Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, will allow cryptocurrencies to be used to pay taxes, Mayor Horacio Rodrguez Larreta announced Monday.
According to Mayor Larreta, the Buenos Aires City government will not receive cryptocurrency directly from residents, but rather Argentine pesos through conversions performed by “leading” cryptocurrency companies.
The city will not have crypto in public accounts, Rodrguez Larreta said in his announcement. However, through an agreement with virtual wallets, we will add one more payment option to the ones we already have, to make things easier.
Diego Fernández, the city’s secretary of innovation and digital transformation, told CoinDesk that the service will be available in the “coming months,” and that local crypto exchanges SatoshiTango, Buenbit, Ripio, and Belo, as well as Mexico-based Bitso, will be involved.
The announcement comes just a few weeks after Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, announced that beginning in 2023, a municipal real estate tax could be paid with cryptocurrencies.
Buenos Aires presented a white paper in March proposing a blockchain-based digital identity platform aimed at giving residents control over their personal data. Fernandez told CoinDesk at the time that it is expected to be operational between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023.
According to Mayor Larreta, vaccination certificates and COVID-19 test results will be included in the digital identity platform in the second quarter of 2022. It will also include civil registry and educational documents later this year.
