Decrypt podcast. She added: “I do think the IRS are reasonable people. Is that gonna get me in trouble for saying that?”
If the Blockchain Association gets its way, the IRS will focus on requiring centralized exchanges to collect tax information from their customers.
“Our hope is that they focus on that, because it’s obviously going to be very difficult if they start [with] miners and validators and software providers, who help with the operation of a transaction but don’t actually take control of customer funds,” Smith said. “It will be impossible for them to comply.”
When the spending plan was first introduced, Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY),
