Argentina

Other Developments

A new monthly reporting obligation arrives under RG 1172/2026: registered PSAVs must file Formulario PSAV_014 from 1 November 2026, including nil returns when there is no reportable activity in a given month. This formalises and standardises what had previously been a less structured reporting practice. The classification perimeter remains narrow. The CNV's competence over virtual assets does not extend to the assets themselves unless they meet the 'valor negociable' (security) definition under article 2 of the Capital Markets Law; no MiCA-style statutory taxonomy for token classification exists in Argentina. No dedicated stablecoin regime exists either — stablecoin issuance, reserve and redemption activity is captured, if at all, only under the general PSAV category, with no issuance-authorisation or reserve-backing requirement specific to stablecoins. On the banking side, the prohibition holds. The Banco Central de la República Argentina's bar on financial institutions and payment service providers offering or facilitating client cryptoasset operations without authorisation from a competent national regulator or the BCRA itself was reaffirmed as unchanged for 2026 on 7 October 2026, with the central bank's superintendent tying any liberalisation to a hypothetical second presidential term beginning December 2027.

Cross-Monitor Connections

The CNV's reporting and conduct-standard tightening under RG 1172/2026 sits alongside a financial-integrity-relevant obligation: the new Formulario PSAV_014 monthly filing is itself an anti-money-laundering-oriented reporting instrument layered onto the registration perimeter, connecting this cycle's crypto-licensing development directly to Argentina's AML/CFT reporting architecture for virtual-asset-service providers.

Outlook

The near-term marker is the 1 November 2026 application date for the standardised monthly reporting form, which will test whether registered PSAVs can build the reporting capability in time. The CNV's own gazette text of RG 1172/2026 was not directly retrieved this cycle, so the precise article-level pinpoints for the mixer-service ban and the registration threshold remain to be confirmed against primary text. Separately, whether any custody-segregation or prudential-capital rule exists for PSAVs beyond the minimum-equity registration threshold remains an open question, as does any prospect of change to the BCRA's bank/PSP prohibition before a potential shift in the political cycle from December 2027.

2 earlier updates not shown here.

Standing brief · as of 25 August 2026

Written before the update above. Where they differ, the update is the more recent position.

Lead Signal

Argentina's virtual-asset perimeter has moved from a registration formality into an operating conduct regime. The Comision Nacional de Valores' (CNV) Prestador de Servicios de Activos Virtales (PSAV) registry, created under Law No. 27,739 and elaborated through CNV General Resolution 994/2024, already requires any provider targeting the Argentine market to register regardless of where it is incorporated -- an effects-based test rather than a place-of-establishment test. What has changed materially this cycle is the conduct layer sitting on top of that registration duty. CNV General Resolution 1058/2025's Chapter III requirements, which had been introduced but held in a transitional posture, became exigible for already-registered PSAVs on 31 December 2025, and reporting into this cycle describes the regime as fully operational since June 2026. In practice this means registered PSAVs are now restricted from using client virtual assets or client fiat funds for their own account, must run asset-segregation and custody procedures, and must maintain customer-disclosure and complaints-handling channels. This is a meaningfully tighter posture than a bare registry: it converts PSAV status from a market-access gate into a supervised custodial and conduct relationship, with the CNV as the standing supervisory authority. A narrow de-minimis carve-out survives alongside this tightening -- CNV General Resolution 994/2024 exempts aggregate PSAV activity that does not exceed 35,000 UVA per calendar month from the registration requirement, preserving some room for genuinely marginal or occasional activity to sit outside the perimeter. Taken together, the licensing and conduct regime is the clearest through-line of this cycle's Argentine coverage: a jurisdiction that has gone, in the space of roughly eighteen months, from statutory registry to an exigible custody-and-disclosure conduct code, while still relying on secondary reporting of CNV resolution text rather than confirmed primary-source review of the resolutions themselves.

Other Developments

Token classification in Argentina remains structurally unfinished relative to comparator regimes. There is no comprehensive statutory taxonomy distinguishing security tokens, e-money tokens, asset-referenced tokens, and utility tokens along the lines of the EU's MiCA framework -- this is a genuine regime gap rather than an oversight in coverage, and it leaves classification questions to be worked out claim-by-claim under the general PSAV perimeter and existing securities law. Alongside that gap, the CNV's tokenization regulatory sandbox -- established under General Resolution 1069/2025 and subsequently extended by General Resolution 1137/2026 through 2027 -- creates a distinct, security-token-adjacent experimental track that permits tokenized securities to trade through registered PSAVs. This sandbox extension is itself a forward-looking marker: it signals that Argentine authorities intend to keep tokenized-securities experimentation alive for at least another year rather than resolve classification questions through a single comprehensive statute in the near term.

