The previous article dealt with contracts for difference, an instrument where nothing is acquired at all and where the tax treatment is that of a derivative transaction. This article is about the opposite case, and none of it applies to CFDs.
A spot trade means you buy the asset at the current price and own it from settlement onwards. Three groups fall under that heading, and clients routinely hold all three side by side in a single app: crypto-assets, ETPs (that is ETFs, ETCs and ETNs) and shares. Visually they are three tabs. For tax purposes they are two distinct regimes and one shared rule that generates most of the errors.
That rule is that the taxable event is not triggered by withdrawing money to a bank account. It is triggered the moment you dispose of the asset, whether for euros, for another asset or for goods.
Two tax regimes inside one app
For an individual who is not carrying on a business, income from the sale of a crypto-asset is other income under section 8(1)(t) of the Income Tax Act. Income from the transfer of a share or an ETP is income from the transfer of a security under section 8(1)(e). An ETN is a debt security, so it belongs in the second category even though it tracks the price of bitcoin. We set out the differences between ETFs, ETCs and ETNs in a separate article.
This classification decides everything that follows, because the exemptions attach to the category of income and not to the underlying asset. Directly held bitcoin and a bitcoin ETP can therefore show an identical chart and produce a completely different tax outcome.
An exchange is a sale
For crypto-assets the statute says so explicitly. Under section 2(ai), a sale of a crypto-asset means exchanging it for property, exchanging it for another crypto-asset, exchanging it for a service, or transferring it for consideration. Swapping bitcoin for ether is therefore a sale. Buying a laptop with bitcoin is a sale. So is moving into a stablecoin, even though the app presents it as stepping into cash within the account.
Income in that case is measured at the fair value of the crypto-asset being exchanged on the day of the exchange under section 17(43), meaning its market price in euros at the time of the trade. Not what you once paid for the coin, and not what later reaches your bank account.
With securities the mechanics differ and the result is similar. Switching one ETP for another is not a single operation but a sale followed by a purchase. The sale is income from the transfer of a security under section 8(1)(e), regardless of the fact that the proceeds stayed in the same account and were immediately spent on something else. The same applies when moving from one share to another. Mergers, amalgamations and share exchanges arising on corporate reorganisations are a separate chapter with rules of their own, and this general conclusion cannot be carried across to them without a closer look.
Rebalancing a portfolio is therefore a sequence of taxable disposals even when the euro balance of the account looks unchanged all year. The app does not present it that way because it displays the value of your holdings, not your taxable events.
The one-year test only applies on one side
For securities there is an exemption under section 9(1)(k), and it rests on two conditions rather than one. More than a year must pass between acquiring the security and selling it, and more than a year must also pass between its admission to trading on a regulated market and that same sale. The second condition is the one most often overlooked, and it bites precisely on recent listings, including ETPs that reached an exchange only lately. The exemption also does not reach securities held as business assets.
Where the test fails, the 500 euro exemption under section 9(1)(i) comes into play, covering income under section 8(1)(d) to (f).
For crypto-assets no holding period test exists in any form. Not after a year, not after five. The 500 euro exemption does not reach paragraph (t) either, because it is drafted for paragraphs (d) to (f). Every sale is taxable irrespective of how long the asset was held.
The 2026 rates run in four bands: 19 % up to 43,983.32 €, 25 % up to 60,349.21 €, 30 % up to 75,010.32 € and 35 % above that. On top sits a 16 % health insurance contribution, which the insurer assesses in the annual reconciliation. At higher amounts the combined burden on directly held crypto approaches 51 %. The same gain on an ETP that has cleared both one-year conditions is zero.
Crypto exchange desks and the spread nobody reports
Now that the MiCA transition period has ended, crypto-asset services may only be provided by a licensed entity. In July 2026 Národná banka Slovenska stated that six licensed providers operate on the Slovak market and that 312 hold authorisation across the union. An exchange desk or ATM operator falls into that category, and the licence can be checked in the ESMA register. We covered the end of the transition period in the MiCA article.
Buying at an exchange desk is neutral for tax purposes and creates no obligation by itself. It does fix the acquisition cost, the figure that will reduce your tax base a year or five years later. This is where a quiet loss arises: the desk's rate contains a spread that is never itemised as a fee because it is built into the price. The full amount paid enters the acquisition cost, which is correct, but it means your real entry price is higher than the exchange quote at that moment suggests.
