Binance to open office in Rio de Janeiro after city accepts crypto for tax payment

After the City of Rio de Janeiro announced that from 2023 it will accept cryptocurrencies as a form of tax payment, Binance announced that it will open its office in the city.

The announcement was made by the CEO and founder of the Changpeng Zhao exchange, CZ, on his Twitter account last Saturday (26). According to him, now that Mayor Eduardo Paes has done his part, Binance will do its part:

9 days ago, I made a handshake deal with mayor @eduardopaes. Rio De Janeiro will accept crypto for tax payments, and @Binance will open an office in Rio. He’s done his part of it. We are working on ours. https://t.co/HPJONtBfQ8

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) March 26, 2022

Binance chooses Rio de Janeiro

CEO of Binance was in the country in mid-March to participate in the ETH.Rio event.

CZ took the opportunity to meet with national leaders, including the Central Bank’s regulatory director, Otávio Damaso; the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes; and the governor of São Paulo, João Dória.

Eduardo Paes then gave CZ the “key to the city”, a kind of honorary citizenship granted to relevant people.

While in Brazil, Binance’s CEO made it clear that the company intends to comply with Brazilian legislation.

In addition, CZ informed that the company would open an office in the country to further expand its business in the region. However, he did not confirm at the time in which city the office would open.

“Brazil is very important to us and we are at a turning point, from an unregulated to a regulated market. It is important to have face-to-face meetings to generate trust”, said CZ in an interview with O GLOBO.

Now, it looks like CZ has already decided that Rio is the best place to host the Binance office.

Binance reported that “CZ announced plans to contribute to the development of the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem in Brazil on a visit to the country, the week of March 14, and that there is no additional information to the announcements made.”

“During this visit, which extended to other Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and El Salvador, the executive participated in extensive discussions on the importance of regulation in the segment, the growing adoption of crypto and the need to expand the blockchain education worldwide,” Binance said in a note.

Rio: crypto city

In recent months, Mayor Eduardo Paes has been announcing several initiatives to foster the crypto market in the city. In this way, he intends to attract business and investors to the city.

This week, Paes confirmed that Cariocas will be able to use crypto to pay IPTU from 2023. In addition, the city intends to use NFTs to stimulate art, culture and tourism in the municipality.

In January, when he first announced that Rio would accept BTC for tax payments, Paes also said that the city would invest 1% of its Treasury in the cryptocurrency. This action, however, has not yet been officially implemented.