Crypto
Crypto in PIT-38: no FIFO, no time limit, and swaps that are not income
Section E/F runs on entirely different rules from shares. Computing crypto the way you compute securities overstates the tax — sometimes several times over.
What the statute says
- Cost is the sum of the year’s purchases
- Art. 22 ust. 14-16 ustawy o PIT. EVERY documented expense on acquiring virtual currency that year counts — including for coins you never sold.
- Excess cost carries forward with no time limit
- Costs not deducted this year enter next year’s costs. No five years, no half-cap — unlike a loss on shares.
- A coin-to-coin swap is neutral
- Art. 12 ust. 4g: exchanging one virtual currency for another creates neither income nor cost. Tax arises on exit into money, goods or services.
- Stablecoins are virtual currencies too
- USDT and USDC fall under art. 5a pkt 33a. Buying USDC for złoty is an acquisition of virtual currency, not a “cash deposit”.
How we compute it
- Line 37 is the sum of all purchases in the year
- Not only those that happened to be sold. Matching purchases to sales by FIFO simply contradicts the provision here.
- Section E/F separate from C/D
- A crypto loss does not reduce a gain on shares, and a share loss does not reduce crypto income — art. 30b ust. 5a.
- Swaps are filtered out before computing
- Swap rows are recognised by their type, not by their description. Counted as income they would inflate it by the entire volume traded between coins.
Where people get it wrong
- A December purchase left out because “it isn’t sold yet”
- The costliest mistake and the most logical-sounding. An 8 900 zł purchase in December either lowers this year’s base or carries to next year — left out, it raises the tax from zero to several hundred złoty.
- Every swap counted as a sale
- Active exchange trading produces hundreds of swaps. Counted as income they yield a figure many times larger than anything that ever reached a bank account.
- A transfer between your own wallets taken for a disposal
- Sending coins from an exchange to your own wallet is not a sale. Without those rows, though, there is no trace of where the later-sold coins came from.
- Crypto filed in section C/D
- It looks like an investment and is often booked with shares. It is a separate section under separate rules — mixed together, both halves of the return break.
Run this once
claude mcp add --transport http taxroam https://taxroam.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer $TAXROAM_KEY"Brokers where this comes up
Questions about crypto
I bought and sold nothing. Do I file PIT-38?
It is worth it. A purchase alone creates no tax, but a declared cost carries forward with no time limit. An undeclared one does not.
I swapped BTC for ETH hundreds of times. Must all that be reported?
Not as income. Swapping one virtual currency for another is neutral, so it never enters section E.
I have a crypto loss and a gain on shares. Can I offset them?
No. They are two separate sources — art. 30b ust. 5a keeps them apart.