The Antigua and Barbuda Government has passed crypto friendly legislation in the lower house under Digital Assets Bill 2020 making it a blockchain and cryptocurrency friendly country in the Caribbean. The legislation paves way for fintech startups invest and do business in this tax friendly island.
The Covid-19 impact has been felt in small caribbean islands including Antigua. With tourism coming to a halt, the government looks to cement its position in digital fintech sector to drive more revenues encouraging digital asset investments in the country. In 2020, St Kitts and Nevis also passed a bill legalising virtual coins
The Bill classifies “digital asset” is anything that exists in binary format and comes with the right to use it and includes a digital representation of value that—
(a) is used as a medium of exchange, money, unit of account, or store of value and is not legal tender, whether or not denominated in legal tender;
(b) is intended to represent assets such as debt or equity in the promoter;
(c) is otherwise intended to represent any assets or rights associated with such assets; or
(d) is intended to provide access to an application or service or product by means of distributed ledger technology;
(e) a transaction in which a person grants value as part of an affinity or rewards program, which value cannot be taken from or exchanged with the person for legal tender, bank credit or any digital asset; or
(f) a digital representation of value issued by or on behalf of the publisher and used within an online game, game platform, or family of games sold by the same publisher or offered on the same game platform;
Exchanges will get license to assume control of digital assets from or on behalf of a client, to sell, trade, or convert—
(a) digital assets for fiat currency, bank credit or one or more forms of digital assets; or
(b) fiat currency or bank credit for one or more forms of digital assets;
Digital asset businesses can engage in the following business activities to the general public—
(a) issuing, selling or redeeming virtual coins, tokens or any other form of digital asset;
(b) operating as a payment service provider business utilising digital assets which includes the provision of services for the transfer of funds;
(c) operating as an electronic exchange;
(d) providing custodial wallet services;
(e) operating as a digital asset services vendor.
The bill strictly regulates operating digital assets without license and imposes heavy penalty of conviction on indictment, to a fine of upto $250,000 or to imprisonment for five years or to both such fine and imprisonment.
Calvin Ayre appointed as Economic Envoy for Technology Development for Antigua and Barbuda in 2017, advises Government with digital assets.
“I believe we can create an entire new industry around original Bitcoin’s massive scaling abilities in Antigua. This technology can now tokenize everything in the world and I want my home country of Antigua to be a major player in this new industry. “With this Act, Antigua is now at the front of the list of countries set to benefit from the application and tokenization explosion that is happening in front of our eyes on BSV.” said Ayre
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies still not accepted for the Antigua and Barbuda citizenship by investment program (“CIP”), this option still remains in the pipeline.
In 2018, Antigua proposed accepting bitcoin for CIP, the same year we launched citizenship coin, as a first cryptocurrency startup for the CBI industry tied to euro.
ECCB already uses digital version of the blockchain based EC dollar (DXCD)
