Norway’s Foray into The Metaverse With Tax Office in Decentraland

Tax Office

With Web3 all the rage at the moment, the Norwegian government is yet another country making moves to establish a presence in Web3 with the founding of a metaverse tax office.

At the Nokios conference this Wednesday, the Brønnøysund, Norway’s central register, and Skatteetaten, the nation’s tax authority, announced a partnership with consulting firm Ernst and Young (EY) to establish an office in 3D virtual world browser-based platform, Decentraland. The initiative, according to Nokios, is to deliver services to younger, tech-native individuals while establishing their Web3 footprint.

The wider strategy, however, plans to educate younger people about taxes related to DeFi and NFTs — and the office in Decentraland is the first part of that project.

Web3-centric actions the Norwegian government has already done that are not directly involved with the metaverse include the steady integration of crypto services at a national level. In the summer, the government said it would use Ethereum scaling service Arbitrum to release a capitalization tables platform for unlisted companies. While September saw Oslo — along with Israel and Sweden — strike up a partnership with the Bank for International Settlements to explore the possibility of introducing a CBDC (central bank digital currency) for cross-border payments.

EY Partnership

Nordic blockchain lead at EY Magnus Jones stated in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday that he hopes the partnership with Norwegian authorities will help spearhead education in the crypto space by teaching users about taxes related to decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT) while the Brønnøysund is also investigating additional Web3 services, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), wallets, smart contracts and other services.

“Kudos once again to the Norwegian authorities who dare to make moves to bring clarity in a complex landscape,” wrote Jones. “Building further on issuing the world’s first guidance on how to tax DeFi and also NFTs, and being a front runner in the crypto space in general.”

“We’re very intrigued to see what more the world will seek to build atop Ethereum, and we’re committed to doing our part to scale Ethereum globally,” said Arbitrum in a Twitter thread.

Norway’s actions follow an ongoing trend of national governments shifting focus to the Metaverse and Web3, with China and the UAE prime examples of this.

Feature image: Martin Solhaug Standal from Pixabay