If you buy US stocks through a crypto exchange, nobody withholds German capital gains tax on your behalf. Dividends and sale proceeds are credited to you gross, and the settlement with the tax office runs entirely through your income tax return. This is no grey area and no negligence on the provider’s part; it follows directly from where the securities account is held.
Since August 18, 2026 the question has become practical for considerably more people. That was the day Kraken opened US stock trading to customers in the European Economic Area. Anyone who previously held only Bitcoin and a few altcoins on the platform can now buy Apple, Nvidia or Tesla shares there as well. For tax purposes they land in a body of rules that has nothing to do with crypto and that many investors encounter for the first time.
According to the exchange’s own announcement, eligible customers in the EEA have been able to trade more than 7,000 US stocks since August 18, 2026, alongside more than 600 crypto assets and more than 700 so-called xStocks. Trading in the shares is commission-free; in the small print the exchange states expressly that further costs such as spreads and currency conversion charges can arise. Trading is offered through the app and through Kraken Pro.
According to consistent trade reporting, Germany was among the first markets in which the offering ran in a limited pilot phase, together with France and the Netherlands. The go-live on August 18 completed that roll-out across the entire economic area. The exchange itself names no list of countries in its announcement and refers throughout to eligible customers in the EEA.
Decisive for everything that follows is one sentence from the legal section of that same announcement: the investment services are provided by Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, an investment firm authorised under the European markets in financial instruments directive and supervised by the Cypriot securities regulator CySEC. Your securities account therefore sits in Cyprus.
A foreign securities account is one held by an institution domiciled outside Germany, even when the app speaks German, you deposit in euros and the provider is regulated in the EU. The domicile of the custodian institution decides, not your address and not the language of the interface.
The difference is invisible in daily use and highly visible in the tax return. A German institution deducts the tax directly on every dividend and every sale at a profit, pays it over to the tax office and sends you a tax certificate at year end in which everything has already been offset. A foreign institution does none of that. It credits you the full amount and leaves the rest to you.
How to spot it without turning lawyer: look in the contract documents or in the footer of the trading platform for the name of the company providing the investment service, and for the competent supervisory authority. If a foreign regulator is named there, you hold a foreign securities account. At Kraken that is the Cypriot CySEC and the Payward company named above. If you are losing track of several accounts, our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers lists programs that consolidate accounts and wallets and prepare the annual figures for the return.
The Income Tax Act governs automatic withholding not through the question of how well a provider is regulated but through a very narrow definition. Under section 44 paragraph 1 of the Income Tax Act, the paying agent, meaning whoever has to carry out the deduction, is in the cases relevant here the domestic credit, financial services or securities institution that holds or administers the securities.
The paying agent is, in tax law, the body that pays out your investment income and is therefore obliged to withhold the tax for you. The word domestic in that provision is the whole difference. An investment firm domiciled in Cyprus is no domestic institution, so the obligation does not apply to it. The firm may not withhold the German tax and consequently does not.
The same holds for providers from Ireland, the Netherlands or Malta, and it holds regardless of whether the provider carries a MiCA licence for its crypto business. Regulation and tax withholding are two separate questions that are frequently confused. A European authorisation protects your securities account and gives you a supervisory route; it does not make the provider a German paying agent.
Because nobody withholds the tax, the law shifts the duty onto you. The wording is short and leaves no room: taxable investment income that has not been subject to capital gains tax must be declared by the taxpayer in their income tax return. And the following sentence states that in this case an assessment is to be carried out, irrespective of the other rules on who has to file a return at all.
In plain terms that means two things. First, the income from the foreign account belongs in Anlage KAP, the schedule of the German income tax return for investment income. Second, anyone who would otherwise not have to file a return at all is obliged to file by this income. An employee with no other income who has never submitted a return slips into mandatory assessment.
The tax rate does not change as a result. Income tax on investment income is 25 percent under section 32d paragraph 1 of the Income Tax Act, plus the solidarity surcharge of 5.5 percent on that amount, which together gives 26.375 percent, plus church tax where applicable. Only the route is different: instead of a deduction at source, the tax office sets the amount in the assessment notice and you pay it afterwards.
The saver’s lump-sum allowance is 1,000 euros under section 20 paragraph 9 of the Income Tax Act, or 2,000 euros for spouses assessed jointly. You do not lose it in a foreign account. The usual route to it, however, is blocked.
An exemption order takes effect only towards whoever is obliged to withhold. Since the Cypriot investment firm is under no such obligation, it cannot accept an exemption order either. There is simply no form for it in this account, and anyone looking for one is looking in vain.
You claim the allowance through the tax return instead. That works reliably, but it has a side effect that costs money in practice: if you also run a German securities account and have an exemption order there for the full 1,000 euros, the allowance is already used up before the foreign income even enters the calculation. Anyone using both in parallel should reduce the exemption order at the German provider accordingly and keep the remainder for the assessment.
