Greece is preparing to impose a 15% capital gains tax on cryptocurrency profits, the Finance Ministry confirmed to ATN through two senior government officials Friday — a legislative move that would close one of the more conspicuous gaps in the country’s tax code while simultaneously acknowledging a fundamental enforcement problem: the Greek state has no reliable measure of how large its cryptocurrency market actually is.
The draft law is expected to be submitted to parliament within months.
Both officials confirmed that the first 500 euros — approximately $580 — of any individual’s annual cryptocurrency gains would be exempt from the levy. Individual crypto mining operations would also be excluded. Corporate mining entities, however, would face the full tax, a distinction that draws a regulatory line between hobbyist activity and organized commercial extraction. Neither official was able to offer a revenue projection from the new measure, a gap that is itself informative: the vast majority of Greek cryptocurrency investors conduct transactions through platforms registered and operating outside Greece, leaving the domestic market largely opaque to the authorities now moving to tax it.
Greece currently has no comprehensive legal framework governing cryptocurrency taxation. That is not unusual in the European context — the EU has not established a unified tax regime for digital assets across member states, leaving each country to legislate independently and producing a patchwork of rates that reflects the absence of any coordinated approach. Cyprus taxes crypto capital gains at 8%.
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France taxes them at 30%. Germany exempts long-term crypto holdings held for more than a year from capital gains tax entirely. At 15%, Greece’s proposed rate would sit toward the lower middle of that spectrum, below the EU average and well below the more aggressive postures adopted by Paris.
The divergence across EU member states has created a predictable dynamic: capital and crypto activity gravitates toward lower-tax jurisdictions, and the platforms investors use reflect that gravitational pull. Greek investors, operating on exchanges domiciled in Cyprus, Malta, or outside the EU entirely, generate gains that currently pass through no domestic reporting mechanism. The Greek state collects nothing and sees little. The new law would establish the legal basis for taxation. What it cannot immediately establish is visibility into the transactions it intends to reach.
This is not a problem unique to Greece. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation — MiCA — which came into full effect in December 2024, established a unified licensing and operational framework for crypto asset service providers across the bloc. MiCA requires exchanges and wallet providers operating in the EU to obtain authorization from a national regulator, and its provisions on transaction reporting are designed to give tax authorities greater data access over time. But MiCA is a market regulation, not a tax instrument. It creates the infrastructure through which tax data might eventually flow; it does not itself resolve how member states choose to tax what that infrastructure reveals.
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Greece’s decision to move now, before any EU-wide tax harmonization framework materializes, reflects both fiscal pragmatism and political timing. The country’s long struggle with tax evasion — a structural problem that contributed substantially to the severity of its sovereign debt crisis between 2010 and 2018 — has made successive governments acutely sensitive to revenue streams that fall outside formal collection mechanisms.
Cryptocurrency, for a finance ministry with institutional memory of what informality costs, represents exactly that category of risk: a growing asset class, held by an unknown number of citizens, generating gains that currently carry no domestic tax obligation whatsoever.
The 15% rate is competitive enough to avoid driving declared activity offshore while establishing a clear legal obligation for the first time. The €500 exemption threshold shields small investors from administrative burden and reduces the political cost of introducing the tax. The carve-out for individual miners acknowledges the practical difficulty of taxing small-scale computational activity while ensuring that commercially organized mining operations — which benefit from economies of scale and generate material profits — do not escape the net on a technicality.
What the government cannot yet say is how much any of this will yield. A tax on a market whose size is genuinely unknown, collected from transactions conducted largely on platforms beyond the state’s direct line of sight, is a policy instrument whose revenue impact will be revealed only after enforcement infrastructure matures. Greece is, in effect, legislating its claim before it has built the means to fully collect on it.
The parliament will have its say on the draft law in the months ahead. The crypto market, for its part, will continue operating on foreign platforms in the meantime — largely as it has been, and largely out of view.