DAC8

What is DAC8?

DAC8 obliges crypto service providers in the EU to report data about their users and transactions to the tax authorities, much as banks already do. The aim is greater fiscal transparency around crypto holdings within Europe.

What does DAC8 change for my crypto assets?

Since 1 January 2026, European crypto service providers automatically exchange your transaction data with the tax authority. It is therefore wise to have your crypto holdings and their origin traceably mapped out yourself.

What automatic reporting means for your records

The practical effect of European reporting rules is that a tax authority may receive data about your holdings before you have said anything about them yourself. Providers established or active in the Union are required to collect customer details and report balances and transactions for the accounts they administer. That does not create a new tax, and it does not settle what your position is. It changes only who has the data first, and that is enough to make the quality of your own records suddenly matter a great deal.

The situations that cause friction are the predictable ones. Holdings spread across several providers, so that each report covers a fragment of the whole. Balances moved to a private wallet, where no provider reports anything at all. Transfers between your own addresses that look like disposals from the outside. And older years for which the platform no longer exists. In each case the reported figures and your own reconstruction can differ for entirely innocent reasons, and the difference has to be explainable rather than merely asserted.

What we do with that is straightforward. We rebuild the position per holding and per date from transaction data, name the source of every figure, and set out where a provider statement exists and where it does not. An adviser can then reconcile a reported amount with your own overview line by line, which is a far shorter conversation than starting from a total.

A note on expectations: reporting rules make data flow, they do not make a position correct. If a reported balance is wrong because a provider misclassified a transfer, the correction still has to come from you, with records behind it. That is the whole argument for keeping a dated overview per holding rather than trusting that the numbers will arrive complete from somewhere else.