Greece is preparing legislation that would impose a 15% capital gains tax on digital assets, according to a Reuters report.
Citing two government officials “with knowledge of the issue,” Reuters reported that the Greek Finance Ministry is preparing a law, expected to be submitted to parliament in the coming months, that will include cryptocurrencies in the country’s tax code for the first time.
“The aim is to include cryptocurrencies in the country’s tax code,” an official told the outlet.
The comment was reportedly confirmed by a second official who offered more details, suggesting that the first €500 ($576.94) of gains will be tax-free and that the tax will not apply to individual cryptocurrency mining, only if the mining entity is registered as a corporation.
Greece currently lacks a legal framework for taxing digital assets, and the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), which came fully into force in December 2024, also does not specify a unified taxation system for crypto assets across the bloc.
Crypto taxation varies across the 27 EU member states and typically applies to realized gains rather than mere ownership. In many countries, profits from selling cryptoassets are taxed as capital gains, while mining, staking, and professional trading may fall under separate income tax rules.
Specific rates range from around 8% in Cyprus to around 30% in France for many individual investors. While France typically applies a flat tax regime to digital asset gains, other countries use progressive tax systems.
The two Greek officials reportedly said that it is difficult to estimate the size of Greece’s cryptocurrency market, since the vast majority of investors use platforms outside the country; therefore, they were unable to provide projected revenues that Greece could generate from the new tax.
Crypto tax evolving in the EU
While taxation rates for digital asset gains remain the purview of national legislatures in the EU, as of this year, there are standard rules around the tax reporting of crypto firms.
On January 1, the bloc’s new directive on digital asset tax transparency and administrative cooperation came into effect, mandating crypto asset service providers (CASPs) to report detailed user and transaction data to national tax authorities by July 1, 2026.
The directive, also known as DAC8, was adopted by the EU on October 17, 2023, and provides for the automatic exchange of information on “crypto assets” between EU countries. This requires EU countries to obtain information from the reporting CASPs “and exchange that information with the EU country of residence of the taxpayer/investor on an annual basis.”
The information must be exchanged with the “tax authorities of the EU country of residence of the non-resident investor” within nine months of the end of the reporting year. Thus, the exchanges relating to the first reporting year must take place by September 30, 2027.
However, only a month after the law came into effect, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, was already calling on member states to fully implement the new rules.
On January 30, it revealed its “January infringements package,” which included sending formal notices to 12 countries for failing to comply with the reporting directive, namely Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Spain, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Greece.
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