A company has blazed a trail in Russia, successfully convincing the country’s tax agency to accept that its equity capital now includes cryptocurrency. The change in the ownership distribution has been registered after the firm filed a set of notarized documents confirming a new investment was made in digital coins, not fiat rubles.
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Investor Buys 5% of Artel’s Equity Using Bitcoin
At present, cryptocurrencies don’t have any legal status and are not regulated in Russia. Yet a company called Artel has managed to officially add bitcoin to its authorized equity capital. Not without giving the entity a hard time, the country’s Federal Tax Service eventually agreed to register the change in its status. According to experts consulted by the Russian business daily Kommersant, the case will not have an immediate effect on the treatment of cryptocurrencies by the state, but it will expand their legal use.
Artel CEO Mikhail Uspensky told the newspaper the company was joined by an investor who added virtual currency to its equity capital. He bought 5% of the company with 0.1 BTC worth around 60,000 rubles (approx. $940) at the time of the deal. From that amount, 750 rubles in crypto covered the purchase of the investor’s share in the firm’s authorized capital and the rest of the money was transferred to Artel’s operating balance.
Initially, the Russian tax agents rejected the company’s request but Uspensky and his team didn’t give up. They acquired an independent evaluation of the wallet holding the cryptocurrency from a third party specializing in the evaluation of different assets, a company called Veta, and prepared a full set of notarized documents including a protocol
