France's Assembly Rejects 2027 Budget Revenue 458-0, Dropping Crypto Tax Amendments

A 458-0 Rejection on November 4

France’s National Assembly on Wednesday rejected the revenue section of its 2027 state budget, a vote that strips the chamber’s cryptocurrency tax and reporting amendments from the legislation now heading to the Senate. The Assembly’s official voting record shows 458 lawmakers against the section, none in favour and two abstentions. The section covers government income, taxes included, and the arithmetic matters procedurally: revenue must clear before expenditure can be taken up, so the unanimous vote halts the budget’s progress, leaves the spending side out of reach for now, and sends the government’s original text, stripped of amendments adopted since debate opened on October 13, to the upper house. Lawmakers had tabled a long run of changes across weeks of fractious debate before settling on the version that fell.

Senators begin debating the finance bill on November 20 and take up the revenue section’s articles from November 23. Anything dropped at first reading can be reintroduced there, although every measure would still need to survive the remainder of the process, including any compromise negotiated between the two chambers, to become law. The wider calendar is unforgiving: France’s constitutional deadline for the budget falls on December 17, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government keeps the option of invoking Article 49.3 of the Constitution to advance the bill without a conventional vote, at the risk of a no-confidence motion. Industry figures had flagged the stakes before the scoreline. Faustine Fleuret, global head of public affairs at lending protocol Morpho, warned in advance that rejecting the revenue section could bring down the whole bill in the Assembly, “including provisions adopted by way of amendments,” and wrote separately that finance is transforming faster than “the law, taxation and sometimes even mindsets.” She named crypto-to-stablecoin taxes, wallet disclosure and exit taxes as measures capable of denting France’s appeal to crypto businesses.

Three Amendments That Fell

Three crypto-specific measures had been folded into the revenue section before it went down. The first, adopted on October 16 by 38 votes to 37 with 25 abstentions, would have made certain cryptocurrency-to-stablecoin conversions taxable transactions from January 2027. France’s existing framework generally leaves exchanges between cryptocurrencies outside capital gains tax unless the investor converts into fiat or uses the assets in a taxable transaction; the amendment would have ended that treatment for conversions into stablecoins classed as electronic money tokens under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, so a swap into a qualifying stablecoin could have produced a tax bill without any bank withdrawal.

The second, approved on Tuesday by 150 votes to 44 with eight abstentions, would have obliged taxpayers holding at least €100,000, roughly $112,000, in qualifying self-custodied assets to disclose them to the French tax authorities, with the threshold measured on December 31 of the relevant tax year and penalties of up to €10,000 for non-compliance. The measure covered disclosure only and introduced no new annual tax. During debate, Public Action and Accounts Minister David Amiel questioned whether a self-reporting duty can actually reach taxpayers who deliberately conceal holdings. The scope matters for anyone keeping assets off exchanges, in hardware wallets such as the Tangem Mobile Wallet; the distinction the amendment tried to codify sits between exchange custody versus self-custody.

A third amendment would have raised the penalty on platforms that fail to provide information requested by tax authorities from €10,000 to €50,000. Two exit-tax extensions had already failed: on October 30, Nicolas Sansu’s amendment covering unrealised gains under exit-tax rules for taxpayers moving abroad went down 27 to 55, and Mickaël Bouloux’s parallel proposal targeting household holdings above €800,000 failed 60 to 31. The debate also runs alongside the EU’s DAC8 directive, which obliges covered service providers, including exchanges such as Coinbase, to collect data on reportable transactions involving EU residents from January 2026, with the first exchanges between tax authorities due in 2027. Bull Bitcoin and Paymium lost an emergency application against the French implementation at the Council of State in September, though their separate challenge to the implementing decree continues.

Proposal, Not Law: The Senate Test

None of these measures was ever law. They were amendments to a draft revenue section that itself failed unanimously, and the only obligation already binding from this file is DAC8’s provider-level reporting, which has been in force for data collection since January. The rejected disclosure rule would have gone further than DAC8 by reaching purely self-custodied holdings, but it extended the same transparency direction rather than contradicting it; the stablecoin tax, by contrast, would have made France an outlier in taxing a swap most jurisdictions still treat as neutral. With reintroduction possible from November 23 and a December 17 deadline behind it, the Senate stage decides whether any of this returns, and Article 49.3 remains the government’s escape hatch if the chambers deadlock.