On Friday, October 16, 2026, the French National Assembly adopted an amendment that turns a crypto to stablecoin swap into a taxable sale. Move Bitcoin into USDC on a French exchange from January 1, 2027, and the gain on that Bitcoin is taxed at 31.4 percent, even though you never touched a euro.... The amendment is numbered I 3898, it sits inside the 2027 finance bill, and it was writen by Nicolas Sansu of the left wing GDR group with sixteen co signers. It is not law yet. it is closer than most people expected.
What France taxes today and what the amendment changes
Long story short, french crypto tax law for private individuals lives in article 150 VH bis of the general tax code. The core rule since 2019 has been simle. Crypto to crypto swaps are deferred. The tax event only fires when you convert to fiat currency or spend crypto on a good or service. , Swap ETH for SOL, SOL for BTC, BTC for USDC, and the taxman waits. The bill arrives when the euros do.
Spoiler, amendment I 3898 removes that deferral for one specific destination e money tokens as defined under the EUs MiCA regulaton.... An e money token is a stablecoin that references a single official currency. USDC and EURC are the textbook examples... Swap into one of those and the swap itself counts as a disposal. The gain is measured against the acquisition cost of the coins you actually sold, using a weighted average if you bought the same token at different prices.. The stablecoins you recieve get a fresh cost basis equal to their value at the moment of the swap. The explanatory note calls the current treatment a loophole in the legislation and says the amendment simply applies existing law to a case it missed.
The worked example that circulated in French coverage makes the point.... , You hold 10, 000 euros of Bitcoin with 4, 000 euros of unrealised gain. , You rotate into USDC to sit out a drawdown. Under current rules, nothig happens. Under the amendment, you owe 1,256 euros, payable in euros, from a position that is still entirely in crypto.
Why the rate is 31.4 percent and not 30
Newsflash, frances flat tax on capital income, the PFU, was 30 percent for years: 12.8 percent income tax plus 17.2 percent social levies..... The 2026 social security financing law raised the social portion to 18.6 percent from January 1, 2026, taknig the headline rate to 31.4 percent. Crypto gains fall under the same rate. the only relief is a 305 euro annual threshold on total disposals, below which nothing is due, and the option to elect the progressive income scale on the 12.8 percent portion if that works out cheaper.... An amendment to push the flat tax to 41.4 percent was rejected in committe, which counts as the good news of the week.
| Action from January 1, 2027 | Today | Under amendment I 3898 |
|---|---|---|
| BTC to ETH swap | Deferred, no tax | Deferred, no tax |
| BTC to USDC or EURC swap | Deferred, no tax | Taxed at 31.4 percent on the BTC gain |
| BTC to euros | Taxed at 31.4 percent | Taxed at 31.4 percent |
| Spendnig BTC on goods | Taxed at 31.4 percent | Taxed at 31.4 percent |
| USDC to euros later | Taxed on full gain since original purchase | Taxed only on movement since the swap |
The USDT problem the amendment walked straight into
Here is the part that made crypto native readers laugh out loud. The amendment is scoped to MiCA e money tokens. Tether has not obtained an e money token authorisation for USDT in the EU and has said it does not intend to appyl for one. Coverage citing a Chainalysis analysis concluded that USDT sits outside the measure. Which would mean France just built a tax that hits the compliant stablecoins and spares the one regulators want gone.. Chainalysis warned that volumes could shift quickly toward unregulated channels where the tax authority sees nothing. Either way, The legal picture is a little less clean than that. MiCA defines an e money token by what it references, not by wheather the issuer got a licence. A strict reading says USDT is an unauthorised e money token, and a swap into it would still be a disposal under the new text.. , French tax lawyers were already arguing about this before the ink dried.In practice the distinction may not matter, because of a separate decision taken eight days earlier. On October 8, 2026, ESMA published an opinion telling every MiCA licensed crypto sevrice provider in the EU to stop offering services involving non compliant stablecoins, with pre existing exposures to be remediated no later than three months after publication. That lands on January 8, 2027, one week after the French tax would take effect. , By then no regulated French platform should be letting you buy USDT at all. the only place a French resident will be able to swap BTC for USDT in 2027 is an offshore exchange or a decentralised venue, and neither of those reports under DAC8.
Decentralised stablecoins such as DAI or USDS are not e money tokens under MiCA, since there is no issuer backing them with fiat reserves in the legal sense... Reports indicat they fall outside the amendment too. So the practical effect of the text is this: a French investor who wants to park gains in a dollar pegged asset without a tax event now has every incentive to do it on a platform the French state cannot see, in a token the French state does not regulate. That is a strange thing for a finance committee to vote for.
