South Korea's Finance Ministry meets Upbit, Bithumb and DAXA as lawmakers push the 22% tax to 2029

South Korea's Ministry of Economy and Finance meets major crypto exchanges on Tuesday, October 20, days after Democratic Party lawmaker Park Min-gyu introduced a bill that would push the start date of the country's 22% virtual-asset tax from January 2027 to January 2029, per Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing.

The attendees

Cointelegraph names the exchange side of the table:

• Upbit
• Bithumb
• Coinone
• DigitalX
• Gopax
• DAXA (Digital Asset Exchange Alliance) executives

Korbit, DAXA's fifth member, is not named in the Cointelegraph writeup.

The bill

Park Min-gyu's proposal rewrites the trigger for the tax:

• Taxation would begin on January 1 of the second year after South Korea begins sharing data under the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF).
• Korea is on track to begin CARF data sharing in 2027, which under Park's bill moves the tax start date to January 2029.
• The rate stays at 22% (20% national + 2% local) on virtual-asset gains above the 2.5 million won exemption threshold.

The proposal is Park's answer to the exchange industry's long-running argument that the National Tax Service lacks the tooling to track decentralized exchange, peer-to-peer, and DeFi activity. Tying the start to CARF data-sharing ties it to a working cross-border reporting pipeline.

Context — the deferral record

The 22% tax has already been deferred three times:

Rep. Kim Sang-hoon (People Power Party) filed a separate amendment on August 28 proposing the same 2029 target. A public petition for a two-year deferral crossed ~51,000 signatures by mid-September, enough to require a legislative review by the Strategy and Finance Committee.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance's own 2026 tax reform bill, submitted earlier this year, omitted any further deferral — the ministry's working position has been that the January 2027 start date holds. Tuesday's meeting is the exchanges' first formal shot at reopening that door.

What's at stake for the exchanges

DAXA members handle the bulk of won-denominated crypto flow. Three operational issues sit on top of the tax question itself:

• Capital-gains calculation on cross-exchange and cross-chain transfers. The current regulatory draft puts reporting weight on the exchange, not the taxpayer.
• DeFi and self-custody flows. The NTS has no mechanism today to see on-chain gains that never touch a Korean exchange.
• Compliance cost. DAXA has previously said each member faces back-office retooling in the low tens of millions of USD to meet the January 2027 reporting cutoff.

What to watch

1. The ministry's post-meeting statement. Any signal that the ministry is open to tying the tax to CARF timing would be a material shift from its 2026 tax reform position.
2. The National Assembly Strategy and Finance Committee's treatment of the Park and Kim bills. Both target 2029; the committee could consolidate.
3. The 51,000-signature petition's committee review. Procedurally required, but the committee can defer indefinitely.
4. CARF timing itself. If Korea's 2027 CARF implementation slips, the Park bill's 2029 target slips with it — automatically.

Context

Korea has been the test case in Asia for how to apply ordinary capital-gains logic to crypto. The repeated deferrals are the mirror image of the US's three-year 1099-DA phase-in and the EU's DAC8 reporting start in 2026 — jurisdictions moving at roughly the same pace, with Korea now explicitly tying its own schedule to the OECD rail that Europe and the UK are also wiring up. The 22% rate itself has not been contested in the current legislative push; only the start date is in play.