“Better detect certain concealment practices”: the Senate votes for a bill that would allow the tax authorities to know the identity of crypto holders and their transactions abroad

France is moving towards greater surveillance of cryptocurrency holders. This Tuesday, October 27, the Senate adopted, at first reading, a bill aimed at authorizing “a multilateral agreement” favoring the exchange of information on cryptocurrencies between 56 tax administrations. The Senate thus transmitted the text to the National Assembly: only validation by the deputies will allow it to enter into force.

As a reminder, this bill was tabled on July 27 by the government for a first reading in the Senate. It pursues an objective of “strengthening international tax cooperation and combating tax fraud”, according to a Senate note. In particular, it will allow the French administration to “receive information on operations carried out by French tax residents with service providers established abroad”.

“Concealment” The objective will be “to better detect certain concealment practices involving crypto-assets, in particular undeclared capital gains, the use of foreign exchange platforms or even transfers of funds to external wallets”, according to the Senate. Concretely, crypto exchanges (like Binance, Coinbase, etc.) will be required to transmit a lot of information to the tax authorities: the identification of users (including tax residence), as well as the amounts and volumes of transactions carried out on these same platforms.

The collection of information applies to transactions that have taken place since January 1, 2026. The French tax authorities will be able to receive this data in a first declaration in 2027. This does not concern so-called “cold” crypto wallets such as Ledger, which allow self-preservation.

Further than DAC 8 This agreement between 56 states around the world therefore intends to go much further than the European directive DAC 8 (administrative cooperation in the tax field), which came into force in January 2026. It provides for the automatic exchange of information between European tax authorities of holders of cryptocurrencies using crypto exchanges in the EU. From 2027, the French tax authorities will therefore already know both your undeclared foreign crypto accounts and all your transactions on a crypto platform registered in the European Union since January 1, 2026.

Until now, crypto platforms only transmitted this information to the tax authorities in the event of suspicion of terrorist financing or money laundering. This increased surveillance worries many experts in a context of the emergence of physical and online attacks against people who own cryptocurrencies.

Machine-translated from French