South Korea to Meet Exchanges Over Crypto Tax Delay

South Korean finance officials will meet representatives of five cryptocurrency exchanges on Tuesday, Oct. 20, to discuss preparations for a digital-asset tax scheduled to begin in January 2027.

The consultation will include executives from Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, DigitalX and Gopax, along with representatives of the Digital Asset Exchange Alliance, known as DAXA. Kwon Dae-young, first vice minister of finance and economy, and Yoo Young-jun, director general for digital financial policy at the Financial Services Commission, are expected to attend.

The meeting will cover tax rules for different types of cryptocurrency transactions and the systems exchanges would need to report taxable activity. Industry representatives have raised concerns that some transaction standards remain unfinished and that exchanges have limited time to prepare their reporting infrastructure.

South Korea has postponed the cryptocurrency tax three times. The latest delay moved its start date to 2027 after political disagreements and concerns over exchange readiness, reporting requirements and the income threshold for taxation.

An exchange official told officials that the industry broadly supports another postponement. “Standards for different transaction types have not yet been finalized, and time is running short for practical preparations on the infrastructure side,” the official said.

Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker Park Min-gyu introduced a bill Friday that would delay the tax until Jan. 1 of the second year after South Korea begins exchanging information under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, or CARF.

South Korea is expected to begin its first CARF data exchange in 2027. If the bill passes and the data-exchange schedule remains unchanged, cryptocurrency taxation would begin in 2029.

The planned tax would apply to income from cryptocurrency transactions. Lawmakers and industry representatives continue to disagree over reporting rules, the taxable threshold and the readiness of domestic exchanges to comply.