South Korea's People Power Party Weighs Bitcoin (BTC) Tax Deferral at September 21 Seminar

September 21 National Assembly Seminar

South Korea's main opposition People Power Party is coordinating a seminar at the National Assembly on September 21 at 2:00 PM local time that could shape the fate of Bitcoin (BTC) and broader digital asset taxation ahead of its scheduled January 1, 2027 rollout. Industry officials involved in the planning said the event, provisionally titled a seminar on improving the digital asset taxation system, is still being finalized and attendance lists have not been locked in. The invite list under discussion includes floor leader Jeong Jeong-sik, policy committee chair Lim I-ja, and executives from the country's five KRW-denominated exchanges — Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax — alongside representatives of DAXA, the joint council of Korean digital asset exchanges. Under the current Income Tax Act, income from transferring or lending digital assets is taxed as other income from January 1, 2027, after a 2.5 million won annual deduction, at a 20% rate that rises to 22% including local income tax. The levy was originally slated for 2022 but has been postponed three times on the grounds that tax infrastructure and investor protections were incomplete. This year's government tax reform package contains no further deferral, so unless a standalone delay bill passes the National Assembly, taxation begins on schedule. Core disputes center on fairness and enforcement reach: the current framework lets traders net gains and losses within a single tax year but does not allow loss carryforwards into later years, and verifying the true cost basis of coins arriving from self-custody wallets, offshore venues or stablecoin flows remains a practical headache for auditors. Within the party, committee chairman Kim Sang-hoon has argued tax infrastructure and access to overseas transaction data remain insufficient, and a separate bill already tabled would push the start date to 2030. The governing Democratic Party, by contrast, has not entertained another delay.

SCAN 2026 Finals in Seoul

As the tax debate escalates, the enforcement side of Korea's digital asset ecosystem is getting a public showcase of its own. SCAN 2026, billed as the world's first digital asset tracking competition, holds its finals on September 28 at 9:00 AM at Monaco Space in Seoul's Seocho district. The contest, organized by digital asset intelligence firm Dasset with blockchain analytics company Chainalysis joining as the CTF (Capture The Flag) partner, is designed to sharpen cyber-security and investigative capability around digital assets. The preliminary round drew 416 teams and 754 participants, with the top 20 — a mix of law-enforcement units, security professionals and university students — advancing to the finals. The finalist roster includes teams such as DeFiHackLabs, Tornado Cats, CertiScan and BITSkrieg. In written interviews with finalists, one qualifying team competing under the name hello, which usually competes as Ttata, described how large language models reshaped the contest: the team said the preliminary round was effectively decided within roughly two hours of the start, a pace it attributed to AI tooling. The members said they relied primarily on Codex, iterating analysis logic and fund-tracing scripts until results converged, and argued that manually out-thinking an LLM's solving speed is no longer realistic. Their stated preparation for the finals focuses on making LLM-assisted code analysis and blockchain forensics workflows faster and more efficient — a skill set that maps directly onto the cost-basis verification and cross-border tracing problems Seoul's tax authorities now face, including assets routed through privacy coins such as Zcash (ZEC) or yield farming positions on offshore DeFi venues. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Enforcement Meets the Statute

The two threads converge on the same question: can Korea actually see digital asset flows well enough to tax them? COINOTAG's reading is that the seminar will test whether deferral politics survive contact with data infrastructure. The statutory text we are looking at is unambiguous — the Income Tax Act binds Korean residents disposing of digital assets from January 1, 2027, with the 22% combined rate — while the OECD's CARF framework, under which participating jurisdictions annually exchange user and transaction data from digital asset service providers, only phases in next year with uneven national adoption. Deferral hinges on closing exactly the tracing gap contests like SCAN 2026 are training investigators to close, and on data rails — exchange records, reporting standards and blockchain oracle-style on-chain tooling — that are being built in parallel, not yet in place.