France's Stablecoin Swap Tax Survives Committee—Then the Whole Budget Gets Tossed 🪙

France's National Assembly Finance Committee approved two amendments this week to tax crypto-to-stablecoin swaps and extend the country's exit tax to digital assets, before rejecting the budget's entire revenue section Friday by 31 votes to 3. The committee's crypto measures do not carry over to the government text the full Assembly will now consider, and their backers would have to refile for the floor debate scheduled to begin Oct. 13.

Amendment I-CF1826, filed by French MP Nicolas Sansu and 16 co-signers and adopted Wednesday, would make crypto conversions into fiat-pegged stablecoins taxable events from Jan. 1, 2027. The explanatory text describes the current treatment as a "loophole in the legislation," according to a machine translation. Taxable gains would be calculated using the acquisition cost of the disposed assets, with a weighted average applied to holdings of the same token bought at different prices. The provision covers electronic money tokens as defined under MiCA, the EU's crypto rulebook, a category that includes most stablecoins tied to a single currency such as the dollar or euro. The amendment defers to France's flat tax, which rose to 31.4% on Jan. 1 after the 2026 social-security financing law lifted the social-charge portion from 17.2% to 18.6%.

A second Sansu amendment, also adopted Wednesday, would extend France's exit tax to crypto, charging unrealized gains when taxpayers with household crypto holdings worth more than 800,000 euros ($895,000) transfer their residences abroad from Jan. 1, 2027. The threshold matches the one already used for shares, and the payment deferral rules are borrowed from the stock regime. Crypto-to-crypto swaps with no cash component would not count as sales for exit-tax purposes, but taxpayers would have to attach a statement of all crypto held on the date of the move, including assets held abroad or in self-custody. MP Daniel Labaronne's Amendment I-CCF798, adopted the same day, would let investors carry realized crypto losses forward for 10 years to offset future gains.

Greece's Ministry of National Economy and Finance published a separate draft bill Wednesday proposing a 10% tax on individuals' crypto capital gains, with an exemption for annual gains of up to 500 euros ($560), and unlike the French proposal, it would leave crypto-to-crypto exchanges untaxed. France and other European Union members must apply the bloc's tax reporting rules under the eighth amendment to the Directive on Administrative Cooperation (DAC8), which requires crypto service providers to collect users' identities and transaction data and report them to national tax authorities for exchange with their counterparts across member states. Those crypto reporting requirements began applying on Jan. 1, 2026, and the first exchanges of information covering 2026 transactions are due by September 2027.