Tax redux

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January 17, 2019 TAX DRIVE: U.S. lawmakers have resurrected a bipartisan push to exempt gains from small cryptocurrency transactions from being taxed. “The Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act of 2020” amendment to IRS tax code would exempt realized gains under $200. Full story DEFI CONFUSION: The decentralized finance (DeFi) boom of 2019 is already making accountants dizzy. If you lock up crypto in exchange for a synthetic asset or a stablecoin, is that a trade or merely a temporary reorganizing of the original asset? Startups are now stepping up to help investors find the answers to such questions. Full story GUIDING LIBRA: Executives and founders from Anchorage Bison Trails, Union Square Ventures, Calibra and Mercy Corps will head up a technical steering committee to oversee the development of Libra. Full story BOT PARTNER: Amid soaring activity within the crypto derivatives market, software maker Trading Technologies rolled out a suite of trading tools for users of the popular Deribit exchange. Included in the software package are advanced order types, charting and analytics, as well as a feature to program algorithmic bot trading. Full story SCANDI LISTING: One of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges in Scandinavia will go public later this year. Oskar Soderstrom, CEO of Stockholm-based BTCX, told CoinDesk the firm is looking to deliver an IPO in Q3. Full story HEADED TO DAVOS? CoinDesk is sending a team of journalists to scrutinize the global elite as it meets for the annual World Economic Forum. It will be Davos, but through a lens of crypto and blockchain. Our daily dispatches will tell you what sessions you should attend, what you missed yesterday (or last night) and prep you for what people are talking about on the Promenade today. The CoinDesk Confidential newsletter will run for five days only, so be sure to sign up now. Subscribe here BITCOIN BUMP: Bitcoin is up only slightly at press time, after a good start to daily trading soon faded. Traders pushed bitcoin above the psychological threshold of $9,000 in early trading hours, but the price has since recapitulated. In a different context, bitcoin is up 23 percent on a year-to-date basis. Full story NOT YOUR FACE, NOT YOUR KEYS: Civic CEO Vinny Lingham sat down with CoinDesk at the Digital Money Forum in Las Vegas last week to talk about the non-custodial Civic Wallet, which enables users to carry crypto and fiat currencies on their own devices and secures the system using facial recognition. Watch now WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER   Copyright © 2020 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is:  250 Park Avenue South New York, NY, 10003, US  Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list