No, 2026 will not be the year of freedom for French crypto! After the deployment of the highly controversial DAC 8, France wants to toughen regulations, even beyond Brussels' fiscal dreams.
Another tightening of fiscal policy
Once again, the Land of Human Rights neglects this concept and plays on surveillance! The Court of Accounts warns about the flaws in crypto taxation in France and proposes to tax cold wallets to fill the gaps in the declaration of digital assets.
To counter this, it recommends extending the declaration obligation to Digital Asset Service Providers (PSAN) hosted in France, unlike DAC 8 which primarily targets foreign accounts. An automatic transmission of data from these accounts to the tax authorities is requested, for increased monitoring of domestic transactions.
But that's not all! The institution also recommends targeting cold wallets, or self-hosted offline accounts (computers, phones), where the user holds their private key. DAC 8 ignores these decentralized wallets, but the recommendation imposes a mandatory declaration beyond an unspecified threshold for French holders. Your Ledger will therefore be monitored as well.
Finally, monitoring of social networks is also mentioned to detect undisclosed transactions via personal accounts. This raises yet another debate about privacy, at a time when many French people are storing long-term without taxable events.
At the same time, Emmanuel Macron recently raised concerns about the American deregulation of crypto and stablecoins during an interview with the newspaper Les Echos. According to him, digital currencies could be the catalyst for global financial instability through dollar reserves.
The French president defends European monetary sovereignty through the stricter MiCA law and calls on the ECB to adjust its policy in response to systemic stablecoins exceeding 300 billion dollars. You will have understood: he also relies on tightening the national framework, aligned with the Court's proposals for more intrusive taxation.
The moral of the story: the walls have ears, and soon your wallets will too.
