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1. What did the French committee decide on crypto taxes?
The National Assembly's Finance Committee in France voted this week to tax crypto holders who swap their assets into stablecoins and to impose an exit tax on wealthy holders who move abroad. On Friday, October 9, the same committee then rejected the entire revenue section of the 2027 budget by 31 votes to 3, which strips both crypto measures of any immediate effect.
The sequence matters for anyone trying to gauge the real impact. Committee approval of an amendment is an early step in French budget procedure, and the later rejection of the whole section means the full Assembly will begin its debate from the government's original text. The crypto provisions are therefore proposals that have been endorsed in committee, not laws, and they are not part of the draft that lawmakers will take up on the floor.
2. Why do the amendments not carry over to the floor debate?
Because the revenue section was voted down as a whole, the amendments adopted inside it do not move forward automatically. Their supporters must submit them again when the full Assembly examines the budget, with the floor debate on the revenue section scheduled to open on October 13. A formal vote is planned for October 20.
That leaves a narrow path. The sponsors need to re-table the texts, and the texts then need to win a majority among a wider group of lawmakers than the committee that first backed them. Neither the stablecoin swap tax nor the exit tax is currently law, and neither can become law unless it survives that second round. If both return and are adopted, the rules are designed to take effect on January 1, 2027.
3. How would the stablecoin swap tax work?
The stablecoin amendment was filed by Nicolas Sansu, a lawmaker from the left-wing GDR group, together with 16 co-signers. They describe the current treatment as a hole in the legislation. Under existing French practice, exchanging a crypto asset such as Bitcoin (BTC) for a stablecoin does not trigger a tax event. Tax is due only when gains are converted into ordinary currency or used to buy goods and services, so a holder can move into a stablecoin and defer the bill for as long as the position stays in crypto.
The amendment would end that deferral. It applies to electronic money tokens as defined by the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, a category that includes most stablecoins pegged to a single currency such as the dollar or the euro. From January 1, 2027, a swap into one of these tokens would be treated as a sale. The gain would be measured against the original purchase cost of the asset, as it already is in a conventional disposal.
The text sets no new rate. Gains would fall under the existing flat tax on investment income, which stood at 31.4% from January 1, 2026, after the 2026 social-security financing law lifted the social-charge portion from 17.2% to 18.6%. For readers unfamiliar with the mechanism, a flat tax means a single combined rate applies to investment gains instead of the progressive income-tax scale.
4. What reasoning do the authors give for the swap tax?
The sponsors present the proposal as the application of existing law to a case it failed to anticipate, not as a fresh burden on holders. In their account, stablecoins are often ordinary investment instruments. People use them to pay crypto service providers and to buy other tokens, which means they function as a stage in a portfolio's activity and not simply as a parking place outside the tax system.
From that starting point, the authors argue that the current deferral has no justification. A holder who sells a volatile token into a stablecoin has, economically, locked in a gain, yet the tax code does not recognize it until the money reaches a bank account or a shop. By the sponsors' reading, that timing gap lets gains slip past the flat tax, and closing it would restore consistency with how other realized profits are treated.
5. What is the proposed crypto exit tax?
A second amendment from Sansu would extend France's exit tax to digital assets. An exit tax charges a person on unrealized gains at the moment they transfer their tax residence to another country, instead of waiting until the assets are sold. France already applies such a regime to shares, and the amendment brings crypto into the same framework.
The measure would apply when a household's combined crypto holdings, including those kept with a custodian, exceed €800,000, and when the taxpayer has been a French tax resident for at least six of the previous ten years. It would cover departures from January 1, 2027. The €800,000 figure matches the threshold already used for shares, and the rules for deferring payment are borrowed from the stock regime as well.
6. Which holders and assets would the exit tax reach?
The proposal contains an important exclusion. Swaps from one crypto asset to another that involve no cash component would not be counted as sales for exit-tax purposes, so a purely on-chain reshuffling would not by itself create a charge. The measure is aimed at the unrealized value of holdings at the moment of departure.
It also carries a disclosure requirement. Taxpayers would have to declare all the crypto they hold on the date they move, including assets held outside France and coins kept in self-custody wallets. That obligation is significant because self-custodied tokens leave no automatic record with a French intermediary, and the amendment places the burden of reporting them on the individual.
The authors argue that the present rules create an inequity. Crypto held directly escapes the exit tax, while shares of equal value do not, so two people with the same wealth can face very different consequences when they leave the country depending on the form in which they hold it.
They also point to the nature of the asset. Digital assets are easy to move across borders, which makes them an attractive way to carry wealth out of reach of a national tax authority. Extending the exit tax, in the sponsors' view, would close that route and put crypto on the same footing as other forms of capital.
7. What other crypto change passed in committee?
One amendment on the crypto side did clear the committee without being tied to a new levy. Proposed by lawmaker Daniel Labaronne, it would let investors carry crypto losses forward for ten years and set them against future gains, a treatment already available for stocks. At present, unused crypto losses cannot be carried over to later years.
Like the other amendments, it was adopted inside a section that the committee later rejected, so it faces the same need to be re-tabled before the floor debate. For investors, the difference between the proposals is notable: the swap tax and the exit tax would raise liabilities, while the loss carry-forward would soften them.
8. Why does the timing of crypto taxation matter to investors?
The central question behind the stablecoin proposal is when a gain counts as realized. In most tax systems, a profit is taxed when an asset is disposed of, and French practice has treated a swap into a stablecoin as a mere change in the form of a holding instead of a disposal. For active traders, that distinction is valuable, because they can rotate out of volatile tokens and into a stable one without creating a bill, then rotate back later.
If the amendment returned and became law, that flexibility would shrink. Every move into a euro or dollar token would register as a sale, and the holder would need to calculate the gain against the original purchase cost each time. That would raise record-keeping demands for individuals and for the platforms that serve them, since a swap would become a reportable event in the same way as a conversion into ordinary currency.
The proposals also show how fiscal pressure is shaping the debate. A budget text has to raise revenue, and digital assets are a category that lawmakers on the left see as under-taxed relative to shares. The committee votes signal that a group of deputies wants crypto treated on the same terms as other financial assets, even though the later rejection of the revenue section means that signal has not yet become policy.
9. How does this fit France's earlier moves on crypto and wealth?
The committee's votes follow earlier attempts to bring digital assets into French wealth taxation. In late October 2025, the National Assembly passed a first-reading amendment, by 163 votes to 150, that created a 1% annual levy on what lawmakers called unproductive wealth above €2 million. The proposal grouped digital assets with items such as gold and yachts. Attorney Burçak Ünsal told Decrypt at the time that taxing early token holders could be economically unjust.
The European setting is also relevant. In October 2024, Coinbase said it would delist stablecoins that do not comply with MiCA for European customers by December 30, directing users to compliant alternatives such as USDC and EURC. That decision showed how the regulation had already begun to shape which stablecoins are available in the EU, and the French amendment relies on the same MiCA definition to decide which tokens a swap tax would cover.
10. What happens next for the French crypto tax proposals?
The next checkpoint is the floor debate on the revenue section of the 2027 budget, which opens on October 13, followed by a formal vote scheduled for October 20. Sansu and his co-signers will need to table the stablecoin and exit-tax amendments again, and the Labaronne loss carry-forward will need a new sponsor or the same one to do likewise.
Until then, nothing changes for French crypto holders. The existing rules remain in force: swaps into stablecoins are not taxable events, crypto sits outside the exit tax, and unused losses cannot be carried forward. If the measures return and win a majority, they would take effect on January 1, 2027, which gives investors roughly the remainder of the year to understand how the rules would affect their positions.