Crypto Cannot be Compared to Gambling: CoinDCX CEO Sumit Gupta
Crypto Isn't Gambling
A day after announcing the proposed crypto framework, India’s Finance Secretary T.V. Somanathan told Bloomberg that the lawmakers have taxed the volatile virtual asset the same way it taxes winnings from another speculative jaunt i.e. horse racing.
“We have now put in a taxation framework that treats crypto assets the same way we treat winnings from horse races, or from bets and other speculative transactions,” Somanathan said.
But the CEO of CoinDCX, Sumit Gupta rejects this notion. In a Twitter thread posted today, Gupta stated that crypto trading requires specific and cannot be just compared to gambling. In this light, he believes that the tax rate should be at least to that of other asset classes.
While the Indian government taxing the crypto profits, leaving the losses for the trader to bear, the high tax rate could further deter emerging technologies like NFTs, DeFi, Metaverse which are all built on virtual digital assets. This will ‘automatically have serious ramifications on the adoption and proliferation of these emerging technologies,’ he added.
The domino effect of reduced adoption and proliferation of cryptocurrencies could also constraint the chances of India winning the web3 game, according to him.
Web3, also designed, like cryptocurrency, largely revolves around blockchain technology. Where blockchain is used in crypto to create and maintain a decentralized digital currency, the same tech is used by the Web3 infrastructure to produce individualized tokens for each user, asset, and trackable item across its entire expanse.