France's Assembly torpedoes budget revenue section, crypto tax amendments sink with it

The French National Assembly torched its own budget late Wednesday. Lawmakers voted 458–0 at first reading to reject the 2027 budget's revenue section — the chunk that covers government income such as taxes — with two abstentions, according to the official voting record. The casualty list includes three crypto-related amendments the Assembly had just adopted.

On Oct. 16, lawmakers backed making gains from crypto-to-stablecoin conversions taxable. On Tuesday, they approved a requirement that taxpayers disclose self-custodied crypto holdings worth at least 100,000 euros ($112,000), with the threshold measured on Dec. 31 of the tax year. A third amendment would have raised penalties from 10,000 euros to 50,000 euros for crypto platforms that fail to hand over information requested by tax authorities.

Faustine Fleuret, global head of public affairs at lending protocol Morpho, saw it coming. She told Cointelegraph before the vote that rejecting the revenue section could result in the rejection of the entire bill in the National Assembly, including provisions adopted by way of amendments. The amendments are now out of the text.

Next stop: the Senate. The government will send the upper chamber the original budget text, stripped of the crypto amendments. Those proposals can still be reintroduced there, but they would need to survive the remaining budget process to become law.

The Senate is scheduled to start debating the finance bill on Nov. 20, then examine the revenue section's articles on Nov. 23, per its own schedule. Until then, French crypto holders keep the tax rules they already have.