The Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania published a document titled “ICO Guidelines”. “Lithuania has found itself in the middle of explosion of ICOs and blockchain based projects and in line with other countries – financial incumbents, when total values of all ICOs are being measured,” – read the opening lines of the document. Then it goes on to offer guidelines in four major topics: regulation, taxation, accounting and AML/CFT (Anti-Money Laundering & Combating the Financing of Terrorism).
Regarding the regulatory aspect, the guidelines state: “Organizing ICO is not regulated by specific legislation, however, taking into account different ICO models and different characteristics of tokens, in some cases, such activity may be subject to the requirements of the legislation of the Republic of Lithuania and supervision of the Bank of Lithuania.” The requirements are different for ICOs depending on whether they “grant profits or governance rights” or not. Once this is determined, depending on the characteristic of the product different laws could be applied to each project. These laws range from the AML and CFT law to the law on securities and so on.