Japanese Lawmakers Want To Carve Out New Web3 Policies: CoinDesk Japan

Japanese congressmen Masaaki Taira and Hideto Kawasaki would like to carve out policies for Web3 in the nation, they said in an interview with CoinDesk Japan on Wednesday.

The country has been looking at different ways to regulate Web3. In April 2023, the Liberal Democrat Party’s Web3 project team (web3PT) released a whitepaper and committed to having discussions “with the aim of developing various Web3 projects using blockchain technology,” a blog post said.

They also hosted a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) rulemaking hackathon at the end of 2023, where stakeholders could express what they wanted from policymakers. “Through the hackathon, both short-term issues and medium to long-term issues became clear,” Kawasaki, who is also executive director of the web3PT, added.

One notable area of concern is that there needs to be more clarity around DAO and whether or not companies need to implement a smart contract to classify as a DAO, something that Taira, who is the chair of the web3PT, thinks will narrow down with time.

“The next step is to clearly reflect this in the next white paper,” Kawaski said, adding that they would need to develop regulations for DAOs. “Furthermore, we would like to grasp the current situation in areas other than DAOs and identify new important points for policy within web3PT.”

The web3PT also managed to get the party’s tax system investigation committee to understand and pass tax reform for third-party ownership. The Liberal Democratic Party’s tax reform outline, which included a review of the holding of crypto assets issued by other companies, was approved at the end of December by the cabinet. Now Kawaski wants to make sure this reform is implemented.