Zonda: the taxman wants PIT on crypto swapped into złoty. The exchange had neither the crypto nor the złoty

Clients of zondacrypto, Poland’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which halted withdrawals in April 2026, are to pay tax on gains they never saw. That is what follows from two rulings of the National Tax Information Office (Krajowa Informacja Skarbowa, KIS) issued in June and July: whoever swapped cryptocurrency into złoty inside the exchange’s panel has revenue and pays 19 per cent on the gain, even if not a single grosz was ever withdrawn. The Minister of Finance declined to issue a general ruling for all the victims, because in May “it could not yet be definitively established” whether the money at Zonda was gone. In August the court in Tallinn, where the exchange’s operator is registered, declared it bankrupt: EUR 167,000 of assets against EUR 431.9 million of liabilities. The exchange’s own reconciliations show that at the end of 2025 it held in its wallets about 2 per cent of the crypto-assets it had credited to clients’ accounts, leaving aside a dormant address to which nobody has the key. The taxman has therefore taxed an exchange in which there was nothing to exchange.

The documents in question: rulings of the Director of KIS of 23 June 2026 (0113-KDIPT2-3.4011.399.2026.1.AK) and 22 July 2026 (0115-KDIT1.4011.479.2026.1.MK), the reply of Deputy Finance Minister Jarosław Neneman of 26 May 2026 to parliamentary question no. 16866 from MP Dariusz Matecki, and the order of Harju Maakohus (Harju County Court) of 27 August 2026 in case 2-26-14436/10, together with the interim trustee’s report on which it rests. Both rulings anonymise the exchange as “A”; that it is zondacrypto follows from the description: withdrawals blocked from April 2026, a public statement by the management that it lacks the keys, and an investigation by a Regional Prosecutor’s Office into an offence under Article 286 § 1 in conjunction with Article 294 § 1 of the Penal Code.

First a distinction, because two different disputes are running in this case.

The first dispute is about timing: does revenue from a crypto sale arise when the exchange writes złoty into the panel, or only when the taxpayer receives them. The ministry and KIS have won that dispute on paper, because the statute excludes virtual currencies from the cash method. I wrote about it in April, in a text on why a frozen crypto exchange balance is not taxable income, and I do not repeat that dispute here.

The second dispute is about the thing itself: whether the event the statute orders to be taxed ever occurred at all. The statute does not tax a click. It taxes the exchange of virtual currency for legal tender, and an exchange requires two things and a movement between them. All three documents, both rulings and the minister’s reply, assume that at Zonda there was something to exchange: that on one side lay cryptocurrency, on the other złoty, and the exchange swapped one for the other. The Tallinn files do not confirm that assumption. They confirm its opposite.

The facts that should have reached the authority therefore read differently from how they were described. Not: “I converted cryptocurrency into złoty and could not withdraw it.” But: “The exchange kept books of which its own accountant told the court-appointed trustee that they did not reflect reality; its panel showed balances backed at two per cent; in that panel I clicked ‘sell’. Is that click my income?” The answer I argue for below: no. The statute does not know this situation. It knows no method of settling by deposits and withdrawals, but it knows no method of taxing a click in an unbacked panel either; of the two gaps, the taxman chose the one that yields revenue. The only events in this story that really happened are the deposit into the exchange and the withdrawal from it, and it is from those, not from entries in a panel, that anyone who wants to tax anything must begin.

A sale after which nothing moves

When a client of a crypto exchange clicks “sell”, nothing happens on any blockchain. The bitcoin does not change address, the złoty does not leave any bank. Two numbers change in the operator’s database: one goes down, the other goes up. The client has no private key to “his” bitcoins and never had one. He has a contract with the operator, in which the operator promises to hand over on demand as many bitcoins or as many złoty as the panel shows. A lawyer will call that a claim. A civil lawyer will add that the closest construction is the irregular deposit (depozyt nieprawidłowy) of Article 845 of the Civil Code: the depositary becomes the owner of what it received and returns the same quantity of the same kind. The client of an exchange does not own cryptocurrency. He owns a claim to cryptocurrency.

Tax law has turned a blind eye to this for years, and rightly so. On an honest exchange the claim is backed one to one, enforceable on demand, convertible at any moment into coins in the client’s own wallet or a transfer from a bank. Economically it does not differ from ownership, so the taxman treats an internal sale as a disposal of virtual currency, the client as having made a gain, and everybody has peace. The entire practice of taxing exchange trading, including the practice in the rulings and in the minister’s letter, rests on the silent assumption that the entry in the panel is the reflection of something that exists behind the mirror.

