Belarus Is the Land of Opportunity for Blockchain Development

On December 22, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko signed a decree "On the development of the digital economy" on the crypto-currencies. The key idea of decree is legalization and support of crypto-currencies operations, as well as mining and block-building technology at the state level.

President Lukashenko appreciates that Belarus has become actually the first country in the world, which opens wide opportunities for blockchain technologies development with possibilities of having every chance to become a regional competence center in this field. The decree does not imply any restrictions on operations for the creation, placement, storage, alienation, exchange of tokens, as well as the activities of crypto-exchanges and crypto platforms.

• The main goal of the decree is to create favorable conditions for it-companies around the world in order to build up friendly environment for opening their branches and representative offices within the country. Such development centers by the aid of creating wide popular product are able to raise foreign investments which will be good for country economy, because Belarus was not sought-after for foreign investors for the last years with negative net foreign investments of 1 124 million dollars.
• The another goal of the decree is investing in the Belarus' future - head hunting for IT-personnel and developing it-education. The introducing of the latest financial instruments and technologies which the leading economies of the world trying to avoid by the several reasons will improve Belarus' Research and Development sector and increase Global Innovation Index: Belarus occupying 60th place with low 9.4 score among others in R&D rating and ranks 89th in GLoban Innovation ranking with 30 scores out of 100 possible.
• Alexandr Lukashenko encourages initiative about tax privileges which are offered to stimulate the activity among IT companies. In particular, foreign companies that provide local residents with marketing, advertising, consulting and some other services will be exempt from VAT. Moreover, tax income rates will be finagled for the foreign IT-organizations using blockchain transactions, mining and so on. Belarus ranks 74th of 127 in the "Ease of Paying Taxes" rating with 70.4 scores out of 100 max which means awkward situation in country.