What the USDT Detour Costs in Tax

Anyone buying crypto assets in Germany brings euros to the table. Whether an exchange also runs a euro order book for them, though, is decided by the venue’s product policy rather than by what the investor would prefer. On August 17, 2026 we counted how many of the tradable assets at four exchanges available in Europe actually have a euro pair. The result ranges from full coverage to one venue where only every twelfth asset is quoted in euros.

The difference is not a matter of taste. Where the euro pair is missing, the route to the token you want runs through an intermediate step, and that step is a separate transaction for tax purposes. One purchase becomes two trades, the second of which can fall under private disposal transactions in section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on August 17, 2026.

Euro Trading Pair or Detour: What Technically Happens When You Buy

A trading pair consists of a base asset and a quote currency. In the pair SOL/EUR, Solana is the base asset and the euro is the quote currency: you hand over euros and receive Solana, in a single transaction, at a single price. Where that pair does not exist, the only way to obtain the token through the order book on that exchange is to acquire something else first that is accepted there as a quote currency. As a rule that means the US dollar or a dollar-denominated stablecoin such as USDT or USDC.

A single transaction thereby turns into a chain. First you exchange euros for the intermediate asset, then the intermediate asset for the target token. On the way out the same chain runs in reverse. Each of these steps has its own price, its own trading fee and, easily overlooked, its own character for tax purposes.

The August 17, 2026 Survey: 2,629 Trading Pairs Across Four Venues

We pulled the public market directories of four exchanges that serve German customers or are reachable for them: Bitvavo, Kraken, Bitstamp and Coinbase Exchange. All four interfaces responded with HTTP 200. We evaluated only pairs that were actively tradable at the time of retrieval; suspended, discontinued or merely announced markets are not included. From the pairs we derived the set of base assets per venue and checked for how many of them at least one euro order book exists. Pure currency pairs, where a fiat currency is itself the base asset, were stripped out, since they would otherwise depress the ratio artificially.

In total the analysis covers 2,629 active trading pairs and 821 distinct base assets. The method is deliberately plain and reproducible by anyone calling the same addresses. What it measures, however, is only what appears in the order books. Whatever an exchange additionally offers through a buy or convert interface does not show up there, and we return to that point in detail below.

Coinbase Exchange: 34 of 399 Assets Have a Euro Pair

The clearest finding of the survey concerns Coinbase Exchange, the provider’s order book venue. There, 517 pairs were active across 399 base assets. A euro order book existed for 34 of them, that is 8.5 percent. The US dollar dominates with 397 pairs; 352 of the 399 assets had no quote currency at all other than the dollar.

What could be traded in euros there was essentially the large, long-established assets, among them Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, Cardano, Chainlink, Litecoin and Dogecoin. Left without a euro pair, by contrast, were numerous assets that do turn up in German portfolios: Sui, Aptos, Arbitrum, Optimism, Near, Hedera, Toncoin, Render, Injective, Celestia, Sei, Ondo, Ethena and Lido were all among the 365 assets without a euro order book on the reference date.

Kraken, Bitstamp and Bitvavo: How Far Euro Coverage Diverges

At the other end of the scale sits Bitvavo. The venue listed 440 active pairs, 429 of them against the euro and eleven against USDC. All 428 base assets evaluated therefore had a euro order book, putting coverage at 100 percent. That is no accident but the expression of a structure tailored to the European market.

Bitstamp came to 298 active pairs and 137 base assets, of which 132 were quoted in euros, or 96.4 percent. The five exceptions are special cases: two dollar stablecoins, a staking derivative on ether, plus Zcash and ZKsync.

Kraken ran by far the broadest market with 1,374 pairs. Of 621 base assets, 519 had a euro order book, which is 83.6 percent. The 102 assets without a euro pair are almost without exception young or very small tokens; among the better-known names were Decred, Casper, OKB, Coin98, Wemix and several liquid staking tokens on ether. Anyone guided by size when selecting will rarely run into the gap at this exchange. Which venues are authorised in Europe at all is a separate question, one our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges deals with.

167 of 821 Assets Have No Euro Pair at Any of the Four Venues

Lay the four venues on top of one another and 821 distinct base assets emerge. For 654 of them a euro order book existed at at least one of the four exchanges. For 167 assets, a good fifth, we found no euro pair at any of the four addresses.

That figure is the most practically important of the whole survey, because it describes the way out and its limit at the same time. At an individual venue the gap can be closed by switching. With these 167 assets, switching within our test field does not help: anyone wanting to buy them through an order book cannot get past the intermediate step.

Regulated crypto exchanges compared

What the Order Book Finding Does Not Say About the Buy Interface

A qualification belongs here, without which the figures would be misread. We counted order books. Almost all large providers also operate a simplified buy interface, often called “instant buy” or “convert”, through which assets without a euro pair can be acquired for euros at the click of a button. That applies expressly to Coinbase as well, where the app shows German customers euro amounts even though the order book behind it quotes predominantly in dollars.

The difference lies in what happens at that click and how much of it you see. In the order book you see supply, demand and your fee separately. In the instant buy interface you are quoted a single final price with the conversion and the provider’s margin already baked in. Whether the provider routes internally through the dollar, and how it books that, is not visible from outside. Our survey therefore does not say you cannot buy these assets in euros. The finding is that no openly quoted euro market exists for them at these venues.

Crypto for Crypto Is a Disposal: What Section 23 EStG Makes of the Detour

For tax purposes the German tax authorities treat the exchange of one crypto asset for another as a disposal of the asset given up and an acquisition of the one received. That is the core of where the chain from the first section can become expensive. The step from euros into the intermediate asset is a pure acquisition and triggers nothing in itself. The second step, from the intermediate asset into the target token, is by contrast a disposal of the intermediate asset.

