Yonhap, a local news agency from South Korea reported the intention of the South Korean government to collect a tax of 22% from the cryptocurrency trading in the the country. Furthermore, the cryptocurrency exchanges will have to pay a tax of 2.2% of their income.
Yonhap further reports that Bithumb, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, made a profit of 317.6 billion wons (around 295 million US dollars) last year and is expected to pay around 60 million wons of tax, according to the aforementioned tax rates.
The new tax rates for the cryptocurrency exchanges are in line with the tax rate for all the corporations whose yearly income is more than 20 billion wons (around 18.7 million dollars).
Bithumb is also the largest cryptocurrency exchange globally, with 2.85 billion dollars of daily trading volume. In February last year, the exchange suffered a hacker attack and around seven million dollars worth of bitcoin and Ethereum were stolen.
The South Korean government has recently started enforcing the cryptocurrency regulations in the country. Many financial investigations have been launched, virtual accounts for cryptocurrency trading were banned and minors, along with the foreign citizens, were prohibited from trading on the cryptocurrency exchanges.
The petition signed by more than 200,000 people in South Korea to stop introducing new regulations related with the cryptocurrencies and amend the existing one is still waiting for an official reaction from the South Korean government.
