French crypto traders have long enjoyed a quiet convenience: swapping one coin for another doesn't trigger a tax bill, only cashing out into euros does. Move bitcoin into ether, and nothing happens on the tax front. Lawmakers are now closing that gap — not for bitcoin, but specifically for stablecoins.
The National Assembly's finance committee has backed an amendment to the 2027 budget that would turn conversions of crypto into MiCA-regulated stablecoins, known as electronic money tokens, into a taxable event. The rate is France's standard flat tax of 31.4% on capital gains. Move your bitcoin into a euro-pegged token, and you'd owe nearly a third of the gain — even though the money never left a crypto wallet.
The exemptions are the odd part. USDT, DAI and PAXG are left untouched simply because they don't fall under the MiCA e-money token category. So the most widely used stablecoin on the market stays tax-free, while its regulated European counterparts get hit with the full rate. The thinking behind the amendment is that MiCA tokens were built as a bridge into the traditional financial system, and regulators want visibility over that bridge.
None of this is law yet. On October 7, the same committee unexpectedly rejected the budget's entire revenue section by 31 votes to 3 — a procedural snag that doesn't kill the stablecoin clause but sends the whole package back to the full National Assembly for a vote on October 20. Parliament has until December 10 to pass a budget, so the fight has almost two months left to run.
Industry voices are already pushing back. Francois Volpoet, Chainalysis' France lead, warned the tax could nudge traders toward unregulated stablecoins, DeFi platforms and offshore exchanges — exactly the places regulators can't see into. The irony: a rule meant to bring capital into the regulated system risks pushing it straight out.
