French Parliament Refuses to Ease Taxation for Cryptocurrency Owners

The lower house of the French parliament has rejected the amendments to the 2019 finance bill which would ease crypto-related taxation.

French monthly business magazine Capital reported this Tuesday, Dec. 18.

Fr, the Parliament rejected four proposals in total.

One of them was to introduce a distinction between regular crypto transactions and occasional ones, offering a more relaxed taxation system for the latter.

Another amendment proposed to increase the annual volume of transactions that falls under tax exemption from €305 to €3,000, or even €5,000.

The National Assembly also declined the proposal to follow the current guidelines for securities when introducing crypto taxation.

As Cointelegraph reported in November, a reduction of the crypto income tax rate from 36.2 to 30 percent was also proposed; this amendment was mentioned during the Assembly's meeting, but its current status remains unclear.

The head of a French blockchain association Chaintech, Alexandre Stachtchenko, told Capital that the government's move did not provide any legal certainty for the country's crypto traders and investors.

In June 2017, France's president Emmanuel Macron said he would like France to become a "Startup nation." The country's Minister for the Economy and Finance, Bruno le Maire, echoed Macron's point of view, claiming that the country was ready for a "Blockchain revolution."

In December, French political deputies offered to spend €500 million on state-level blockchain deployment over the next three years in order to comply with the course plotted by le Maire.