On the tax side, the picture has also tightened. Gains from selling crypto-assets continue to be taxed under Impuesto a las Ganancias (LIG Article 98) at differentiated rates -- 5% for Argentine-source income and 15% for foreign-source income -- and crypto-asset holdings continue to be treated as financial assets subject to Bienes Personales wealth tax once total patrimony exceeds the annual non-taxable minimum, per AFIP Dictamen 2/2022. The new development this cycle is an information-reporting regime: RG 5804/2025 requires exchanges and virtual-asset wallets to report user crypto-asset movements to the tax authority (now ARCA, the successor to AFIP) on a monthly basis, with that reporting obligation effective from May 2026. This is a visibility-oriented instrument rather than a rate change, but it materially increases the tax authority's line of sight into on-platform crypto activity and should be read alongside the capital-gains and wealth-tax rules as a coordinated tightening of the fiscal perimeter around registered intermediaries.

Two modules remain genuinely quiet rather than merely under-covered. No CNV or BCRA instrument specifically addressing staking, DeFi lending, mining, or validator activity was identified this cycle; on-chain activity of this kind presumptively falls under the general PSAV perimeter, but that inference is unconfirmed by any dedicated instrument. Similarly, no dedicated Argentine stablecoin-specific statute addressing issuance, reserves, or redemption was identified; stablecoins fall under the general PSAV perimeter if they fall under any regime at all. Both are treated here as standing regime gaps rather than as findings requiring correction, consistent with how thin-evidence modules are expected to read in a jurisdiction that regulates virtual assets through a single general-purpose registry rather than instrument-specific statutes.

Cross-Monitor Connections

Two overlap vectors are carried forward from this cycle. First, the PSAV conduct regime's custody, segregation, and systems requirements under RG 1058/2025 reach into territory that properly belongs to the financial-integrity monitor's AML/CFT scope -- registered PSAVs' asset-segregation and internal-control obligations sit adjacent to, and in places overlap with, anti-money-laundering control expectations, even though this monitor does not perform first-party AML/CFT analysis for Argentina. Consistent with the single-owner subscription arrangement now in place, Argentina's aml_cft_regime module content is sourced from the financial-integrity monitor rather than generated independently here, and no first-party crypto claims are attributed to that module this cycle. Second, the effects-based extraterritorial-capture test under CNV General Resolution 994/2024 -- which pulls a foreign virtual-asset provider into the PSAV registration perimeter where it uses a .ar domain, has local third-party fund-receipt arrangements, targets Argentine residents, advertises into Argentina, or derives significant volume from Argentina -- intersects with payment-account-adjacent virtual-asset services now falling within BCRA's payments regulation under Communication A 8432/2026. That intersection is why cross-border virtual-asset transfer touching Argentina increasingly has to be read jointly against securities-style PSAV registration and central-bank payments oversight, rather than against either framework in isolation, and it is the basis for this cycle's world-payments overlap flag.

Outlook

Argentina's trajectory across every module carrying first-party analysis this cycle points the same direction: tightening. The PSAV conduct regime is now exigible and described as fully operational; a new monthly tax-reporting obligation comes into force through ARCA; and the tokenization sandbox has been extended rather than allowed to lapse. None of this resolves the standing structural gaps -- no comprehensive token taxonomy, no dedicated on-chain-activity instrument, no dedicated stablecoin statute -- and those gaps should be read as durable features of the current Argentine approach (a general-perimeter registry model) rather than as oversights likely to close on their own in the near term. The jurisdiction remains classified in_transition rather than fully regulated because the enacted conduct regime is materially reshaping practice while several adjacent domains remain unaddressed by any dedicated instrument. This record is held pending regulator confirmation: the underlying reporting for the core CNV resolutions (RG 994/2024, RG 1058/2025, RG 1137/2026) and the AFIP/ARCA RG 5804/2025 circular rests on secondary T4 corroboration rather than confirmed primary CNV or AFIP/ARCA text, and that gap should be closed before the licensing and tax findings here are treated as fully verified. The tokenization sandbox's extension through 2027 is the clearest scheduled marker to watch next: it sets a horizon against which any future move toward a comprehensive statutory token taxonomy, or toward folding tokenized securities fully into ordinary securities law, is likely to be judged.