How should earnings on cryptocurrency be taxed

Assuming you are asking about Greece, the cleanest answer is this:

Crypto earnings are taxable, but Greece still does not appear to have a fully explicit, crypto-specific income-tax line in the published AADE materials. AADE’s published income categories remain: employment, business income, capital income, and capital gains. On the same AADE page, business income is taxed with the ordinary progressive scale 9% / 22% / 28% / 36% / 44%, while capital gains are taxed at 15%. AADE’s examples of capital gains mention shares, partnership interests, government/corporate bonds and derivatives, not cryptoassets.

So, in practice, the working tax treatment in Greece is usually analyzed as follows:

• Occasional investor / private individual: the safer analytical route is usually to treat realized profit as capital-gain-type income, i.e. profit on disposal, with the 15% capital gains rate as the closest published category. Because AADE’s own examples do not expressly include crypto, this remains a reasoned position, not a perfectly codified crypto rule.

• Frequent, organized, business-like activity: if the activity looks like trading business rather than passive investing, the risk shifts toward business income treatment, which would follow the ordinary income scale for individuals.

• Company / legal entity: where crypto gains are earned through a company, they would generally fall into the company’s taxable profits; AADE’s current guide states the standard corporate income tax rate is 22%.

From a compliance standpoint, the environment is tightening: Greece enacted Law 5273/2026 on automatic exchange of crypto-asset information, and the reporting/due-diligence part of that framework applies from 1 January 2026. That is a reporting law, not a dedicated crypto tax-rate law, but it clearly increases transparency for crypto holdings and transactions.

Practically, I would advise this approach in Greece:
Keep a full audit file with purchase date, sale date, quantity, wallet/exchange records, acquisition cost, disposal proceeds, and fees. Compute gain only on realized disposals under the capital-gains approach, and be more cautious where there is systematic trading, mining, staking/yield, or crypto received as consideration for services, because those fact patterns are more exposed to reclassification as business/ordinary income.

Example:
You buy BTC for €10,000 and later sell it for €16,000, paying €200 total fees.
Taxable gain = €16,000 – €10,000 – €200 = €5,800.
Under the capital-gains approach, tax would be 15% × €5,800 = €870. This is the practical calculation many advisers would model, but again, the point of uncertainty is that AADE has not published a fully bespoke crypto tax article in the materials cited above.

If you want, I can turn this into a Greece-specific memo with:
the likely declaration treatment for a natural person,
the treatment for an ΙΚΕ/ΑΕ, and
a worked template for calculating taxable crypto gains transaction by transaction.