Cryptocurencies remain incredibly popular in Japan. The National Tax Agency of Japan announced that, they received 21,980,000 income tax return forms in 2017 and the total amount of tax-paying hit 41,430 billion Japanese yen, according to Nikkei Keizai Shimbun.

This is the first time that the National Tax Agency of Japan has publicly released statistics related to digital currency. Due to the cryptocurrency fever, bitcoin and other mainstream cryptocurrencies have a hot topic. People who have accumulated digital assets worth more than 100 million Japanese yen have been called “100 million people” in Japan. According to the statistics, 331 crypto investors reported they have earned more than 100 million yen from trading cyptocurrency. A lot of younger generations in Japan believe invest in cryptocurrency is a new way of making money. They see relatively small sums of money rising 10 to 20 fold in cryptocurency trading.

Some officials from Japanese financial regulators pointed out that the actual number of people who makes profits from cryptocurrency trading far surpasses the number of those tax return payers. Most crypto investors haven’t report their dealings adequately. How to promote taxation in cryptocurrency trading can be a real issue to Japanese tax authorities.

Japan has always been friendly to cryptocurrency. Some Asian countries, such as China, South Korea and India are feeling the pain of inadequate cryptocurrency regulation. In contrasts, Japan has put a lot of efforts in building a clear framework for how cryptocurrency exchanges should operate there.

Japan’s Financial Service Agency (FSA) is going to launch stricter regulations for exchanges to secure domestic crypto exchanges, prevent money laundering activities and protect crypto invsters. The new framework will be applied in this summer according to Nikkei.

FSA also released statistics on Japanese crypto trading based on 17 domestic cryptocurrency exchanges, which shows Japan has at least 3.5 million cryptocurrency investors. People in their 20s, 30s and 40s make up the major share of the total population. As Japan is becoming a hotspot of crypto trading, setting up a mature regulatory framework to lower the risk in the trading market and promote tax reporting behavior becomes a pressing issue to Japanese