Under the petition system open to the public in South Korea, a petition demanding the abolition of the "virtual asset tax" received 58,571 agreements by June 2026, surpassing the legal threshold of 50,000, and was formally submitted for review by the National Assembly's Committee on Finance and Economy. The petition directly targets the current established plan: starting from January 1, 2027, a 22% tax rate will be levied on the portion of income from the transfer or borrowing of virtual assets exceeding 2.5 million won (approximately 1,800 USD), reshaping investors' tax burdens through exemptions for small amounts and taxation on larger gains. Now, this taxation plan, which has been postponed multiple times from 2022 to 2025 to 2027, is again facing a systematic backlash from investors — on one side, there is a tax system arrangement that has been incorporated into the legislative timeline, while on the other side, there are public demands to abolish the taxation altogether, and the conflict has officially been placed on the committee's agenda. According to the "National Assembly Act," petitions must be submitted for deliberation at the first meeting 30 days after being transferred to the committee. Although this procedure itself does not automatically repeal the 2027 tax law arrangement, in South Korea, a major global cryptocurrency trading market, it is sufficient to leverage a future rebalancing of tax paths and regulatory costs: if the committee’s deliberation leads to adjustments in tax rates or thresholds, or even suggests abolition, the overall tax environment for South Korea’s crypto investors, along with the compliance costs for real-name systems and anti-money laundering measures already established by local trading platforms, may be forced to be revalued.

58,000 people sign to put crypto tax on the national assembly's table

In South Korea's national petition system, the crypto tax is no longer just a debate among technocrats but has been systematically placed on the legislators' agenda. The law has set clear thresholds for this channel — when a petition receives more than 50,000 agreements from citizens, the National Assembly must accept and transfer it to the relevant standing committee. This means it is no longer just a "public voice" but has become a formally constrained case with procedural validity. The petition to abolish the virtual asset tax was supported by 58,571 individuals on June 21, 2026, and the exceeding number not only signifies agreement but triggers a whole set of review obligations under the "National Assembly Act," turning the crypto tax into a political issue that must be responded to in a public process, rather than merely an administrative plan.

Next, this petition is expected to be transferred to the National Assembly's Committee on Finance and Economy, responsible for taxation and fiscal policy. According to the "National Assembly Act," the committee must formally submit it for review at its first meeting 30 days after receiving the petition. The path is roughly clear: the National Assembly Secretariat completes procedural transfer, the Committee on Finance and Economy incorporates "whether to abolish income tax on virtual asset gains starting in 2027" into its agenda, and subsequently, after listening to opinions from government departments and relevant parties, decides whether to maintain the current arrangement, propose adjustments, or submit a recommendation for complete abolition to the plenary session. For South Korea, a large crypto trading market, the key moment is not whether the petition itself can immediately change the tax law, but rather how public opinion is institutionalized into the tax legislation game, forcing the government, the ruling party, and the opposition to provide positions and rationale in public records.

Dragging from 2022 to 2027: The political tug of war over the crypto tax

If we place this petition back on the timeline, we notice that South Korea’s virtual asset taxation has never been a straightforward line. When the government began planning for taxation around 2021, it originally set the timeline for 2022, hoping to quickly incorporate this new asset into the tax system. However, this design quickly encountered resistance between legislation and the market: on one hand, fiscal authorities hoped to adhere to the principle of "timely taxation," while on the other hand, investors and some members of the assembly emphasized that the market's capacity and regulatory support were not yet mature. As a result, the timeline was pushed back for the first time, postponing the implementation date from 2022 to 2025; the legal text was not abolished but was marked with a new effective date after having previously been "written in stone."

However, pushing the collection period back three years did not end the controversy. As various parties continued to tussle over the scope of taxation, tax rates, and administration conditions, the South Korean National Assembly chose again to exchange time for space: the current plan has been rewritten to impose a 22% income tax on the portion exceeding 2.5 million won from the transfer or lending of virtual assets starting on January 1, 2027, with the originally stated 2022 and 2025 dates being consecutively erased, and new dates being filled in repeatedly. This path of "preserving the text, reopening the timeline" is essentially a political compromise: it neither openly denies the principle of taxation nor does it expose the real landing costs to the government left behind by repeated postponements. It is within such a tradition of postponement that this abolition of the crypto tax petition becomes particularly critical — it provides Congress with a new reason to reassess the 2027 arrangements, whether to maintain the established timeline, make minor adjustments to the tax rate, and the 2.5 million won threshold, or delay once again or entirely rewrite the plan, will depend on how this ongoing time battle is redefined.

22% tax rate and 2.5 million won threshold, who is at the center of the tax burden

According to the current plan, starting from January 1, 2027, South Korea will levy a 22% tax rate on the portion of income from virtual asset transfers or loans exceeding "2.5 million won." The logic behind the design is clear: the 2.5 million won threshold, equivalent to about 1,800 USD, is used to distinguish between "small exploratory investments" and "scaled asset allocation or speculative behavior." For a large number of retail investors who only buy a small number of tokens on local exchanges and occasionally realize profits of several tens of thousands of won, this threshold means that actual gains falling into the tax base are not substantial; they are more often included in the "recorded statistics" rather than as direct tax targets. The true targets in the range of the 22% tax burden are heavy traders and high-net-worth individuals whose income from single or cumulative transactions significantly exceeds this level; once their earnings surpass the threshold, the excess will be segregated at a uniform tax rate and enter the tax authorities’ records.

