Blockchain intelligence tax authorities can trust: ICI Bucharest makes the case for open standards at the Crypto Tax Forum
Victor Vevera, Director General of ICI Bucharest, told tax administrations and crypto-asset service providers that the reporting data now arriving under DAC8 and CARF will only be as reliable as the blockchain analysis behind it — and invited them to help write the open standards that analysis needs.
Speaking at the Crypto Tax Forum, Victor Vevera, Director General of the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI Bucharest), delivered a keynote on a question that will soon face every tax administration in Europe and beyond: what happens once crypto-asset reporting data starts to arrive.
With DAC8 in application in the European Union and the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework following a similar timetable worldwide, administrations that have never had systematic visibility into crypto-asset activity are about to receive a great deal of it. Much of the preparation, he noted, is about volume — receiving, storing and matching reports to taxpayers. The harder problem begins where the report stops. Where did the funds come from before they reached the platform? Where did they go afterwards? Is a reported disposal a taxable event at all, or a transfer between two wallets the same taxpayer controls? Every one of those questions is answered by blockchain analysis and intelligence — and that discipline, today, has no agreed standard for what a reliable answer looks like.
The keynote set out what that gap costs on both sides of the reporting relationship. Two competent analysts, working the same transactions with different tools, can reach opposite conclusions about whether two addresses belong to one person, because the tools apply different clustering assumptions and neither publishes them. An attribution received from another administration arrives with no shared way of stating on what basis, by what method or with what confidence it was made. Service providers meet the same uncertainty first, deciding how to classify transfers to self-hosted wallets and how to establish acquisition cost before they sign the report, and each maintains its own bespoke integration with every supervisor it reports to. Administration, provider, adviser and taxpayer end up reasoning about the same chain with tools that cannot be compared and results that cannot be reproduced. “That is not a data problem,” he told the audience. “It is a standards problem.”
Open standards, built together
This is the gap that the Open Blockchain Intelligence Standards (OBIS) exist to close. ICI Bucharest promotes OBIS together the Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association (BIPA). OBIS develops open, vendor-neutral specifications for blockchain intelligence — shared formats for expressing who made an attribution, by what method and with what confidence — in public, the way internet standards are written. It certifies nobody, sells nothing and replaces no regulation: it sits beneath DAC8, CARF and the FATF Recommendations, in the technical layer where the absence of common formats costs everyone time and money.
Dr. Vevera described ICI Bucharest’s contribution as threefold: bringing the perspective of an institution that builds independent analytical capability for public authorities, so that a finding can be verified and reproduced without relying on a vendor’s assurance; helping to establish blockchain analysis as a recognised profession, so that those producing findings for administrations, providers and courts are trained, examined and accountable; and hosting the Blockchain Intelligence Forum in Bucharest on 22 April 2027, part of the Digital Innovation Summit Bucharest, where OBIS is formally launched and authorities can join the project.
Warsaw, 24 March 2027: the fiscal roundtable
The meeting that matters most for tax authorities comes a month before the launch. The OBIS roundtable in Warsaw on 24 March 2027 is dedicated to tax administration and fiscal enforcement. It brings national tax administrations, the providers implementing DAC8 and CARF, and the contributors writing the specifications around one table, to settle what an attribution standard must contain before an assessment can rest on it — and before a report can be trusted by the administration that receives it. It falls deliberately in the window between having the data and having to act on it.
The Warsaw roundtable is supported by the Crypto Tax Forum. Tax authorities, service providers, advisers and blockchain intelligence professionals who wish to take part can express their interest through the online form circulated in the forthcoming Crypto Tax Forum newsletter; those who register their interest will be contacted with further details about the event.
The invitation extends beyond a single day. OBIS drafts are public and open to comment from anyone, and the specifications are shaped by the people who use them. As Dr. Vevera put it in closing, trust in blockchain intelligence does not mean trusting an institute or a vendor; it means being able to check — a finding that arrives with its method attached, in a form that an administration’s own people can examine, providers can reproduce and tribunals can evaluate. That is not something anybody can sell. It can only be built, and only together.
The OBIS specifications and current drafts are available at obistandards.org. Comments can be submitted through the public repository or to [email protected].