A loss pot is an account that a German institution runs for you and in which it collects your losses during the year in order to offset them against later gains. Under section 43a paragraph 3 of the Income Tax Act, the paying agent offsets negative investment income in the current calendar year up to the amount of the positive income; whatever remains it carries forward to the following year automatically. On request it issues a loss certificate instead, and the irrevocable application for it must reach the agent by December 15 of the current year.
This entire apparatus does not exist for your Cypriot account. There is no loss pot there, no automatic carry-forward and no loss certificate, because all of it is tied to the duties of a domestic paying agent. You offset losses from share sales only in the assessment, and subject to the relevant restrictions: losses from the disposal of shares may be offset only against gains from the disposal of shares, not against dividends or interest.
In practice that means you have to keep the books yourself. The platform supplies you with transaction lists but no annual statement prepared for tax purposes under German law. Anyone who also holds crypto assets already has a record-keeping duty and knows the drill; anyone who has only ever had a German securities account has to learn it. An overview of brokers and trading venues together with their tax treatment helps in deciding whether the effort is worth it for you or whether a German provider with automatic withholding is the quieter choice.
Withholding tax is the tax retained by the state from which the income originates, before the money reaches your account. On dividends from US companies the US side deducts that amount. For investors who have filed no W-8BEN form it is high; with the form on file, the lower rate from the double taxation treaty between Germany and the United States applies.
The W-8BEN form is a self-declaration to the US tax authority in which you confirm that you are resident for tax purposes outside the United States. Brokers usually ask for it when the account is opened, and it is time-limited. After opening, check in the account area whether it is on file and still valid. The specific rates and the handling in an individual case could not be verified on the platform side; they are set out in the provider’s contract documents and in the statements for each individual dividend.
Tax paid abroad is not lost. Under section 32d paragraph 5 of the Income Tax Act, foreign tax assessed and paid is credited against the German tax, though at most 25 percent of foreign tax on each individual item of taxable investment income. This crediting too happens exclusively in the assessment with a foreign account, because in a domestic account the bank would already have taken it into account at the point of deduction.
Kraken advertises the combination expressly: real shares and tokenised shares side by side in one account. An xStock is a token that tracks a US share and, according to the exchange, is backed one to one by the underlying share. The legal annex to the announcement states that the xStocks are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, domiciled in Jersey, and offered through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd, licensed in Bermuda, and that they are not registered with any local securities regulator and will not be registered.
What looks convenient is a fork in the road for tax purposes within the same account. Whether a token that tracks a share is treated for tax like a share or like another asset is the decisive question, and it depends on the legal form of the token. We covered it in detail in our piece on tokenised shares and their taxation in Germany; anyone using both product types should record them separately and not mix them in a joint annual statement.
A second point concerns backing. In June 2026 we described a case in which the backing of an xStock on a paper with no available trading inventory began to slip; the details are in our analysis of the shortfall on an xStock. For the tax question that changes nothing; for the risk question it does.
cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 27, 2026. Method: on the same day we retrieved the four relevant provisions of the Income Tax Act as well as the surcharge rate of the Solidarity Surcharge Act in the official full text on gesetze-im-internet.de and analysed the governing paragraphs in their wording. Five provisions were examined, each in full.
What we could not check belongs here just as much. First, we hold no account with the provider and could therefore not look at which statements and annual summaries the platform actually issues. Second, the statement that Germany was among the pilot markets rests on trade reporting and not on a statement by the exchange. Third, the specific withholding rates in an individual case depend on how the account is set up, which we cannot verify without access to a real dividend statement.
The notion that an account abroad stays undetected has been out of date for years. For securities accounts at foreign financial institutions, the automatic exchange of information on financial accounts applies, in which Cyprus participates like every EU state. For crypto assets, the European reporting obligation for crypto-asset service providers has applied since 2026, with the first data deliveries expected the following year.
The two channels are separate and concern different types of assets, but they arrive at the same place. Anyone holding shares and crypto assets at one provider is reported through two routes. That is no reason for nerves but a reason to make your own return complete: discrepancies between what the tax office receives and what you declare now show up automatically. How this interacts across the individual asset classes is something we worked through using the taxation of stablecoins as an example.
Because nobody issues you a German tax certificate, your own filing becomes the basis of the return. It makes sense to secure the documents continuously rather than once in April of the following year, because trading platforms shorten export periods and make accounts available only to a limited extent after closure. The BitMEX case showed in 2026 how quickly access to a platform can become tight.
These are the records you need:
A note on our own account: this text places the legal position in context and replaces no tax advice. With larger amounts, with losses across several years or with a mixture of shares, tokenised paper and crypto assets, a trip to a tax adviser is the cheaper option.
You can look up the governing provisions yourself: section 32d of the German Income Tax Act covers the tax rate, the filing obligation and the crediting of foreign taxes in one place. The exchange’s product announcement with the legal annex is in the Kraken blog of August 18, 2026.
(As of August 27, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
