The year 2022 was not the best in terms of crypto reputation among regulators and legislators. Yet even amid the market collapse and repeated public attacks on the industry, some of the officials found the courage to embrace the innovation. Some of the names are not new, while others showed significant enough progress to be included on this list. The United Arab Emirates and El Salvador continued to push their crypto agenda and the UK showed great effort to lay the regulatory groundwork, while Brazil and the Central African Republic legally recognized cryptocurrencies.
Brazil
2021 could have been a year of mass adoption in Brazil, but it was in 2022 that the country finally got its own regulatory framework. Before leaving his office, Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, signed a bill that legalizes the use of cryptocurrencies as a method of payment in the country. The bill does not make cryptocurrencies legal tender, as in El Salvador, but still introduces the legal definition of digital currencies and establishes a licensing regime for virtual asset service providers.
The bill came on time. The number of companies that have cryptocurrencies in Brazil has reached new records โ The country's tax authority recorded 12,053 unique organizations that declared cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets in August 2022.
In May, the Brazilian Stock Exchange confirmed its intention to launch the first official product aimed at the cryptocurrency market โ Bitcoin (BTC) futures trading. Unlike in the United States, institutional and retail investors currently trade 11 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with cryptocurrency exposure on the Brazilian Stock Exchange.
The United Kingdom
Britain surely did not have an easy year. In 2022, Queen Elizabeth II passed away after serving the nation for 70 years. Two prime ministers, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, resigned. But when it comes to crypto, the turbulent government never stopped working on regulation. And even if the fruits of this labor could be more impressive, the UK still makes an important case for a national regulatory framework.
The Financial Services and Markets Bill, introduced in july, reaffirmed the intention of the United Kingdom to become a world center of cryptocurrencies. He expanded stablecoin regulations and coined a new term: Digital Settlement Assets (DSAs). The bill will authorize the Treasury to regulate DSAs, including payments, service providers and insolvency arrangements. The Draft Law on Economic Crimes and Business Transparency, introduced in mayHe proposed "creating powers to more quickly and easily seize and recover crypto assets" to mitigate the risks to people who are targeted by ransomware attacks.
Related: Indonesia's crypto industry in 2021: a kaleidoscope
This year the British Web3 community celebrated an important legal precedent. The High Court of Justice in London, the closest analogue to the Supreme Court of the United States, has ruled that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) represent "private property."
At a time when everyone is rummaging through unhosted wallets, the Treasury Department lowered your requirements to collect data from both senders and recipients of cryptocurrency sent to non-hosted wallets, unless the transaction presents "a high risk of illicit financing." And, at the end of the year, he gave a great gift to all investors by qualifying the transactions as "designated crypto assets" for the Investment Manager Exemption.
The Savior
The nation of El Salvador, whose main breakthrough occurred in 2021, deserves to be included in this list, at least for its persistence. Once the plan to issue โBitcoin bondsโ was revealed, the government of Nayib Bukele has been trying to execute it ever since. The first delay occurred in March, then it was repeated in September. In November, the Minister of Economy, Marรญa Luisa Hayem Brevรฉ, presented a bill confirming the government's plan to raise $1 billion and invest it in building a "Bitcoin city." However, since then there has been no news about the success of the bill.
Still, the country remains a crucial laboratory for Bitcoin adoption. According to the Minister of Tourism of El Salvador, Morena Valdez, the tourism industry in El Salvador has increased more than 30% since the adoption of the Bitcoin law in September 2021. In early 2022, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showed that 20% of companies have started accepting BTC as a method of payment.
In May, El Salvador received 44 central bankers from developing countries from around the world to address financial inclusion and discuss Bitcoin at a three-day conference. The event was visited by central bank delegates from Ghana to Burundi, Jordan to the Maldives and Pakistan to Costa Rica.
The Central African Republic
In April, the Central African Republic (CAR), with 5 million inhabitants, became the first nation on the continent to legalize the use of cryptocurrencies in financial markets. The cryptocurrency bill, unanimously approved by legislators, allowed merchants and businesses to make cryptocurrency payments and also make way for cryptocurrency tax payments through authorized entities. In July, the local central bank (CBDC) digital currency, Sango Coin, was launched to raise nearly $1 billion over the next year. Until now, however, only $1.66 million in the coin has been sold.
The country had also announced a plan to allow foreign investors to purchase citizenship for $60,000 in Sango Coins. However, this initiative was blocked as unconstitutional by the superior court of the CAR.
The adoption generated rejection of the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), which warned of the โsubstantial negative impactโ the legislation will have on the Central African monetary union.
United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates took a strategic approach to cryptocurrencies and moved steadily to create a regulatory environment and attract global investors. Perhaps that is why the country makes it to the Cointelegraph list for the second time in a row.
Dubai in March established a legal framework for crypto aimed at protecting investors and "designing highly warranted international standards" for industry governance. A newly formed Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) was granted enforcement powers in the emirate's free and special development zones, with the exception of the Dubai International Finance Centre. The now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX was among those first to get the same license.
Another emirate, Abu Dhabi, came up with a draft recommendations for NFT trading. They marked NFTs as intellectual property rather than โspecific investments or financial instrumentsโ and allowed multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) and virtual asset custodians (VACs) to operate NFT markets.
In July, Dubai launched the Dubai Metaverse Strategy, whose goal was to make the emirate one of the top 10 metaverse economies in the world. It includes research and development (R&D) collaborations to enhance economic contributions to the metaverse, using accelerators and incubators to attract companies and projects from abroad, and supporting metaverse education for developers, content creators, and users.
the country even opened its first city in Metaverse. Nicknamed Sharjahverse, it was described as a "photorealistic, physically accurate" metaverse encompassing the emirate's 1,000-square-mile surface area. The virtual city will support the local tourism industry and potentially create new jobs in the metaverse.
All in all, 2022 wasn't too bad in terms of friendly regulation. And next year will be even more interesting, with the race to the first comprehensive crypto framework in the US and possible liberalization in Hong Kong and South Korea.
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