Dutch tax authority gets crypto data from 2027: what DAC8 does and does not see

What changes: the DAC8 timeline

DAC8 is the eighth round of the European directive on administrative cooperation in taxation, formally Directive (EU) 2023/2226. The Netherlands translated it into the Wet implementatie EU-richtlijn gegevensuitwisseling cryptoactiva. The lower house passed it on 27 January 2026 and the senate followed on 31 March 2026.

The scheme runs in three steps, and those steps sit further apart than most headlines suggest.

• 1 January 2026: crypto service providers start collecting and verifying customer and transaction data.
• 31 January 2027: first report on calendar year 2026 to the tax authority. On that same date they must tell customers which data about them was passed on.
• 30 September 2027: EU countries exchange the first datasets with each other.

Who is affected and what exactly gets reported

In the Netherlands this concerns roughly a hundred crypto service providers, according to the tax authority. Parties with a MiCA licence report in the country that issued it; providers without a licence that exchange crypto-assets here on a professional basis have to register separately. The same movement runs worldwide through CARF, the OECD standard DAC8 is based on: 46 jurisdictions take part for reporting year 2026, with 29 more following for 2027.

The report has two layers: who you are, and what you did.

• Identification: name, address, tax residence and tax identification number.
• Exchanges from crypto to fiat and from crypto to crypto.
• Transfers to other users and to wallets whose owner has not been identified.
• Retail payments above 50,000 dollars.
• Per transaction: type of crypto-asset, type of transaction, number of units, gross amount and fair market value.
• The balance as at 31 December.

For investors, nothing changes fiscally

That is literally how the tax authority puts it. Crypto holdings always had to be declared in your income tax return. What changes is that the tax office can now hold that return up against an independent source. It also goes beyond bitcoin and ether: stablecoins and certain NFTs are in scope too.

For the providers themselves the bar is considerably higher. Failing to report intentionally or through gross negligence risks an administrative fine in the sixth category: up to 1,030,000 euros, with criminal prosecution in serious cases.

What stays out of sight

This is where it gets interesting. In late August 2026 Chainalysis published an analysis of six major blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, BNB Smart Chain and Base. For 2025 they arrived at roughly 457 billion dollars in potentially taxable activity, of which about 125 billion is attributable to the EU. Of that total, they estimate only around 14 percent falls within the practical reach of CARF.

The other 86 percent sits in corners where there is no intermediary to do the reporting.

• Trading on decentralised exchanges and direct transactions between private wallets.
• Income that arises directly on-chain: staking, mining and lending.
• Everything from before 2026, because the rules are not retroactive.
• The purchase price. An exchange sees what you sell for, but not what you once paid for those coins if you bought them elsewhere.

A missing report is not an exemption

This is where a lot of coverage moves too fast. A transaction being absent from the report does not mean no tax is due on it. The duty to file correctly still sits with the taxpayer. Chainalysis also explicitly calls its estimate a floor, because activity inside centralised exchanges was left out.

The practical effect cuts both ways. From 2027 an incorrect return stands out sooner than before, while the data the tax office receives is incomplete. A difference between your return and their file is therefore not automatically your mistake, but it is something you have to be able to explain.

How crypto is taxed now and later

In the Netherlands crypto sits in box 3 under other assets. For 2026 a deemed return of 6 percent applies, taxed at 36 percent. That works out at roughly 2.16 percent of the value per year, measured on the reference date of 1 January, above a tax-free allowance of 59,357 euros per person.

If you trade so intensively, or mine or stake so professionally, that it goes beyond ordinary asset management, the proceeds can land in box 1. That is a case-by-case judgement and one to take to a tax adviser.

Looking ahead, the Wet werkelijk rendement box 3 is with the senate, having passed the lower house on 12 February 2026, with 1 January 2028 as the intended start date. For crypto it would introduce a tax on annual value growth: you settle up each year on the change in value, even if you sell nothing. The cabinet is still working on amendments, so the details are not fixed.

That shift matters more administratively than it sounds. Under the current system you need a value on one reference date. Under the new one you need an opening value, a closing value and every deposit and withdrawal in between. Exactly the data that sits scattered across exchanges and wallets.

This article is general information and not tax advice.

Under the hood this is a data problem

No single party has the complete picture. An exchange knows only its own slice. The tax authority will receive separate reports from several providers in several countries, with no guaranteed fit between them. You are the only one who can put all the pieces together, and a spreadsheet rarely gets you there.

Doing it properly means four operations, each harder than it looks.

• Merging sources: every exchange exports in its own format and uses its own names for the same action.
• Recognising transfers: moving coins between your own wallets is not a sale, but in two separate exports it looks like one outgoing and one incoming transaction.
• Valuation: rates at the right moment, in euros, from a source you can reproduce later.
• Recording: a reconstruction you can still explain three years from now, so with source, timestamp and version attached.

What you can do right now

For private investors the most important action is not fiscal but practical: make sure the data still exists when you need it.

• Export your full transaction history from every exchange where you are active or ever were. Accounts get closed and export features disappear.
• Record your position as at 1 January, including source and timestamp.
• Track transfers between your own wallets separately. That context cannot be reconstructed later.
• In January 2027, check the statement from your provider against your own records and chase up differences straight away.

And if you are on the reporting side

For crypto service providers, accountancy firms and fintech companies this is not an annual export but a process that runs all year. First check whether the registration duty applies to you. Then set up customer due diligence around self-certification and verification, and reuse what you already hold in your anti-money-laundering file instead of asking for everything again.

The hard requirement is reproducibility: the same input has to produce the same output a year from now, with a trail showing where every amount came from. That is plain software work, and exactly the kind of thing you have custom software built for rather than bending an off-the-shelf package around it.

AI helps at the messy edges. Labelling transactions, working out what an unknown transfer was, flagging discrepancies between your figures and a counterparty's: a model is strong at that. The amounts themselves should come out of deterministic code, not out of a language model. What that split looks like in practice is covered in our article on integrating AI into business software.

If you mainly see this as an annual manual chore, it is worth looking at improving business processes with AI. And if you are looking for a partner to build such a pipeline, our guide on choosing a software agency will get you started.