- A French parliamentary committee adopted amendments that would tax crypto-to-stablecoin swaps and extend the country’s exit tax to crypto holdings.
- The same committee then voted down the revenue half of the 2027 budget, so none of it currently stands as law.
- Swapping bitcoin for a stablecoin is already a taxable disposal in the UK, whether or not any sterling reaches your bank account.
France currently lets you move between crypto assets without paying anything. Tax arrives when you cash out to euros. A National Assembly committee has now voted to change part of that, and then voted down the budget section the change was sitting inside.
The thing France is arguing about is already settled in Britain, and not in holders’ favour. If you sell bitcoin for a dollar stablecoin, HMRC treats that as a disposal: the gain is worked out in pounds at the moment of the swap, and you can owe tax in a year when no money ever reached your bank account. Plenty of people only discover this when they come to file.
Tax treatment depends on your own circumstances, and this is not advice.
What the committee actually did
Two amendments, according to Decrypt. One would make an exchange of crypto for a stablecoin a taxable event rather than a tax-free swap. The other would widen France’s existing exit tax, the charge on unrealised gains when a wealthy individual gives up French tax residency, so that it captures crypto holdings as well as company shares.
Then the committee rejected the revenue section of the 2027 finance bill in full.
That sequence sounds stranger than it is. Committee votes on a French budget are closer to a signal than a decision: finance bills are an exception to the usual procedure, and the chamber debates the government’s original text rather than the version the committee produced. Anyone who wants these amendments has to table them again on the floor and win there.
One caveat on sourcing. We could not find the committee’s own record of the votes or the published text of the amendments, so this account rests on Decrypt’s write-up rather than a primary document.
Why stablecoins are the pressure point
A stablecoin is a designed to hold a fixed value, almost always one dollar, backed by reserves held by the issuer. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are the two big ones.
Under the current French rules for private holders, tax is triggered when digital assets are converted into conventional currency or used to buy something. Crypto-to-crypto trades sit outside that. The practical effect is that someone can sell bitcoin at the top of a run, hold the proceeds in a dollar-pegged token indefinitely, and owe nothing until they actually withdraw euros.
Whether that counts as cashing out is the whole argument. Economically it looks like one. Legally, in France, it has not been.
Britain settled this years ago
HMRC’s published guidance lists “exchanging tokens for a different type of token” among the events that count as a disposal for capital gains tax. There is no stablecoin carve-out and no deferral.
So the calculation runs in sterling whatever the trade looked like on screen. You take the pound value of what you disposed of at the moment of the swap, subtract the pound cost of acquiring it, and the difference is a gain or a loss. Swap £20,000 of bitcoin that cost you £8,000 into USDC and you have crystallised a £12,000 gain, even though every pound of it is still sitting in a token on an exchange. The same applies to buying one coin with another, and to spending crypto on goods.
Our guide to crypto tax in the UK goes through the mechanics, including how disposals are pooled and what records are worth keeping.
The exit tax is a narrower question
Exit taxes work on a different principle. France’s existing one applies to people with substantial holdings who move their tax residence abroad, charging them on paper gains they have not yet realised, on the reasoning that the gain accrued while they were resident. Extending it to crypto would close a route that shares do not offer.
By design this reaches a very small number of people, and nothing in the reported amendments changes the day-to-day position of an ordinary French holder who stays put. Britain has no general exit tax, though temporary non-residence rules can pull some gains back into charge if you leave and return within a few years.
What to watch
Whether either amendment is re-tabled when the finance bill reaches the floor of the Assembly, and whether the government backs it. A committee vote that died with the section it sat in is not a tax, and reporting that calls it one has moved a step ahead of the evidence.
The broader thing to watch is the direction. If France does start treating stablecoins as currency for tax purposes, it joins the UK and the US in removing the gap between a swap and a sale, and the “park it in dollars and deal with it later” approach stops working almost everywhere that matters. Our policy coverage tracks the rest.