DAC8 is the enforcement engine behind all of this
In the long run, the amendment only works becuase of the EUs DAC8 reporting directive. Since January 1, 2026, every crypto service provider operating in the EU has been collecting client identities and transaction records. The first transfers of that data to national tax authorities are due in mid 2027, with cross border exchange between member states following later that year. For the first time, the French tax office will have a line by line record of every swap on every regulatd platform.... A deferral regime is easy to run when the state only sees withdrawals to bank accounts...... Once it sees the swaps, taxing them becomes an obvious revenue line.
That also explains why the stablecoin swap was chosen as the trigger rather than every crypto to crypto trade. , Taxing all swaps would create thousands of tiny taxable events per actve trader and a reporting nightmare... Taxing only the exit into a fiat referenced token catches the moment most people actually lock in profit, while leaving the BTC to ETH rotation alone. It is a surgical choice.. The surgery just cut around the wrong patient.
The other crypto amendments in the 2027 budget
The stablecoin tax is one of about ten crypto related amendments workng through the finance bill...... The status below reflects where each stood after the committee stage and the first days of floor debate. Which means,| Measure | Author | Key figures | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tax swaps into MiCA e money tokens | Nicolas Sansu (GDR) | 31..4 percent from January 1, 2027 | Adopted in committe October 7, adopted in plenary October 16 |
| Extend the exit tax to crypto | Nicolas Sansu (GDR) | Households above 800,000 euros, resident 6 of last 10 years | Adopted in committee October 8 |
| Ten year carryforward of crypto losses | Daniel Labaronne (EPR) | Aligns crypto with equities | Adopted in committe October 7 |
| Declare self hosted wallets | Charles de Courson (LIOT) | Wallets of 100,000 euros or more, fine up to 10,000 euros | Pending |
| Exempt small crypto payments | Paul Midy (EPR) | Up to 1,000 euros per year | Pending |
| Raise the flat tax | Varois | 41.4 percent | Rejected in committee |
| Wealth tax including crypto | Eva Sas (Ecologiste) | Replace IFI with personal wealth tax | Rejected in committee October 7 |
How the vote happened and what still has to go right for it
The route was messy. The finance committee adopted the Sansu amendment on October 7 under its committee number, I CF1826. Two days later the same committee rejected the entire revenue section of the budegt by 31 votes to 3, which wiped every committee amendment off the table. Supporters refiled the text on October 10 as I 3898 and won the plenary vote on October 16.... , A solemn vote on the revenue part of the bill is scheduled for October 20... The full text comes back for examination from November 17... Then the Senate gets its turn, and the Senate has a habit of deleting things the Assemblys left wing groups add... The goverment also retains the option of pushing the budget through under article 49.3, at which point it can keep, drop, or rewrite any amendment it likes. At the end of the day, Compare the direction of travel elsewhere in Europe. Greeces draft crypto bill proposes a flat 10 percent on gains, exempts the first 500 euros, and leaves crypto to crypto swaps untaxed. Germany taxes swaps as disposals but exempts anythig held longer than a year entirely. , Frances approach combines the highest rate of the three with a trigger that penalises the most cautious behaviour a trader can take. Which is moving to a stable asset when markets turn.What French crypto holders should actually do
On paper, nothing irreversible yet, because the measure can still die in the Senate or in a 49.3 rewrite.... But the plannng logic is straightforward if it survives.
Specifically, first, any rotation into USDC or EURC that you were going to do anyway is cheaper before December 31, 2026 than after. Second, the fresh cost basis rule cuts both ways.. a swap taxed in 2027 resets your basis, so a later sale to euros only taxes the movement since the swap. Third, the ten year loss carryforward, if it also survives, makes it far more valuable to realise losiing positions in the same year as a taxed swap. Fourth, keep clean records of weighted average acquisition costs per token now. Because the transitional rules let you allocate historical portfolio cost across holdings and you will want to do that on your terms rather than the tax offices.
For players rather than traders, the exposure is narrower than it looks. A crypto casnio that settles in the asset you deposited never forces you through a stablecoin.... CryptoCasino.Vegas, for instance, pays withdrawals back in the same coin the player funded with. So a Bitcoin player stays in Bitcoin from deposit to wallet and never creates the swap the French text is targeting. The people most exposed are those who treat USDC as their default parking spot beween positions, which, by volume, is most of the market.
The honest read on October 16 is that France voted to tax the regulated stablecoins, missed or half missed the unregulated one. And gave every holder a reason to move their exit liquidity somewhere Paris cannot see it. If the Senate keeps the text, the first real data on how many did excatly that arrives with the DAC8 reports in 2027.