Buy directly through a euro pair and this intermediate step never arises. You have one acquisition, one acquisition date and one acquisition price in euros.ll of that before you have held your actual target token for even a day. On the way out the same thing repeats in mirror image

The Holding Period Starts From Scratch on the Intermediate Token

The one-year rule applies to private disposal transactions: where more than twelve months lie between acquisition and disposal, the gain remains tax-free. That period attaches to the individual asset, not to the portfolio and not to the investment idea.

For the intermediate asset that means a holding period of its own, usually a very short one. Exchange euros for USDT today and USDT for the target token two minutes later, and you have held the stablecoin for two minutes. A gain out of those two minutes is a gain within the one-year period and therefore taxable in principle. That the amounts are small changes nothing about the mechanics, only about the size.

USDT Is a Dollar Asset: Why You Are Also Betting on the Exchange Rate

Here is the point most often overlooked in practice. USDT and USDC are pegged to the US dollar, not to the euro. Both therefore stay stable against the dollar. For you, as an investor calculating in euros, a dollar stablecoin is accordingly not a resting asset but a foreign currency position.

The taxable gain is determined in euros, from the difference between the acquisition costs in euros and the disposal proceeds in euros. If the exchange rate moves between your two steps, a gain or a loss arises from exactly that, even though the stablecoin stood unchanged at one dollar against the dollar. On a conversion lasting seconds this carries no weight. Leave the intermediate asset sitting for days or weeks, however, perhaps while waiting for an entry price, and you carry that movement in full.

2.72 Percent Range: What the ECB Reference Rate Did in Three Months

How large that movement can be is readable from an official series. We pulled the euro reference rates of the European Central Bank for the past 90 days, 65 banking days from May 18 to August 14, 2026. The euro’s reference rate against the US dollar moved between 1.1340 and 1.1649 in that period; on August 14 it stood at 1.1567. The span between the lowest and the highest value comes to 2.72 percent.

Anyone parking capital in a dollar stablecoin over that period therefore picked up a movement of that order, in one direction or the other, depending on when they went in and out. That is not a forecast for the coming months and cannot be extrapolated; it is the measured range of a quarter that has ended. The figure does put the proportions in perspective, though: against many trading fees, which sit in the fractions of a percent, the exchange rate is the larger item.

Crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers compared

The 1,000 Euro Threshold and Documentation: Why Many Small Swaps Become a Nuisance

An exemption threshold of 1,000 euros per calendar year applies to private disposal transactions. Where the sum of all gains from such trades stays below it, no tax is due. Exceed it and the entire amount is taxable, not merely the excess. That makes the many small intermediate steps less of a tax problem than a bookkeeping problem: they all count, and you have to know them in order to know where you stand at all.

In practice this means every detour generates two additional lines in your records, with date, time, quantity and euro equivalent. On a savings plan executing monthly, that comes to two dozen additional transactions over a year for a single position. Portfolio and tax tools that fetch the history directly from the exchange are made for exactly this. Anyone working without such a tool has all the more reason to avoid the detour.

Convert Function and Instant Buy: Why the Convenient Route Hides the Spread

That leaves the question of whether the detour through the instant buy interface is not simply the more convenient solution. More convenient it is; cheaper it rarely is. With a single final price there is no way to separate out which share falls to the market rate and which to the margin. In the order book, by contrast, you see the spread and the stated fee separately and can compare both with other venues.

That the visible price components at crypto exchanges cover only part of the costs anyway is something we measured elsewhere on August 17, 2026: in our analysis of withdrawal fees against the actual network fee, the difference for Bitcoin ran to eight to sixteen times. Anyone wanting to know the total cost of a position has to look at the trading route, the conversion steps and the withdrawal together.

Limits of This Analysis: What We Did Not Examine

The survey is a snapshot from a single point in time. Exchanges list and strike pairs continuously; today’s ratios may look different in a month. We do not have a time series.

Four venues are not the market. We examined Bitvavo, Kraken, Bitstamp and Coinbase Exchange because their market directories are open and retrievable without registration. Providers that are equally obvious choices for German investors are missing for technical reasons: the public retrieval at Binance was refused to us with HTTP 451, at Bitpanda with HTTP 401 and at Bison with HTTP 403. Our analysis says nothing about their euro coverage.

Nor did we measure trading fees, the liquidity in the individual euro order books or the execution prices actually achieved. An existing euro pair is no evidence that sufficient volume sits there; a thin euro order book can in an individual case execute worse than the detour. At no point did we place an order. And we are not tax advisers: the tax treatment set out in this text reflects the general framework and is no substitute for advice on an individual case.

Checking Euro Trading Pairs: What to Take Away

1. Check before buying whether your asset has a euro order book. Every exchange’s market overview shows the available pairs. Find only dollar or stablecoin pairs and you know in advance that an intermediate step is coming. Which authorised providers treat the euro as the rule rather than the exception is shown by the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Hold the intermediate asset for as short a time as possible. Where the detour cannot be avoided, run both steps immediately one after the other. The longer the dollar stablecoin sits, the more exchange rate movement you carry into a taxable transaction you never meant to enter. If you are looking for a new venue anyway, the crypto exchange comparison helps with the shortlist.
3. Record every intermediate step immediately. Date, time, quantity and euro equivalent belong on file for both steps, not first in the following year. A tool that pulls the history straight from the exchange takes that off your hands; the selection is set out in the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

(As of August 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primaryI

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Source: cryptoticker.io