The reflection is credible exactly as long as something stands behind the mirror. What stood behind Zonda’s mirror is known today from three sources: the company’s books, its own wallet reconciliations, and the trustee’s report.

Books that were a copy of the panel

The interim trustee’s report of 21 August 2026 describes how the books of BB Trade Estonia OÜ came into being. They were kept by an external accountant in Tallinn on the basis of data supplied by the management; he had no access to the accounts, the wallets or the custodians’ systems and could verify nothing. Liabilities to clients reached him as aggregate sums. The crypto-asset and client-balance accounts moved in the books once a quarter, by a single entry that wiped the old balance and wrote in the new one from the exchange’s report; the last such entry is dated 31 December 2025, and for January, February, March and April 2026 there is not a single entry on those accounts. The books were not the source of the panel. They were its quarterly copy. The accountant himself, as the trustee noted, admitted that they do not reflect the company’s real situation.

From those books came a balance sheet as at 22 April 2026, a week after the CEO announced the missing keys: assets of nearly EUR 477 million, including EUR 346.5 million in cryptocurrency, equity of plus EUR 44.7 million, and a result for the period from 1 January 2025 to 22 April 2026 of EUR 5.13 million, of which EUR 3.31 million fell on the one hundred and twelve days of 2026, the period of the run on withdrawals. An exchange that was not paying out was earning on paper about a million euros a month, mostly from tokens it awarded itself and from interest it charged itself on a company it was itself financing. The report speaks of up to 30,000 victims.

The trustee checked what of this exists. He sent enquiries to dozens of Estonian banks and lenders, to the tax office, the vehicle register, the land register and the Kraken exchange. The company had no account at any bank in the country of its licence. It had balances with five payment operators and two Swiss banks, mostly as at 31 March 2026:

Together EUR 167,675.04, of which EUR 131,000 with three Polish payment operators. The trustee received no statements later than March and does not confirm whether that money is still there. Otherwise: no real estate, no vehicles, no tangible fixed assets; the Zondacrypto trademark, carried in the books at EUR 271,849.53, valued at zero. The report defines the estate as the sum of the account balances and “identifiable crypto-asset balances”, but the accounts account for the whole EUR 167,000, so in that arithmetic nothing is left for crypto-assets (this is a conclusion from adding up, not a sentence from the report). On the liabilities side: EUR 429,037,981.18 owed to clients, of which EUR 321.1 million in crypto-assets, as aggregate balances that the trustee cannot attribute to specific clients, periods or transactions. The same gap was described by the auditor of the 2021 financial statements: the company’s accounting system did not allow anyone to establish to whom, and in what amounts, the liabilities to clients existed. The trustee today has liabilities but no creditors. The only ledger of clients that exists is the panel, and the panel has been seized by the prosecutors.

So much for the books. The “Balances x Wallets” reconciliations, from which the accountant copied the quarterly balances, say how much stood behind those balances.

The application described Zonda. The files describe a different exchange

The application that ended in the July ruling reached KIS on 22 May 2026, five weeks after the exchange’s CEO announced that there were no keys to the cold wallet. The applicant described what she saw: in November 2025 she “converted cryptocurrency into złoty”, in 2026 she swapped the złoty back into cryptocurrency, she could not withdraw, an investigation is pending at a Regional Prosecutor’s Office. She did what every taxpayer does: she described reality in the language in which she saw it, and she saw it in Zonda’s panel. The authority accepted that description as the facts, because that is how an individual ruling works. Article 14b § 3 of the Tax Ordinance (Ordynacja podatkowa) requires the applicant to present the facts exhaustively, and the authority conducts no evidentiary proceedings and answers what it was given. The answer protects only if reality turns out to be identical to the description; the authority wrote that itself in the instructions attached to the ruling, and we have written many times that a tax ruling does not always protect the taxpayer.

The authority replied on 22 July, five days before the Tallinn court appointed an interim trustee for the company and five weeks before the bankruptcy was declared. It could not establish what is known today, because a ruling is not an evidentiary proceeding. It could, however, have known that it did not know, and answered conditionally: the applicant herself wrote to it that the prosecutors were investigating whether the purchase and custody of cryptocurrency at this exchange were genuine. She even put a separate, third question to it on exactly that point: whether, having lost access to funds on a platform under investigation, she could be regarded as having earned no income. The reasoning does not contain a single word on it. It is covered by a blanket “incorrect”.

