Innisfil in Canada, just north to Toronto, becomes the first town in the North American nation to offer citizens the option to pay in cryptocurrency.
The town begins to accept Bitcoin as payment for property tax.
To do this, when residents sign in to Innisfil’s website they will be presented with a new option to pay in Bitcoin, with more cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ripple aimed to be added at a later date.
The municipality isn’t technically receiving payments in Bitcoin, though, as the town is partnering with CoinBerry Pay, a third-party payment provider that converts cryptocurrency to fiat.
What this means, while residents can pay their taxes in cryptocurrencies, the system will convert the funds to Canadian currency, to then forward the cash back to the town.
CoinBerry Pay was generally accepted in a meeting by the town council on March 27.
To entice people (especially businesses) into paying their taxes promptly, Innisfil that introduced cryptocurrency as a method of payment, said that normal tax paying would be subjected to “convenience fee,” according to the Innisfil municipality website.
But using cryptocurrency, the town's 36,000 people could pay their taxes right from their digital wallets, and having its fee reduced by half, according to the payment provider, but also said that people could always pay taxes through local bank, directly in person or with a cheque to avoid the fees altogether.
Initially, Innisfil is trialing the method for a one-year period.
If the trial is successful, Innisfil aims to join Ohio, which already accepts tax payments in cryptocurrency.
Innisfil, which is located on the western shore of Lake Simcoe in Simcoe County, has historically been a rural area.
But with experiencing growth in the Barrie area and the Greater Toronto Area, this pushed a greater residential development in Innisfil.
With this initiative, Mayor Lynn Dollin said that Innisfil is signalling to the world that it's an innovative community that's ready for the future.
"Once again, we are proud to be first in taking this bold step by offering this new, exciting payment option to our residents," said Innisfil Dollin in a statement.
Previously in 2017, the town started providing citizens with a tax-subsidized ride sharing program called Innisfil Transit, as an alternative to conventional public transit, in partnership with Uber.
When this project was launched, it is said to have saved the town Can$73,500.
As for the town's tax experiment, it is being launched amid controversy about the risks of using cryptocurrency which, unlike conventional currency, isn't backed by any government or central bank.
Investigators in Canada, for example, have yet to determine what happened to about $190 million worth of cryptocurrency that has been missing or inaccessible since December, when co-founder of QuadrigaCX trading platform died without revealing his password.
In 2018, a similar initiative was introduced in Toronto. It was voted down as it didn't find much support from the city authorities.
At that time, politician Norm Kelly who has been the City of Toronto's councillor for over 36 years, was looking into ways whether residents of that city could use cryptocurrency to pay bills such as property taxes, parking tickets and land transfer taxes.
