Tax office imposes 22% on token swaps, lacks clear DeFi guidance

1. I can accept treating token swaps as disposals, and even taking 22% when swapping between stablecoins, since other countries do this too. If we interpret it as taxing 22% on all gains realized at each step, that’s understandable.

2. For netting profits and losses with overseas exchanges, it seems they’ll accept it if you file voluntarily and submit supporting documents. Expecting automatic data collection is probably unrealistic.

What worries me most is that even in Telegram communities where people are relatively familiar with crypto, everyone is asking how this will be handled, and there still isn’t a single clear guideline.

They’re saying they’ll run it on a voluntary filing basis and make improvements if needed, but until those improvements happen, countless crypto users are bound to face inconvenience in the administrative process and anxiety about potential calls from the tax office at any time.

I believe there was plenty of time to at least estimate the expected tax amounts for a subset of taxpayers and set explicit guidelines for DeFi users, but I’ve never heard of anything like that being done.

It’s hard not to read this as an intention to just go ahead and tax domestic/overseas CEX users for now, and I’m already worried about what kinds of cases will pop up in 2028. I guess the best we can hope for is the comprehensive taxation system they say they’ll build before implementation.