A Bill Would Move South Korea's Crypto Tax Start to 2029

An Income Tax Act amendment filed in South Korea's National Assembly on 16 October would push the start of the country's crypto income tax out to 1 January 2029. The bill, listed as 2221923 and carrying 14 sponsoring lawmakers, names no year of its own. It sets the start at 1 January of the second year after Korea's first qualifying information exchange under the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, the cross-border standard for reporting crypto transactions between tax authorities. If that first exchange falls in 2027, as the accounts expect, the tax begins in 2029. As of Monday the bill was recorded as introduced and nothing more, and the 1 January 2027 start remained in force.

Five exchanges, one table

Officials are due to sit down with the country's five largest exchanges on Tuesday. Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and GOPAX appear in every account checked. The fifth name does not. Cointelegraph, crypto.news, The Cryptonomist and ChainCatcher all have DigitalX, while Bloomingbit has Korbit. The two do not reconcile. We could not establish which list is right. Executives from DAXA, the alliance the exchanges belong to, attend in every version, and Bloomingbit describes the exchange side as chief executives where ChainCatcher says representatives.

Nobody agrees whose meeting it is

The host is unsettled in the coverage. ChainCatcher and Bloomingbit say only that the government is holding the session. Cointelegraph puts senior finance officials in the room. The Cryptonomist has the Financial Services Commission meeting the exchanges, and crypto.news has officials from both the finance ministry and the FSC attending. None of those accounts is a notice from the host itself. The agenda is steadier across the reports: each exchange's state of readiness, the operational problems the new regime creates, the changes the industry wants, and whether the start date should move at all.

What is still not written down

The industry's complaint is about rules that do not exist yet. Treatment of staking, airdrops, hard forks and decentralised finance, the practice of lending and trading through code instead of a licensed intermediary, is named as unresolved in three of the accounts. Exchanges say they have little time left to build the reporting systems the tax will need. One exchange official, unnamed in Yonhap's report, gave the industry position in a line.

"There is a shared view in favor of postponing the start of taxation," the official said.

The same official said standards for different transaction types have not been finalised. Detailed guidance from the National Tax Service is expected around November, which its commissioner told a National Assembly audit on 13 October, and this desk covered the 22% levy and that November promise four days ago. The rate is 20% national income tax plus a local surcharge, 22% combined, charged on annual income above a basic deduction of 2.5 million won. ChainCatcher renders it as 22% income tax plus local income tax, which would put the total higher than 22%; two of Monday's accounts and this desk's earlier reporting give 22% as the combined figure. They do not reconcile.

Three delays already

The tax was legislated in 2020 and has been postponed three times since, a count all three of Monday's accounts give. Separate rulemaking is close behind it. The FSC's government draft of the Digital Asset Basic Act could be ready as early as late October on crypto.news's account, and ChainCatcher expects it by month's end. crypto.news alone reports that a cap of 15% to 20% on major shareholders' stakes in exchanges sits among the disputed points in that draft, and no other account checked mentions a cap. The commission has been filling in detail elsewhere on the same calendar, including a 4 billion won capital floor for tokenized securities issuers. Tuesday's session writes no rule by itself. Whether January 2027 holds now turns on a bill that has been introduced and not voted on.