Anyone who bought into crypto assets twelve months ago is sitting on a paper loss almost everywhere today. On September 9, 2026 we compared the daily closing prices of ten major crypto assets
Anyone who bought into crypto assets twelve months ago is sitting on a paper loss almost everywhere today. On September 9, 2026 we compared the daily closing prices of ten major crypto assets against their level exactly one year earlier: nine of the ten trade lower, many of them sharply. For tax purposes this is the decisive moment, because in Germany a loss from a private disposal is only worth something when no more than one year lies between purchase and sale. Anyone who lets the deadline pass keeps the coin and loses the option of ever offsetting that loss against a gain.
The comparison is deliberately blunt. It sets the daily close of September 9, 2025 against the price level of September 9, 2026, which is exactly the day the one-year holding period expires for a purchase made back then.
Bitcoin stood at $111,541 a year ago and trades at around $78,925 today. That is 29.2 percent less. Ethereum falls harder still, from $4,308.23 to $2,490.88, a decline of 42.2 percent. XRP lost 51.8 percent, Solana 52.3 percent, Chainlink 46.9 percent, Dogecoin 62.5 percent, Avalanche 69.5 percent and Cardano 74.8 percent. Only two assets in the field stand higher than a year ago: Tron with a gain of 1.2 percent and Zcash, which moved from $48.22 to $1,235.92.
These figures say nothing about where prices are heading. For your tax file they say a great deal. If you bought in the autumn of 2025 and are still holding today, your portfolio very probably contains a loss whose usability for tax purposes is running out in these very days.
cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 9, 2026. The method in one sentence: for ten widely traded crypto assets, selected by availability on European venues and not as an exact top-ten list by market capitalisation, we pulled 721 daily candles against the US dollar each from the public price interface of the Kraken exchange, took from them the closing price of September 9, 2025 and the current level of September 9, 2026, and calculated the change ourselves.
Ten price pairs with a combined 7,210 daily candles were checked. All ten requests returned HTTP code 200. As a cross-check we pulled the same price level at 09:57 UTC from a second, independent market data service: there Bitcoin stood at $78,935 against $78,925 from the candle series, Ethereum at $2,491.95 against $2,490.88, XRP at $1.42 against $1.4202. The deviations move in the per-mille range and stem from the fact that the current day's candle has not yet closed. We present the values as what they are: a snapshot from the morning of September 9, 2026.
Two assets in the field deserve a note of their own. Zcash is the only major asset with a multiplying trajectory over the twelve months, which lets its percentage figure dominate the picture; for the tax question of this article it is the counter-case, because a gain arose there and no loss. Tron sits so close to the zero line at 1.2 percent that for a single purchase the sign depends on the price of the specific purchase day and not on the year-on-year comparison.
Held as private assets, crypto assets count among the other economic goods within the meaning of Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. Paragraph 1 sentence 1 number 2 states the condition without any leeway: a private disposal exists when the period between acquisition and disposal is not more than one year.
Private disposal in one sentence: a sale or a swap out of private assets that tax law captures at all, because it takes place within the statutory deadline. Everything outside that deadline does not exist for tax purposes, and that is precisely the point most investors know in one direction only.
The one-year holding period is known as a benefit: hold for longer than twelve months and you sell tax-free. The same mechanism applies to losses in mirror image. A sale after the deadline has expired is not a taxable event, so no loss arises from it that you could offset against anything. The economic damage remains, the tax effect falls away.
For a purchase made in September 2025 this means the window is open now and closes on the anniversary of that individual purchase. That single day is what counts; neither the end of the month nor the turn of the year plays any role.
Two positions in the same portfolio can be treated entirely differently for tax purposes when their purchase dates lie apart. The check needs three figures per position, and all three sit in your transaction history: the acquisition date, the acquisition cost in euros and today's value. If today's value is below the acquisition cost and the acquisition date is less than twelve months back, the position is still movable for tax purposes. If the purchase goes back further, there is no need to calculate anything at all.
Anyone with more than a handful of purchases quickly reaches the limits of a spreadsheet. The common tax and portfolio tools read in the history from exchanges and wallets and assign an acquisition date to every position; an overview of the providers sits in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers. What matters is less the range of features than the question of whether the tool maps the consumption order cleanly, which is the subject of the next section.
