The Government of Sweden recently announced its plans to cancel tax breaks for miners and significantly increase the electricity tariff for cryptocurrency mining by 58 times.
The cost of electricity for mining will go from $0.0006 to $0.035 per kWh, and the benefits will be lifted starting in July.
This decision is outlined in the 2023 budget report, which was released in November 2022, but only recently made public.
It’s uncertain if the new restrictions will affect only miners or the entire crypto industry.
While some believe that the increase in the cost of 1 kWh could lead to the destruction of the local industry, others see it as an attack on Bitcoin mining.
The tax breaks for miners were initially reduced by 98% in 2017 to attract more businesses to the country.
But as the industry didn’t create the expected number of jobs and the macroeconomic situation changed, the government is reversing the decision.
In April, the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, released a report on the results of the third round of stablecoin experiments.
The report focused on governance and programmability issues and suggested that the digital krone should function based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) to ensure its programmability for payments and settlements.