To explain how bitcoin asset-related activities would be regulated, Uruguay’s executive has submitted a bill project to the nation’s legislature. If passed, this will be the nation’s first legislation to address the legal limbo in which cryptocurrency exchanges and companies that provide services for virtual assets operate.
The proposed legislation alters the Central Bank of Uruguay’s original charter. It establishes the Superintendence of Financial Services, a unit within the central bank, as the primary regulator of the operations of virtual asset service providers.
In this regard, the text stipulates that third parties who lend financial services associated with the offer or sale of a virtual asset, custody providers, businesses that allow the acquisition and exchange of virtual assets, and corporations that do so will be regarded as part of this class.
A new class of organization called “virtual asset issuer” is introduced by the law. It is defined as a platform that issues any kind of virtual asset that falls under the regulatory purview or asks for admission of regulated virtual assets on a virtual asset trading platform.
The proposed measure places full responsibility for oversight of these activities on the nation’s central bank, similar to other legal proposals in the area that establish institutions as the primary crypto watchdogs.
Virtual asset securities, the digital analogs of the already well-known financial securities, are also mentioned in the text.
The country has made prior attempts to legalize cryptocurrencies as payment. This was the aim of a bitcoin law initiative that Senator Juan Sartori put out last year.
