LATEST: Italy Considers Increasing Bitcoin Tax from 26% to 42%

Italy announces a significant rise in capital gains tax on cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, to 42%, as revealed by Vice Economy Minister Maurizio Leo. This strategic move, disclosed during a press briefing on the 2025 budget, targets generating additional funds to bolster family, youth, and business support across the nation. Since 2023, such gains were subject to a 26% tax, a substantial increase from earlier, more favorable rates.

This tax adjustment aligns with global trends, mirroring considerations in the UK to elevate capital gains taxes on digital assets. The Italian government’s approach reflects a broader commitment to fiscal responsibility and economic sustainability, aiming to harness the financial potential of the burgeoning cryptocurrency market.

The revised tax strategy coincides with efforts to reduce cash transactions to curb tax evasion. Despite concerns, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni assures that the tax reforms are specific and will not impose new burdens on the general populace, reaffirming commitments to structural tax cuts and social welfare enhancements.

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Conduit sees path to gigagas throughput with new sequencer

Imagine a highway: The more lanes you have, the more cars can travel simultaneously without creating a traffic jam.

For a blockchain network, a high-throughput sequencer acts to widen that highway — allowing far more data and complex operations to flow through smoothly. This is especially important for applications such as onchain games, demanding DeFi protocols and social apps, where large volumes of transactions and interactions need to be processed without delay.

Sequencer throughput determines how much computational work a blockchain can process in a given time, directly impacting the scalability and efficiency of dapps. Higher throughput allows the network to manage spikes in…

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Cryptocurrency Mantle Rises More Than 3% In 24 hours

Over the past 24 hours, Mantle’s MNT/USD price has risen 3.57% to $0.63. This continues its positive trend over the past week where it has experienced a 6.0% gain, moving from $0.60 to its current price. As it stands right now, the coin’s all-time high is $1.54.

The chart below compares the price movement and volatility for Mantle over the past 24 hours (left) to its price movement over the past week (right). The gray bands are Bollinger Bands, measuring the volatility for both the daily and weekly price movements. The wider the bands are, or the larger the gray area is at any given moment, the larger the volatility.

Mantle’s trading volume has climbed 40.0% over the past week, moving…

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Memecoin conceived by AI trumps Trump-linked token sale

The Trump-linked World Liberty Financial (WLFI) token sale is live and so far, underwhelming.

It’s been overshadowed by an AI-propelled memecoin tied to the old-school vulgar internet meme, goatse.

(Please, if you’re unfamiliar with any of the goatse stuff, don’t Google it at work or with anyone around you, because it will absolutely get weird and NSFW.)

The World Liberty Financial platform is pitched as a DeFi lending and stablecoin protocol, which would allow users to earn a yield on their digital assets. As of Wednesday morning, the WLF team had sold over $11.1 million worth of governance tokens as part of its presale, which opened on Tuesday.

Read more: The details behind…

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Bitcoin’s False Dichotomy between SoV and MoE

This post is long overdue.

I talk about Bitcoin a lot. In any given week, I’ll have dozens of conversations about bitcoin with various people across different sectors. And like a pendulum oscillating every other year, the narrative of bitcoin not being a medium of exchange keeps coming back. I get it. When influencers from the community are pushing this narrative, people listen. They’re influencers.

But in this post, I want to set the record straight: Bitcoin IS a medium of exchange, now and in the future. What’s more, its future as a store of value (SoV) depends on its acceptance as a medium of exchange (MoE). Some of the people pushing the (false) dichotomy between bitcoin as a…

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NEW: Grayscale Seeks to Transform Multi-Crypto Fund into an ETF

Grayscale is seeking to transition its Digital Large Cap Fund into an ETF, an initiative highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal report. The fund, which manages around $524 million, is predominantly invested in Bitcoin (75%) and Ethereum (19%), with additional stakes in Solana, XRP, and AVAX. This move aligns with Grayscale’s successful conversion of its Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts into spot ETFs earlier this year.

The SEC’s recent approvals of spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ether marked a pivotal shift, ending a long-standing pattern of rejections. This regulatory transformation, spurred by a court ruling favoring Grayscale, has ignited a surge in asset prices and motivated numerous filings for new ETFs encompassing a range of cryptocurrencies.

Grayscale’s latest filing not only underscores its ambition to broaden its ETF portfolio but also reflects a growing investor appetite for diverse digital assets. If approved, this would be Grayscale’s fifth ETF launch in the year, reinforcing its strategy to meet the expanding market demand for varied crypto investments.

SEC Filed