Selling at a desk or an ATM, by contrast, is a disposal like any other. The supporting document tends to be a paper slip and nothing else. No such machine issues an annual statement. Photograph the receipt on the day of the trade and note the date, the quantity, the amount in euros, the rate applied, the address and the operator. Without that the acquisition cost cannot be evidenced, and an unevidenced acquisition cost means being taxed on gross proceeds.
Vexl and trades made off-platform
Vexl, built by SatoshiLabs, is neither an exchange nor a dealer. It is an app that works as a private notice board within the circle of your contacts and their contacts. It holds no funds, provides no escrow, and the trade itself happens outside the app, often in cash at an in-person meeting. The app deliberately stores no personal data and no message content.
One practical consequence follows. There is no export, no statement and no history from which anything could be reconstructed afterwards. The difficulty here does not arise from user carelessness but from the fact that a system built on not retaining data has nothing from which to generate a record.
The tax obligation is nonetheless identical to the one arising on an exchange. Selling bitcoin for cash is a transfer for consideration under section 2(ai) and income under section 8(1)(t). How the income is classified does not depend on where the trade took place.
Records therefore have to be kept at the time of the trade rather than after it. Date, quantity, agreed rate, value in euros, method of settlement. A screenshot of the offer and the network transaction identifier both help. A bank transfer leaves a trace on the statement, cash does not. Attention belongs above all on the buying side, because that is the figure that will reduce the tax base years later.
From 2026 the tax administration sees part of the flow
With effect from 1 January 2026 Slovakia transposed the DAC 8 directive. Licensed crypto-asset service providers keep records on their users and report identification details, tax residence and transaction data. The first report is due by 31 May 2027 for the 2026 period. Exchange transactions and transfers are both reportable, so swapping one crypto-asset for another is a reportable item even though no euros moved.
What stays out of reach is a trade between two individuals, movement within your own wallet, and an unlicensed provider outside the union. That is a gap in reporting rather than in taxation. The obligation to declare income does not depend on whether anyone reports it.
An asymmetry worth planning around follows from this: part of your history will arrive at the tax administration in structured form and can be compared against your return, while the rest exists only where you stored it yourself.
A worked example
A taxpayer bought half a bitcoin in March 2024 for 22,000 €. In May 2026 they exchanged it for ether, when the amount being exchanged had a market value of 44,000 €. Income is 44,000 €, the expense is 22,000 € and the tax base is 22,000 €. Nothing reached the bank account.
Tax in the first band, 19 %, comes to 4,180 €. The health contribution of 16 % comes to 3,520 €. Together 7,700 €, which is 35 % of the gain. The health contribution is itself a deductible expense under section 8, but only in the year it is actually paid, which is normally the year after the annual reconciliation. The calculation above therefore works deliberately with the gross base, and the real burden is spread over time. The tax falls due at a point when the taxpayer holds ether rather than euros, so part of it will have to be sold to settle the bill. That sale is another taxable event.
The same taxpayer also bought an ETP in March 2024, admitted to its exchange back in 2021, and sold it in May 2026 at a gain of 10,000 €. Both one-year conditions are met, so this income is exempt in full. The same holding period, the same underlying, a different outcome.
What to record
The Act does not prescribe a form of record keeping, but it does require that your figures can be evidenced. For every disposal you need the date, what left the position and what came in, the quantity, the value in euros at the time of the trade, the source of the rate, any fees and the name of the platform. For securities two further dates matter: when you acquired the paper and when it was admitted to trading on a regulated market.
Download your exports during the year rather than after it. Once an account is closed or a provider leaves the market, they tend to be unavailable. The acquisition cost methodology under section 25b, on which the whole calculation rests, is covered in the article on crypto taxation in Slovakia.
The duty to file a return is also assessed on total taxable income rather than on profit. For 2026 the threshold is 2,983.37 €. With crypto-assets income arises on every exchange at full market value, so a handful of moves between coins will clear that threshold even for someone who finished the year flat.
This article is a general overview, not individual tax advice, and it is neither an investment nor a product recommendation. Processing exchange and wallet exports, reconstructing acquisition costs and splitting income between section 8(1)(t) and section 8(1)(e) are routine parts of the work kryptotax.sk does for clients. 🇸🇰