Korean Lawmakers Urge Digital Asset Tax Deferral Before January 2027

Deferral Calls at the National Assembly Forum

The ruling Democratic Party pushed on Monday for the digital asset tax due to take effect in January 2027 to be postponed, telling a forum at the National Assembly Library that Korea should legislate its basic framework before it starts collecting revenue. Representative Min Byung-deok said that weighing tax equity against market competitiveness leads him to expect the levy will be deferred, and that the state cannot tax digital assets before a basic law exists. Party colleague Park Min-gyu made the same case in a written address, calling enactment of the Digital Asset Basic Act the most urgent task before the market. The deferral argument rests on readiness: Park noted that implementation is now close while the basic rules and the industry foundation for digital assets remain unfinished, and that if authorities cannot secure trading data from offshore venues, the burden would concentrate on users of domestic exchanges. Min compared the situation to the scrapped financial investment income tax, where a levy was pushed onto a stock market before its institutions were improved, and argued that deferral tasks and deadlines should be written into the basic law process; he described his stance as the strongest on this within his party. The finance ministry stopped short of any commitment. Income tax division director Mun Kyung-ho said the government is deliberating a reasonable plan that citizens can accept and that can be implemented stably, with conclusions to follow consultations across ministries and with the Assembly. Neither the fact of a deferral nor its length has been decided; Min's remark that the tax will be deferred is his own forecast. The Digital Asset Basic Act itself is a comprehensive bill covering issuance, distribution, disclosure and listing, advanced as two-stage legislation together with stablecoins, and still contested: lawmakers have not settled whether to cap major shareholders of virtual asset exchanges, or whether stablecoin issuance should go to a consortium in which banks hold a majority stake of 50 percent plus one share. Democratic Party representative Lee Kang-il said the Financial Services Commission is to submit the government bill this month and the Assembly will aim to pass it in December.

DAXA Vice Chairman Flags an Offshore Tax Gap

Kim Jae-jin, standing vice chairman of the Digital Asset Exchange Alliance (DAXA) and a business professor at Catholic University, brought the industry's case to the same forum. The tax regime first designed in 2020 has had its start date pushed back three times without any change to its content, he argued, while the market has moved far beyond what those rules anticipated. His central concern is an imbalance between domestic and offshore users. Korean exchanges may not offer digital asset derivatives, so domestic traders are limited to spot activity, while offshore futures markets run at full volume; such derivatives settle only the price difference without transferring the asset itself, which makes it difficult to fit them into the taxable categories of transfer or lending of digital assets. The result would be a system in which income earned at domestic venues is taxed while offshore derivatives income largely escapes collection. The scale is not trivial: in 2023, Korean users' monthly trading volume at a single offshore exchange reached roughly 85 trillion won, and about 83 trillion won of that, close to 98 percent, was futures. Users and assets move offshore to find products unavailable at home, and an uneven levy would accelerate that outflow, he warned. Verification compounds the problem. When acquisition and disposal both occur at a domestic exchange, records are easy to audit, but activity across offshore venues, a DEX, over-the-counter desks, peer-to-peer trades and self-held wallets, whether a hot wallet or cold storage, makes the acquisition date and cost basis hard to establish, leaving users of domestic operators to carry the tax alone. Stablecoins widen the gap: neither the income tax law nor the user-protection statute classifies them separately, so converting a dollar stablecoin into won could expose exchange gains tied to the won-dollar rate to taxation, while ordinary foreign currency gains escape tax under traditional finance rules, and every purchase settled with a won stablecoin could require a taxable gain computation. Kim stressed the point is not to avoid taxation but to define its base clearly, and he tied that to the Basic Act: its classification of stablecoins should shape how taxable income is computed, and taxing before that classification exists would invite confusion and disputes. He asked for a system that lets domestic operators compete fairly with offshore rivals, saying the question is not merely what must exist to tax, but what must exist to keep the outflow of users and funds to a minimum.

A December Window Before a January Levy

The calendar is the substance of this dispute. The government bill is due this month, the Assembly wants passage in December, and the levy starts in January 2027, which leaves weeks rather than years to align a tax code with a framework that does not yet exist. DAXA's 85 trillion won monthly offshore figure puts a size on the base that would sit outside collection if deferral fails, and it explains why industry wants the sequencing reversed. Nothing is settled: Monday's statements were individual positions and a ministry review stance, and the Basic Act still carries open items such as exchange shareholder caps and a bank-majority stablecoin consortium. The choice Korean users face between venues is visible in any comparison of the Best Crypto Exchanges, where product availability, not geography, decides where volume lands.