Italy’s new decree has reserved over $46 million for companies who wish to set up subsidiaries for blockchain research. The respective companies will be able to apply to this budget from September 21st, 2022 as either individual or joint.
Giancarlo Giorgetti, Italy’s Minister of Economic Development elaborated that the new initiative is aimed at supporting the investments of companies in innovative technologies to modernise production systems.
Giorgetti added, “The challenge of competitiveness requires the manufacturing industry to constantly innovate and grasp the potential of new technologies.”
Initiatives that investigate Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) are acceptable.
Italian stance on crypto
According to numbers from last year, Italy has ranked 10th with the highest crypto adoption amongst 27 polled countries, with the likes of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Ripple emerging as the country’s most popular coins.
Another report from Chainalysis ranked Italy as the seventh in crypto adoption, closely behind Germany and United Kingdom.
In terms of regulation, the Italian market watchdog Consob is responsible for crypto-assets. Last June, Consob stated that over 4,000 crypto-assets were in circulation and that the government would have to take measures to mitigate potential risks. There have been no announcements on crypto legislation since.
However, Italy subjected all virtual assets providers to comply with the AML rules in early 2022 and blocked Binance from the country. Another sign of the country’s crypto adoption came from Binance, which despite being blocked in the past, re-entered the Italian market using a new registration.
And in January 2022, Banca Generali, the biggest private bank in Italy announced that it will allow private clients to buy and hold Bitcoin until the end of 2022. Although the bank commenced the technical integrations, the official launch remains unannounced.
Photo credit: mise.gov.it
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
