Ukraine legalises Bitcoin

By Escandita Tewari

Amidst the accelerating tensions with Russia, the Verkhovna Rada(unicameral parliament) of Ukraine, with a sizable majority of 272/365, has adopted new legislation supporting the amended law "On Virtual Assets". With this, Bitcoin is now legalised in the country, not mistaken as a legal tender. Ukraine is the biggest country globally as far as cryptocurrency adoption in terms of the percentage of the population using the tender, with a whopping 12.73%.

So why this sudden legalisation, in the middle of a war-like crisis? Well, the answer to that is twofold. Firstly, Ukraine is trying to protect its assets from possible abuse and fraud, as crypto is the only currency where you can double-spend and forge transactions- with all transactions available publicly for anybody to access, audit, or verify. The second is that, at the moment, the total cryptocurrency transactions are way more than those in fiat currency- with a deep talent pool of crypto developers and programmers.

With Russia looking for opportunities to invade and possible hacking Ukraine's financial system, this change in the legal status of crypto is being seen as an attempt to safeguard Ukrainian financial assets from any form of malpractice. With the rampant advent of bitcoin and other cryptos in Ukraine likely, the country might soon declare the online token as a legal tender. Still, even that is a risky affair, given that Bitcoin is not very stable. But it will be pretty interesting to see the upcoming turn of events in this political fiasco that is taking turns into cyber warfare!