Reality lies in the file of case 2-26-14436/10 before Harju Maakohus: in the trustee’s report, in the order declaring bankruptcy, in the exchange’s reconciliations and in the exports from its custody systems. Let us set the two descriptions side by side, point by point.

In the application: cryptocurrency. In the files: seven thousandths of an ether

The applicant sold cryptocurrency. Which, we do not know; we know how much of it the exchange had. As at 31 December 2025, six weeks after her transaction, the exchange’s own reconciliation showed 4,517 BTC in its wallets. Of that, 4,503 BTC sit on an address dormant since 2016, the key to which, according to the CEO, was held by a founder who went missing in 2022. Beyond that address the exchange was left with about fourteen bitcoins (that is the result of subtraction, not an entry in the reconciliation) against 2,072 BTC owed to clients. In the other currencies the backing of client balances was: ether 0.7 per cent (179 ETH against 26,910 owed), USDC 2.0 per cent, XRP 0.4 per cent, DOGE 0.9 per cent. Without the dormant address the wallets held about EUR 10 million in cryptocurrency and cash against EUR 342.8 million of client balances at the spreadsheet’s rates: backing of 3 per cent, and in crypto-assets alone, which made up almost the whole of those balances, about 2 per cent. For every ether a client saw in the panel, seven thousandths of an ether lay in the exchange’s wallets.

I described this at greater length in a text on how Kral had notarised his access to 4,503 BTC. Here one thing matters. Which cryptocurrency the client sold, we do not know; we know that for each of the main currencies Zonda held on behalf of its clients between a fraction of a per cent and two per cent. The sale in the panel in November 2025 could therefore have been an exchange of cryptocurrency at most in the fraction in which that cryptocurrency existed, and which fraction it concerned neither the client nor the authority will ever establish. For the rest, Zonda was not holding cryptocurrency for her. It was holding a number.

In the application: złoty. In the files: a queue

On the other side of the transaction the applicant saw złoty. Under the Act on the National Bank of Poland, legal tender means the currency issued by the NBP (Article 32), that is banknotes and coins (Article 31); in tax practice, money on a bank account counts as their equivalent. A “PLN” entry in the panel of an Estonian company is neither. It is a claim against BB Trade Estonia OÜ, of which the Ministry of Finance itself wrote, in its reply to the parliamentary question, that it holds no MiCA authorisation in any EU member state and that deposits on such accounts are not guaranteed. The ministry adds that it had warned of this in communication no. 77 of 14 February 2024. A warning, however, is not revenue.

The files add what that claim was worth. At the end of 2024 clients were owed, according to the exchange’s reconciliations, EUR 74.3 million in fiat currencies, and the company’s accounts held EUR 4.0 million. During 2025 client cash balances fell to EUR 15.8 million on 30 September and EUR 2.9 million at the end of the year. Withdrawals were going out in that period, that is true. They were going out of a pool that never covered the entries, so whoever “held złoty” in the panel held a place in a queue. Whoever withdrew in the autumn of 2025 got what was still left in the till. Whoever waited until April got a statement about the full stabilisation of the system.

In the application: a transaction. In the files: an edited record

The ruling speaks of “an operation of exchanging virtual currency for means of payment carried out by a cryptocurrency exchange”. Less than a year before the applicant’s transaction, as at 31 December 2024, the exports from the exchange’s custody systems (Fireblocks and BitGo) show 685,738 wallets and a total of 59.9 BTC, confirmed address by address, against 4,503 promised. In the Fireblocks vault described as cold, both bitcoin addresses were empty; in the whole system lay 0.000012 of a bitcoin. Zonda had a professional vault for everything except bitcoin, about which I wrote in the text on the loan agreements with AdmiTrade and Orion. The operation the authority writes about consisted in one record in the company’s database going down and another going up. No coin changed hands, because the vaults held a fraction of what the panel showed.

In the application: an investigation as background. In the files: an investigation into the same question

The applicant told the authority that a Regional Prosecutor’s Office was investigating “the misleading of many persons as to the possibility of purchasing and storing fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies within the exchange” (Article 286 § 1 in conjunction with Article 294 § 1 of the Penal Code). The authority copied that passage and passed over it. But it is not background. It is exactly the question the ruling silently answered. The prosecutors are investigating whether cryptocurrency was being bought and stored for clients at all. The tax office already knows that it was, and issues the bill. If the prosecutors’ hypothesis is confirmed, the premise of the ruling collapses. Two organs of the same state are working on opposite assumptions about the same transactions, and only one of those assumptions has support in the Tallinn files.

