Buenos Aires City to Allow Residents to Make Tax Payments With Crypto

Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, will allow the payment of taxes using cryptocurrencies, Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta announced Monday.

According to Mayor Larreta, the Buenos Aires City government will not receive crypto directly from residents but instead Argentine pesos, via conversions to be carried out by “leading” crypto companies.

“The city is not going to have crypto in public accounts, but through an agreement with virtual wallets we are going to add one more payment option to the ones we already have, with the idea of making things easier,” Rodríguez Larreta said in his announcement.

The service will be available in the “coming months,” Diego Fernández, the city’s secretary of innovation and digital transformation, told CoinDesk, adding that local crypto exchanges SatoshiTango, Buenbit, Ripio and Belo, and Mexico-based Bitso, will be part of the initiative.

The announcement comes several weeks after the Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro announced a municipal real estate tax could be paid with cryptocurrencies starting in 2023.

In March, Buenos Aires presented a white paper proposing a blockchain-based digital identity platform that aims to give the city's residents control over their personal data. It is expected to be operational between the last quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, Fernandez told CoinDesk at the time.

According to Mayor Larreta, the digital identity platform will include vaccination certificates and COVID-19 test results in the second quarter of 2022. Later this year, it will include civil registry documents and educational documents.