French lawmakers have advanced a proposal that would force cryptocurrency holders to report self-custody wallet holdings of €100,000 ($112,000) or more to the tax authorities—or face fines of up to €10,000 ($11,000).

The French National Assembly's Finance Committee adopted amendment I-CF821 on Friday. The proposal would add a provision to France's general tax code requiring crypto users to declare holdings equal to or above €100,000 ($112,000), based on their value at the end of the calendar year, or face fines of up to €10,000 ($11,000).

The reporting obligation covers assets held in self-custody wallets, in which the owner holds the private keys that allow them to fully control the assets inside. No exchange or intermediary controls the funds in such arrangements, in contrast to holding assets through platforms that take custody of user funds, such as centralized exchanges.

The proposed rule is not law yet and remains subject to change. According to the amendment, the measure is intended to fight the use of cryptocurrency as a vector for fraud, asserting that crypto ownership is currently underestimated.

The plan has sparked an uproar among some crypto holders, who claim it threatens their personal security by creating a record of who owns significant amounts of digital assets. Several prominent industry figures voiced their opposition on social media. The backlash comes after a series of high-profile, in-person crypto robberies and kidnappings in France in recent years.

"This is a terrible idea as corrupt employees in the French tax authority have already shown themselves to [be] a danger to their own citizens," Harry Halpin, CEO of privacy infrastructure firm Nym, told Decrypt, referencing a recent case in which a French tax agent was accused of selling data from the tax authority to criminals. The case was reported by French daily Le Parisien.

France should be "held accountable" to the victims of crypto kidnappings, Halpin continued. "In the future, criminals will use chain analytics and other AI surveillance," he said, adding that "the only solution to defend your data and cryptocurrency is to use shielded cryptocurrency like Zcash and actually private VPNs."

"If you live in France and hold crypto, leave," Rand Hindi, founder of privacy protocol Zama, wrote in a post on X. "If you can't leave, hire personal security for you and your family."

This is the same government whose employees sold tax returns of crypto holders to criminals. If you live in france and hold crypto, leave. If you cant leave, hire personal security for you and your family.

— Rand (@randhindi) October 12, 2026

France and "wrench attacks"

France has emerged as a hotspot for crypto robberies in recent years—a trend that has weighed heavily on the debate over declaring holdings. In 2025, Ledger co-founder David Balland and his wife were kidnapped from their home and held for ransom in a wrench attack, an in-person robbery in which victims are physically coerced, sometimes under threat of violence, into surrendering their crypto; the attackers severed one of Balland's fingers.

Earlier this year, the wife of Sébastien Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox, was the victim of an attempted kidnapping at her home in Villenoy, Seine-et-Marne. Also earlier this year, a couple in their late 50s were forced at knifepoint to transfer $1 million in Bitcoin to robbers posing as police officers in Versailles, France.

That troubling trend is a major reason crypto participants feel apprehensive about declaring their holdings. "France is the leading country on the planet for crypto kidnappings and wrench attacks," Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana-based infrastructure firm Helius, said in a post on X. "Now they want to increase by 50,000x the amount of data they collect and hence leak."

The reporting requirement was not the only crypto measure the committee waved through last week. It also voted to treat swaps from crypto into stablecoins as taxable sales from January 2027, and to extend France's exit tax to crypto held by households worth more than €800,000. The provisions were approved during the committee's review of the government's budget. Taken together, the measures would touch crypto holders at several points: what they must declare to the tax authorities, how swapping into stablecoins is taxed from January 2027, and when the exit tax applies to their assets.

But the committee then rejected the budget's entire revenue section, 31 votes to 3. The full National Assembly will now start from the government's original text, which does not include any of the crypto amendments, when floor debate resumes on Monday. Lawmakers who want the measures back will have to table them again—and whether they manage to do so will shape whether the self-custody reporting rule and the wider crypto provisions move closer to becoming law.