The second ruling: the client doubted, the authority did not

The ruling of 22 July was not the first. A month earlier, on 23 June 2026, the same authority answered another Zonda client, and that case matters more for our question, because the client came within one sentence of it.

She described that she had bought cryptocurrency on the exchange, sold part of it there for traditional currency, transferred part in from another exchange, and that since April she could withdraw neither. She asked “that it be accepted as an element of the facts that platform A turned out to be a tool used to commit a crime”. And she wrote a sentence worth quoting in full: “The applicant is not certain whether his cryptocurrencies were in fact held at the exchange, or whether the entries in the IT system were merely an empty digital image not matching the actual resources of the exchange’s wallets.” In June that was a supposition. In September it is the content of the trustee’s report.

The authority copied the sentence about the tool of a crime into its own summary of the case, from which it begins its assessment. The sentence about the empty digital image is not in that summary. And it found that revenue had arisen. It could do so for two reasons, and both are instructive. First, the client herself declared that her assets met the statutory definition of virtual currency, and the authority took over from her, into its description of the case, that “the assets held by you meet the legal definition of virtual currency” and that “part of the virtual currencies were sold there for legal tender (fiat)”. The authority conducts no evidentiary proceedings and could not go beyond that declaration; it received from the taxpayer a confirmation that the object of the exchange existed, alongside a doubt whether it existed. A doubt is not an element of the facts. A declaration is. Second, her legal argument ran: the cash method of Article 11(1), “income tax cannot be charged on fictitious accounting entries”. To the first part the authority has a ready answer, the same the minister gave the MP. To the second it did not need to respond, because the taxpayer herself had described those entries as virtual currency that she sold for fiat. The question what document would confirm the absence of revenue the authority found moot. It thus accepted as fact that the exchange was a tool of a crime, and as fact that the client had sold virtual currency on it. It did not ask whether a tool of a crime can carry out a sale of virtual currency.

The second part of that ruling is good for the victims and worth knowing. The authority confirmed that documented expenditure on the acquisition of cryptocurrency lost through fraud remains a tax-deductible cost: it is accounted for in the year it was incurred, and the surplus is carried forward to subsequent years without any time limit (Article 22(15) and (16) of the PIT Act). The operative part speaks of the year in which the crime is reported, but the reasoning reduces that to the expenditure of that year plus the surplus from previous years; there is no new cost arising from the loss of the coins itself. The client relied here on an earlier ruling concerning the theft of cryptocurrency (of 22 January 2026, 0113-KDIPT2-3.4011.859.2025.2.SJ), and the authority did not question it. The client stipulated that the coins she had bought might have been “only a digital representation, and not a real entry”, and the authority found her position in that part correct. In other words: a purchase in the panel is a cost even if the coins did not exist; a sale in the panel is revenue even if the złoty did not exist. The authority is consistent. The panel is reality for it on both sides.

That consistency has a price, best seen on two clients. Both paid in PLN 100,000 and bought bitcoins in the panel. The first held them until the freeze. The second sold them in the panel for PLN 150,000 and likewise waited until the freeze. Both have the same today: zero in hand and a claim against the estate. The first has no revenue and PLN 100,000 of cost to carry forward. The second has PLN 150,000 of revenue, PLN 100,000 of cost and PLN 9,500 of tax to pay in real money. The difference between them is one click in a system known to have reflected nothing. The tax is paid by the one who won in the fiction.

Whoever withdrew, got paid. Until April

If Zonda was not holding its clients’ assets, what was it paying out from? The spreadsheets do not answer directly; they show instead that the stock shrank as withdrawals went out. In the fourth quarter of 2025 the operational wallets were emptying: ether from 1,323 to 179, XRP from 3.59 million to 82,600. In the same quarter client cash balances fell from EUR 15.8 million to EUR 2.9 million, which means withdrawals were going out, only they were not funded by the sale of assets that did not exist, but by what was still left in the till. Findings previously known from the public Recoveris analysis also entered the file: the average balance of the main hot bitcoin wallet fell between August 2024 and March 2026 from 55.7 BTC to 0.18 BTC, by 99.7 per cent, and on 1 April 0.086 BTC remained; between mid-December 2025 and 2 April 2026 about USD 21 million left the exchange’s wallets for a single address at the Kraken exchange. In March 2026, the last month before the freeze, the CEO received from the company’s accounts fourteen transfers totalling EUR 501,037.80, booked like the withdrawals of an ordinary user with the login pkral1; I wrote about it in the text on the EUR 501,000 for the CEO. The trustee dates the company’s possible permanent insolvency to the end of 2022, and the undisputed one to the first quarter of 2026 at the latest. When the client from the July ruling clicked “sell”, Zonda may have been insolvent for nearly three years.

