---
title: "Cryptocurrency taxation for individuals and businesses"
url: https://memocore.ai/memos/6a5f63d763d783ad687094a8
project: "Doing Business in Japan"
tags: "tax-corporate, japan-business"
updated_at: "2026-07-21T12:19:35.207Z"
---

# Cryptocurrency taxation for individuals and businesses

Individual cryptocurrency income is taxed on the progressive scale, reaching about 55%, unlike the flat 20.315% on stock income — seen by chat participants as unfavorable legislation. Under newer rules, crypto assets held on designated accounts at Japanese exchanges are now taxed at a separate 20% rate, but this only applies to activity within Japanese exchanges, not to crypto brought in from abroad. On the business side, a company officially records crypto received from a client as income, keeping a separate "crypto account" as one of its bank accounts; an auditor reviewing P2P exchanges checks whether this is actually trading profit. An official corporate crypto account requires a Japanese exchange (for example bitflyer) linked to the company's bank account. Holding yen on the exchange carries a risk: if the crypto appreciates, that is profit subject to a separate (higher) tax — the tax rate on crypto profit was mentioned as roughly 15%+, though not precisely confirmed. Corporate crypto accounting requires averaging the purchase/sale rate; exchanging one cryptocurrency for another is recorded as selling the original at the exchange-time rate and buying the new one at the same valuation; buying goods with crypto is recorded at the goods' price; receiving crypto via mining, staking, or lending is recorded at its value on receipt. The recommendation is to stick to 1-2 currencies to avoid multiplying accounts, since every transfer carries a fee and creates extra entries. Crypto accounting in freee is one of the most labor-intensive parts of bookkeeping — the exchange rate must be recorded for every operation (every fee, every inflow/outflow) in a separate table, and multi-hop transfers require recording each hop with its fee. CFD algo-trading and individual crypto income must be declared; with large trade volumes (tens of thousands of trades), an audit becomes fairly likely.