Anyone who has bought again and again over months actually holds a series of individual acquisitions with different dates and prices, even where the exchange shows only a single line for them. On a sale the question therefore arises which of those acquisitions is being sold. Whether a loss that matters for tax purposes arises at all depends on the answer.
A precision that many guides skip is worth having here. The text of the law itself prescribes the first in, first out order expressly only for foreign currency amounts, in Section 23 paragraph 1 sentence 1 number 2 sentence 3. For crypto assets the consumption order follows from the administrative position: in its circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets of March 6, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance gives priority to individual allocation and permits the FIFO method where the individual units cannot be attributed.
FIFO in one sentence: on a sale, the units acquired first count as the units disposed of first. In practice that means a sale clears out your oldest purchases first, and where the entry lies more than twelve months back those are often exactly the ones that have grown out of the deadline. Anyone who wants to lift the loss from the more recent purchases therefore has to be able to document the allocation cleanly. How FIFO compares with the alternative is something we took apart in our article on FIFO and LIFO for crypto in Germany.
Suppose you realise the loss in time. Then comes the second hurdle, and it is the genuinely painful one. Sentence 7 of the third paragraph says in so many words that losses may be offset only up to the amount of the gain the taxpayer achieved from private disposals in the same calendar year, and that they may not be deducted under Section 10d.
In plain terms: a crypto loss reduces neither your salary nor your investment income from shares, funds or interest. It works exclusively against gains from private disposals, and alongside crypto assets those include gold, collectibles or foreign currency transactions within the one-year period. Anyone without such a gain in 2026 offsets nothing this year.
The loss is still not gone. Sentence 8 opens two routes: the loss reduces gains from private disposals of the immediately preceding assessment period, a carry-back into the previous year, or it is carried forward into the following years and waits there for the next gain of the same kind. The tax office determines the remaining amount separately.
The carry-back meets a special starting position. Prices in the autumn of 2025 stood at a markedly higher level than today, with Bitcoin alone 41 percent above the current level. Anyone who sold at a gain in that phase and taxed the gain in the 2025 tax return holds exactly the counter-position against which a loss realised in 2026 can run.
With the anniversary of the purchase the window closes in which a loss is still worth anything for tax purposes. Sentence 5 of the third paragraph leaves gains tax-free where the total gain achieved from private disposals in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. This is an exemption threshold and no allowance: at a total gain of 999 euros everything stays tax-free, at 1,000 euros the full amount becomes taxable.
An uncomfortable consequence follows for the loss question. If your total gain from private disposals this year sits below the threshold anyway, an additionally realised loss brings you nothing for tax purposes in the current year, because you had nothing to tax. Its value then lies solely in the carry-back or the carry-forward. Anyone realising the loss only to lower a figure in the return may have paid trading fees and a spread and received nothing for them.
The same section contains a sentence that regularly causes uncertainty. Sentence 4 extends the period to ten years for economic goods from whose use as a source of income revenue is generated in at least one calendar year. Anyone who has lent out their coins or put them into staking reads that as a threat at first.
For crypto assets the tax administration has settled this question. Under its circular of March 6, 2025 the Federal Ministry of Finance does not apply the extension to ten years to staking and lending; the one-year period remains. That statement comes from the administrative position and not from the wording of the law, and it can change with a new version. If your case hangs on it, that is the point where tax advice genuinely pays for itself.
In practice for the loss question this means: even for staked holdings the anniversary of the purchase decides, and there too the window closes to the day.
The survey answers a single question: how ten major crypto assets have developed over twelve months. What it expressly does not answer is whether you personally are down. That hangs on your specific purchase price, your purchase date and your consumption order, and we do not know those three figures.
We also did not check the pricing of individual German trading venues, which can deviate from an international exchange; the conversion into euros, which delivers a result of its own where the exchange rate fluctuates; and every asset outside the ten pairs measured. Anyone invested in smaller tokens will find no statement about their holdings in our series.
A further limit concerns the law. On the question of whether a sale followed by a repurchase on the same day is recognised for tax purposes, Section 23 EStG contains no express bar of the kind other jurisdictions provide for securities. Whether such an arrangement holds up in an individual case is decided by the responsible tax office, and there is no blanket answer for it.
This article is no substitute for tax advice. It places the wording of the law and a price measurement of our own in context; every individual case hangs on figures only you and your tax adviser know.
Further reading: selling crypto at a loss and using loss offsetting, together with the records the tax office requires when documenting crypto losses.
(As of September 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
