Cryptocurrencies: Accounting Treatment and Tax Rules

On 6 July 2026, the Italian Revenue Agency and the Italian Accounting Standards Board (OIC) published a joint technical note dedicated to cryptocurrencies held by companies: a guidance document that, for the first time, provides an organised and coordinated overview of their accounting and tax treatment.

More and more companies are holding Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, but Italian accounting standards have never provided specific rules for these assets. The new document fills this gap by clarifying, in a coordinated manner, both how cryptocurrencies should be recognised in financial statements and how they should be treated for tax purposes.

Accounting treatment

In the absence of a specific accounting rule, the document clarifies that cryptocurrencies should be treated as intangible assets: they have no physical substance, they do not grant the right to receive a predetermined amount of money, and they can be sold individually. Therefore, their recognition in the financial statements depends on the purpose for which the company intends to use them.

If cryptocurrencies are intended to remain permanently within the company’s assets, they must be recognised as fixed assets at their purchase cost. They are not subject to amortisation – as is the case, for example, with land or works of art – but they are subject to impairment if their market value falls permanently below the carrying amount recorded in the financial statements.

If, on the other hand, they are purchased for resale as part of the company’s ordinary business activity, they must be classified as inventories and measured at year-end at the lower of purchase cost and market value.

Tax treatment

From a tax perspective, the key rule is Article 110, paragraph 3-bis, of the Italian Consolidated Income Tax Act (TUIR), introduced by the 2023 Budget Law: changes in the value of crypto-assets recorded at year-end have no impact on business income, either for IRES or IRAP purposes, regardless of their accounting classification. In practice, companies are taxed on a cash basis: capital gains or losses become relevant for tax purposes only when cryptocurrencies are actually sold or exchanged, and they are calculated as the difference between the proceeds received and the purchase cost.

This rule applies regardless of the accounting classification chosen. If cryptocurrencies are recorded as fixed assets, impairment losses are never tax deductible. If they are classified as inventories, even the ordinary inventory valuation adjustments that would normally affect taxable income are irrelevant: the Italian Revenue Agency confirmed this principle in its ruling No. 78/2025, stating that the tax neutrality provided by the law is complete. In both cases, companies must therefore make the appropriate tax adjustments in their income tax return to neutralise year-end valuation effects, so that taxable income arises only when the cryptocurrencies are disposed of.

Summary

With this joint intervention, the Italian Revenue Agency and the OIC finally provide a clear and coordinated framework for an increasingly widespread phenomenon: from an accounting perspective, classification depends on the economic purpose of the cryptocurrencies; from a tax perspective, only the moment of their actual disposal matters, while year-end value fluctuations remain completely irrelevant.