Lukka’s co-CEO and head of tax and regulatory affairs speaks on crypto taxation, & recent gov proposals for a ‘digital dollar.’
Cryptocurrency accounting company, Lukka, has announced the launch of the Lukka Library — an interactive collection of academic papers addressing legal, accounting, and tax questions pertaining to crypto assets.
On March 26, Cointelegraph spoke to Lukka co-CEO, Robert Materazzi, and Lukka Library creator and head of tax and regulatory affairs, Roger Brown.
“People weren’t interested in paying their taxes in 2014”
Materazzi states that the company was formed under its former brand, Libra, in 2014 after the founder “Googled how to pay his capital gains tax and found that there wasn’t any solution that was out there.”
The experience prompted the founder to rope together some developers to build what Robert claims was the first cryptocurrency tax calculator. However, the product failed to make an impact as “people weren’t interested in paying their taxes in 2014 relating to crypto.”
After the 2017 bull run pushed Bitcoin (BTC) towards the mainstream and gave rise to a proliferation in crypto hedge funds, the firm decided to shift its focus towards institutions.
Brown states that they then set about drafting a list of 170 issues relating to crypto tax for which they state “there was either no IRS guidance, or the IRS guidance on the topic was overly broad and missed the nuances in their facts.”
Lukka Library covers more than 75 topics
Roger asserts that more than 75 topics are currently covered in the Lukka Library, including a wide array of taxation strategies for crypto traders, and suggestions on how to value digital assets that experience high volatility for institutions.
The resource currently contains articles written by more than two dozen authors, including the University of Pennsylvania, in addition to legal firms McDermott Will & Emery, Steptoe & Johnson, Mayer Brown, and Baker & Hostetler.
Lukka’s users can also request articles addressing desired topics and can access the authors featured in the library’s collection.
Annual access to the Lukka Library is currently priced at $99.95 per year.
Roger adds that the platform is soliciting content internationally, starting with an emphasis on the U.K.
Brown on U.S. digital dollar proposals
Looking forward, Materazzi asserts that Lukka believes “crypto assets and digital assets are the future,” adding: “finally all the regulators and governments are catching up to this right now.”
Brown agrees, contending that the said future may be arriving sooner than previously anticipated, citing recent proposals for a U.S.-government backed digital dollar.
“The US has two bills in Congress and one in the House, one in the Senate that talk about digitizing the dollar and the digitization not only just at the institutional level […] but they’re also going to creating a digital wallet for each U.S. person to, in effect, no longer have to deal with currency. And that’s incredibly important. Not only for technology, the savings around sending it, the security also associated with it […] but digital assets are more traceable than cash. So that could be part of the reason why Congress is enacting it.”
He adds: “People say you could get the coronavirus from touching money in coins, you can’t do that by touching digital assets.”