In such a structure, the tax burden presents a "hierarchical" nature among different participants: ordinary investors perceive a "threshold-based" tax system — as long as their earnings do not cross the 2.5 million won line, it is difficult for them to truly face a 22% tax; frequent market participants with greater earnings volatility must invest more effort in compliance reporting, retaining trading records, and cooperating with tax audits, as they might cross the threshold at any moment and become a focus of the tax authorities; as for institutions already operating locally or cross-border, once their taxable income from the transfer and lending of virtual assets exceeds the threshold, they too fall under the 22% tax rate jurisdiction. Given that South Korea is one of the world's major cryptocurrency trading markets, with a considerable scale of local users and exchanges, this structure, with the 2.5 million won as the dividing line, will directly compel local platforms to further sort and retain user earnings data based on tax needs on the basis of real-name systems and anti-money laundering regulations, while cross-border platforms will also need to make clearer trade-offs between whether to cooperate with Korean users' reporting and how to adjust products and operational strategies targeting Korean users.

Tax burden or outflow signal? Compliance choices for South Korean investors and platforms

Under the premise that the current plan has not been altered, South Korean investors are, in fact, already calculating the costs and benefits of future reporting obligations. Beginning January 1, 2027, with the arrangement to impose a 22% tax rate on the portion exceeding 2.5 million won from virtual asset transfers or loans, high-frequency traders and large holders must anticipate: once the rules are implemented, carefully recording purchase prices, holding periods, and transfers between different accounts will become a prerequisite for compliance reporting. Real-name systems and anti-money laundering requirements have already brought local accounts into regulatory sight, and under the premise that the tax administration heavily relies on exchange data, the more concentrated the funds on South Korean local platforms, the more challenging it becomes to ambiguously handle the reporting phase. This also explains why the higher tax burden design is viewed as a potential "outflow signal" — some high-frequency or large investors may prefer to switch to overseas platforms or over-the-counter channels to reduce their traceable gains in future reporting.

For local exchanges, real-name systems and anti-money laundering measures are just the starting point. Supporting the aforementioned tax system means needing to provide more granular data reporting capabilities to the tax authorities at the system level, and even taking on the withholding role once policies are clarified: calculating taxable amounts based on users’ annual earnings, generating reports, and withholding in advance for Korean residents when necessary, followed by aggregating them for tax authorities. Such arrangements will directly increase compliance system investments and operational costs for local platforms and will also become a structural burden when competing with overseas platforms. If the National Assembly chooses to adjust tax rates, raise or lower the 2.5 million won threshold after deliberating on the petition, or even suggests abolishing the arrangements, the calculations in terms of site selection, licensing applications, and business focuses between South Korea and offshore platforms will subsequently change — if the tax burden pressure is alleviated, local platforms will have more motivation to keep their business focus within the domestic regulatory and licensing framework; if the current plan remains unchanged, then the choice between "staying within the system bearing the tax burden" and "relocating platforms and capital flows to dilute the tax burden" will become a border issue that South Korean investors and platforms cannot avoid in the coming years.

Three paths for parliamentary deliberation: Maintain, adjust or abolish

For a petition that has already crossed the threshold of 50,000 agreements, entering the Committee on Finance and Economy is just the first gate; it will not automatically rewrite the established arrangement of levying a 22% tax rate starting from January 1, 2027, distinguishing small and larger gains at 2.5 million won. After the committee's review, whether it decides to maintain the current plan, make "adjustments" to the tax rate or threshold, or propose a complete abolition amendment will still have to go through a full legislative procedure in the National Assembly, and currently, the government and major political parties have not stated a clear position on "whether to abolish the tax," making the probability of the three paths hard to characterize as optimistic or pessimistic. The more pressing concern is that the timeline, which has been repeatedly postponed from 2022 to 2025 and then to 2027, has led many market participants to question the predictability of the rules: with regulatory stances shifting every few years, how can trading platforms lay out medium to long-term business plans, and how can investors plan their holdings and reporting paths under uncertain tax burdens? Moving forward, when the Committee on Finance and Economy schedules discussions, how it provides review opinions, and whether the National Assembly pushes for a plenary vote will directly determine the actual tax burden curve for South Korean investors in the future, while also redrawing the boundary line for local platforms operating within the compliance system versus migrating overseas.

Join our community to discuss together and become stronger together!
AiCoin exclusive Hyperliquid benefits: https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/AICOIN88
AiCoin exclusive Aster benefits: https://www.asterdex.com/zh-CN/referral/9C50e2
On-chain Telegram community: https://t.me/AiCoinWhaleData
On-chain community: https://www.aicoin.com/link/chat?cid=N6OVMor5g
AiCoin on-chain Twitter: https://x.com/aicoinwhaledata

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。