I mine cryptocurrency in the UAE — what's the actual tax position on that?

The Federal Tax Authority draws a clear line between two very different situations. If mining is purely for your own account — your effort and equipment produce coins you own, with no other party paying you for the activity — it sits outside the scope of VAT altogether, because there's no "supply" to an identifiable recipient. The side effect is that you also can't recover VAT on mining expenses (hardware, electricity, hosting), since there's no taxable activity for those costs to relate to.

The picture changes completely once you provide your computing power as a paid service to someone else — renting out hash power to a client, or joining a mining pool for a defined payment. That's a genuine supply of services, subject to the standard 5% VAT rate, with zero-rating potentially available where the service is provided to a qualifying non-resident. And if you're on the receiving end of mining services from a non-resident supplier, the reverse charge mechanism applies to your side of the transaction.

On the Corporate Tax side, the usual test applies: is this an organised commercial operation with clear markers — equipment investment, recurring activity, meaningful electricity and hosting scale — or a limited personal pursuit? Where the scale and pattern genuinely call for a licence, the profits fall under Corporate Tax like any other business activity, regardless of the fact that the output happens to be a cryptocurrency.

Getting the classification right from the start — personal or commercial, licence-scale or not — is what determines your VAT recovery position and the extent of your Corporate Tax exposure. RASEEKH helps you pin down that classification before it becomes something you're correcting after the fact.