Could you please elaborate on the privacy aspects of this token? Since this has been approved by New Zealand's authorities, I assume any trading of the token would require personal information to be submitted to your company and/or the IRD for tax collection purposes and to stop funding terrorism. Also, would Coingrid automatically withhold taxes after exchanging the tokens for other currencies like they do with many investments sold in the United States (stocks, gold, etc.), or would this solely be the responsibility of the seller? From my understanding, cryptocurrency is treated as property and follows many of the rules of gold trading, but I'm not very familiar about withholding regulations as you can probably tell. This is one of the most legitimate projects I've ever seen in the crypto world and has piqued my interest. Thanks.
First of all, the fact that our token has been reviewed by authorities does not make it approved or endorsed in any way. At present, New Zealand regulatory bodies do not provide endorsements for ICOs. What we can confirm, however, is that we have had our project reviewed over a period of time, and there are currently no objections to our ICO. This was important to us before proceeding with promoting our ICO as we did not want to incur any unforeseen delays after our ICO launch date.
In terms of the privacy aspect, in order to purchase CGT during the ICO stage, users will be required to submit information to verify their identity (standard KYC which is comparable to other ICOs). This information will be held in accordance with the Privacy Act 1993, and will not be disclosed to any third party, unless that third party has authority to request such information (for example, if we are audited, certain details may need to be disclosed).
Our obligations under AML will become more stringent if we start accepting NZD in exchange for CGT and/or including when users wish to deposit fiat. It will be therefore be a preliminary requirement for all users to provide us with personal information in accordance with our KYC/AML requirements before a user may create an account and/or make any form of deposit (once our exchange is operational). At present, because we are only at the ICO of our project, we are only offering CGT in exchange for ETH.
Any tax obligations will be the responsibility of the trader / seller. We are also of the view that regulatory bodies are treating cryptocurrency as a valid form of property, however, from what we understand there is currently no guidelines or legislation that expressly touches on this issue; in this regard, there are still some grey areas that we believe will be addressed by Parliament in the near future.
We hope this clarifies some of your queries, but please feel free to ask us more detail as we would like to be as transparent as possible for everyone.