If you hold bitcoin on two exchanges and in a wallet of your own, and then sell part of it, you need to know which of your tranches counts as sold. That is what decides whether the sale stays tax-free. The answer goes by the name of crypto FIFO, and in Germany it works differently from what most holders expect: the Federal Ministry of Finance does not calculate across your total holdings but separately for each wallet and each exchange account. A sale on account A never reaches the older coins in wallet B, however long they have been sitting there.
That separation decides more in the autumn of 2026 than it did in earlier years. Providers will report to the Federal Central Tax Office under the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act for the current year for the first time, each one on its own. And under the draft bill on the holding period, 31 December 2026 is to become the line between protected legacy holdings and taxable new holdings. Which tranche sits in which pot has stopped being an academic question.
What FIFO means for crypto, and why individual identification comes first
FIFO stands for "first in, first out": the units bought first count as the units sold first. The term describes an assumed order of...
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