Brazilian Congress Fails to Vote on Cryptocurrency Bill, Next Discussion Scheduled for September

The Brazilian Congress failed to address a proposed cryptocurrency bill this week. While the proposed public policy was indeed on the agenda, the deputy chamber focused on discussing bills that tend to other issues, including health and digital education problems. The digital currency bill is scheduled to be discussed again in September.

Brazilian Congress Sidelines Crypto Bill Discussion

The Brazilian Congress, which had slated for this week the discussion and a possible vote of a proposed cryptocurrency bill, sidelined it to deal with other legislative issues. The deputy chamber, who had recently came back from a vocational period, discussed other bills that included health plans, digital education, and prisoner issues.

The next period of time in which the deputy chamber will be able to discuss this bill will be in September, due to the proximity of the general presidential and legislative ballot. This means that deputies will be focused on their individual campaigns in each of their states, leaving just these periods of time to develop lawmaking duties. These periods are known as concentrated effort windows.

Some parts of the crypto-focused bill have already been cut, including the tax exemptions for green mining companies, as the rapporteur of the law, Expedito Netto, stated that these matters should be addressed in subsequent laws that deal with clean energy issues.

Troubling Situation

While Congress focuses on election matters, people from the cryptocurrency community in Brazil have complained about the situation. Critics noted that this would delay the approval of such a bill and the benefits it may bring to the ecosystem.

Julien Dutra, director of regulatory affairs at 2TM, the holding company of Mercado Bitcoin, one of the biggest exchanges in Brazil, exhorted the deputy chamber to dedicate some time in the next period of concentrated effort to discuss the referred bill. He stated:

With each postponement of the vote, investments and the development of solutions with high potential to change people’s lives are postponed, in addition to the fact that we lose the opportunity to turn off the tap of some serious systemic risks such as fraud prevention, money laundering, and unfair competition.

If the bill gets sidelined again during the next concentrated effort window in September, it is likely that its discussion and approval will be pushed off until after the general ballot that takes place next October.

Recently, the director of the Central Bank of Brazil praised bitcoin (BTC) as the precursor of Web3 technology and talked about giving smart traits to the digital real, the proposed Brazilian central bank digital currency.