France’s National Assembly voted 38 to 37 to introduce a France crypto tax gains when investors swap crypto into stablecoins from January 1, 2027, adopting communist deputy Nicolas Sansu’s amendment to close what he calls a gap in the law. Only 100 of 577 deputies voted. One of the 38 later said she meant to vote no.
That deputy, Olivia Grégoire, corrected her vote after the count, the Assembly’s official record shows, but a correction doesn’t change the result. So who wanted this France crypto tax, and does it survive?
JUST IN:
France's parliament advances legislation to impose 31.4% capital gains tax on crypto-to-stablecoin transactions.
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) October 20, 2026
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New Stablecoin Rule: What Does the France Crypto Tax Change?
Who wanted this change? Small Democratic and Republican Left group filed it, but the idea came from the crypto industry. In a May op-ed in Le Monde, three French founders, from Deblock, Waltio and Lyzi, asked for exactly this tax. They put the gains parked in stablecoins at €1 billion to €3 billion a year.
The left carried it on the floor: France Insoumise, the Socialists, the Greens and Sansu’s group, plus four centrists. Macron’s camp and the right voted against. The far-right National Rally decided it by abstaining: 25 of its deputies sat out and only 10 voted no.
This new tax ends the deferral on swaps into stablecoins. Today, selling bitcoin for USDC costs nothing in tax, and the bill only arrives when you cash out in euros or spend the coins. Amendment I-3898 makes a swap into an e-money token, a stablecoin pegged to one currency under the EU’s MiCA rules, taxable at France’s 31.4% flat rate.
Take a bitcoin bought at €30,000 and swapped into USDC at €100,000. That’s €21,980 in tax, with no euros ever reaching the bank.
The text also scraps France’s portfolio-wide cost method. Each gain would instead be worked out from the cost of the coins actually sold, with a weighted average for coins bought at different prices.
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French Goverment Targets Stablecoin Gains. How Are Crypto Traders Reacting?
Badly. Stablecoins are where French traders park gains between trades, and the Adan, the French crypto industry body, opposed the stablecoin tax, warning it would push users toward dollar coins and away from regulated euro tokens.
Chainalysis’ France sales director Francois Volpoet said the rule could push investors toward DeFi, peer-to-peer deals and offshore exchanges. The tax lands on the stablecoins Europe licensed, the ones easiest to trace.
This new tax law lands in a fight over the 2027 budget, with no majority. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wants €54 billion in savings to cut the deficit from 5.4% to 5% of GDP, and Public Accounts Minister David Amiel asked Sansu to withdraw the amendment, saying France must “first define stablecoins.”
No party has held a majority in the chamber since the 2024 snap election. Lecornu forced the 2026 budget through with Article 49.3, the constitutional tool that skips the vote, and has promised not to use it this time. With 2,828 amendments still pending, the vote on the tax half of the budget slipped to November 3.
Then the Senate, where the right-leaning majority can strip it out. Next spring’s presidential race hangs over every vote.
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The post France Crypto Tax Passes by One Vote: Will Stablecoin Swaps Really Be Taxed in 2027? appeared first on 99Bitcoins.
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