I started with Nash Earnings but soon questions popped up.
I know Nash wants to be legal compliant but it’s impossible te invent new technology and be legal, it will be a gray area. Regulation/politicians are slow so you can’t wait for them and have to move on. Nash earnings looks real nice but I see problems, for myself and inviting other people too.
In Belgium we have 2 types of saving accounts, first is regulated and up to ± 1000 euro of interest is tax free. Second is unregulated saving accounts and here the withholding tax is 30%(!) on interest. Banks withhold that tax. Nash is kinda neither of them. Picking the EU might be though with 27 countries and regulation kills all innovation within the EU. So how compliant is this financial product? Do users have to report the interest themselves? Will be their an annual financial report with interest to do our taxes? How will average Joe know how to deal with it? Knowing to EU they want all information of the users on exchanges, wallets an tax every tranaction, every sell with profit, they will tax everything to death.
Other exchanges offer savings/earnings too and right now we all act unregulated. There’s a big chance the EU will shut down all those products. (1 example are Binance mystery boxes, in Belgium loot boxes in gaming were banned because of gamling laws, mystery box will fall under that law. Soon government learns about their mystery boxes it will be illegal.) Banks are heavely regulated, crytpo is not. Before you know it you have to be a bank, no more privacy, they must know how much you own, how much you trade, how much tax you have to pay.
For now Earnings is not a regulated nor unregulated savings account, but in the future Earnings would be an unregulated savings account with 30% tax. If you don’t withhold the tax then you will have to report it. And then average Joe gets penalized for not reporting his interest on his tax forms. Customers will think that what they do is legal but everything feels insecure. All goverments are bankrupt, they try to tax everything except the rich.
With such questions I wonder how thoughtful Nash is about those things, with all regulation in the EU you might launch illegal products.
Rest assured that Nash has been careful to take the compliant route since day one. Especially with a Series A on the horizon, I do not believe Nash would jeopardize their future by launching a legally dubious product.
From what I’ve been reading, if/when governments roll out regulations on DeFi, it may be requiring a KYC’d wallet (Nash is covered here already).
As far as taxes go, right now the onus is on the user to determine how they need to report taxes in their country. This extends to regulated banking products as well – in Canada, I need to report bank interest income on my year-end taxes (they don’t do it for me, nor should Nash imo). After learning what you need to report in your area, there are services online that help you determine capital gain/losses on specific wallet addresses (ie Koinly).