France's committee backs a stablecoin swap tax, then rejects the budget

The finance committee of France's National Assembly voted this week to tax people who swap crypto into stablecoins and to charge an exit tax on wealthy holders who move abroad, Decrypt reported. On Friday the same committee rejected the entire revenue section of the 2027 budget by 31 votes to 3. That means the full Assembly begins from the government's original text, without the crypto amendments, Decrypt said.

The stablecoin measure closes what its authors call "a hole in the legislation." Today, swapping bitcoin for a stablecoin triggers no tax in France, because the state collects only when gains are sold for regular money or spent, Decrypt explained. The amendment, filed by Nicolas Sansu of the left-wing GDR group with 16 co-signers, would treat a swap into a stablecoin as a sale from 1 January 2027, with the gain measured against what the holder originally paid. It covers the electronic money tokens defined in MiCA, the EU's crypto rulebook, a category that includes most single-currency stablecoins. Crypto.news identified it as amendment I-CF1826, adopted by the committee on 7 October.

The text sets no rate. It defers to France's flat tax, which rose to 31.4 per cent on 1 January after the 2026 social-security financing law raised the social-charge portion from 17.2 per cent to 18.6 per cent, Decrypt said. The authors say they are not creating a new burden, only applying existing law to a case it missed. For holdings bought before 1 January 2027, investors would choose between documented purchase prices and an allocation of the portfolio's total acquisition cost as of 31 December 2026, according to Crypto.news. The allocation choice would be irrevocable.

A second amendment from Sansu, which Crypto.news identified as I-CF1822 and said the committee adopted on 8 October, would extend France's exit tax to crypto. The exit tax is a levy on unrealised gains charged when a taxpayer moves their tax residence abroad. It would apply when a household's combined crypto, including holdings kept through custodians, is worth more than €800,000 and the taxpayer was a French tax resident for at least six of the previous ten years, for moves from 1 January 2027, Decrypt reported. The threshold matches the one used for shares. Swaps between cryptocurrencies with no cash component would not count as sales for exit-tax purposes.

Taxpayers would have to attach a statement of all the crypto they hold on the date of the move, including assets held abroad or in self-custody. The authors argue that crypto held directly escapes the exit tax today while shares of equal value do not, and note how easily digital assets can cross borders, Decrypt said.

One measure cuts the other way. The committee also approved an amendment by Daniel Labaronne that would let investors carry crypto losses forward for 10 years to offset future gains. Today, unused crypto losses cannot be carried into later years, whereas losses on stocks can be, Decrypt said. Crypto.news identified the amendment as I-CF798.

The calendar matters more than the votes. Decrypt said the amendments do not carry over to the government's text, so their backers would have to table them again for the floor debate on the budget's revenue section, which opens on Tuesday, 13 October. A formal vote is scheduled for Tuesday, 20 October. If the measures return and survive, the stablecoin and exit-tax rules would apply from 1 January 2027, and neither is law, Decrypt said.

The size of the base is uncertain. Crypto.news reported that French taxpayers declared €368m in crypto capital gains for 2024, through about 24,000 tax filings, though that covers a different period and a narrower category of transactions than Chainalysis's estimate of $9.4bn in potentially taxable French activity in 2025, which Chainalysis cautioned is not unpaid tax or government revenue. Stablecoins are already a regulatory flashpoint in Europe: ESMA told national regulators that MiCA-licensed firms should drop services in non-compliant stablecoins, a step we covered in Eight days after asking for a law. Brazil's central bank has gone another way, barring stablecoins from settling aggregated cross-border FX flows from 1 October. France is now testing whether the same tokens should also be taxed when people swap into them.