Courts have known this mechanism for a hundred and fifty years, and a US court of appeals described it in the Madoff case: the account statement shows positions that were never bought, and payouts to old clients are funded by the deposits of new ones. That court refused to settle the victims by the last statement and adopted the difference between deposits and withdrawals. In April I cited that judgment as an analogy from another industry. Whether it was a description of this case, the prosecutors will decide. The spreadsheets say this much: backing was approaching zero, and withdrawals were going out.

Two versions of the key, two versions of revenue

In June 2025 Zonda’s CEO signed before a notary a declaration that the company had “unrestricted, full and exclusive access” to the address holding 4,503 bitcoins. In April 2026 he announced that the key had been taken by the missing founder. The interim trustee’s report dates the loss of access to the end of 2022. Both versions cannot be true at once. If the June one is true, the company has the key and is not returning the coins to its clients. If the April one is, the notarised declaration was untrue and the bitcoins had been gone since the end of 2022. In both versions, at the end of 2025 clients’ ether and XRP were backed at a fraction of a per cent, and USDC at two.

The state has two versions in this case, just as the CEO has two versions of the key. In the prosecutors’ version, clients were misled as to whether cryptocurrency was being bought and stored for them at all. In the version of the National Tax Information Office, repeated in June and in July, it was bought, stored and sold, and 19 per cent is due on the sale. The Ministry of Finance wrote in May that it “constantly monitors” the situation and that, if necessary, it will take “special measures concerning the interpretation of the provisions”. Since May the Tallinn court has declared bankruptcy, the trustee has counted the estate, and the exchange’s own spreadsheets have shown backing that exceeded two per cent for none of the main currencies. The monitoring continues.

The accrual method does not create a transaction. It fixes its moment

Here justice must be done to the ministry. Article 11(1) of the PIT Act (ustawa o podatku dochodowym od osób fizycznych) does indeed exclude revenue from the disposal of virtual currency for consideration from the cash method. Revenue under Article 17(1)(11) arises on an accrual basis, at the moment of disposal, not at the moment of payment. The ministry compares this to the sale of shares: whoever sold shares and did not receive the price has revenue, and pursuing the price “rests with the creditor”. Agreed. Only that this comparison decides the case against the ministry.

For the sale of shares the statute states the moment of revenue expressly: the moment ownership of the shares passes to the buyer (Article 17(1ab)(1)). The seller had something and transferred something; the buyer incurred a debt for the price; the seller has a claim against a solvent or an insolvent person, but he has it against someone who received something from him. The accrual method does not dispense with the transaction taking place. It only changes the date under which we book it.

For virtual currency the event is “the exchange of virtual currency for legal tender, goods, services or a property right other than virtual currency” (Article 17(1f)). Three elements: virtual currency on the seller’s side, legal tender (or goods, a service, a right) on the buyer’s side, and an exchange between them. Virtual currency, under the Anti-Money Laundering Act (Article 2(2)(26)), is “a digital representation of value” that “can be electronically stored or transferred”. A representation requires something that it represents. The entry in Zonda’s panel represented the company’s promise, and behind the promise, as the exports and the trustee’s report show, stood a fraction of what had been promised. Nor was there legal tender on the other side; there was a second promise by the same company. What remained was an exchange, that is, the swap of one claim against BB Trade Estonia, denominated in bitcoin, for another claim against BB Trade Estonia, denominated in złoty. The statute requires an exchange. The exchange was offering a change in the name of a claim.

The taxman may reply that the seller’s counterparty on an exchange is not the exchange but another user, that settlement by book entries at an intermediary is the ordinary form of cashless payment, and that whoever sold and whose bank collapsed the next day also has revenue, he has merely lost the money. That is the strongest of the replies, and at Zonda it does not work. The buyer on the other side of the order received an entry for cryptocurrency just as unbacked as the seller’s entry for złoty; both left the transaction with a claim against the same insolvent company, which by its own reconciliations held about 2 per cent of its clients’ crypto-assets and, at the end of 2024, EUR 4.0 million against EUR 74.3 million of client cash balances. The bank in that analogy is licensed, supervised, and really received the buyer’s money; the ministry itself wrote that BB Trade held no MiCA authorisation and that deposits with it were not guaranteed. Between two users of Zonda no value circulated. What circulated was a promise the company had issued to both.

It may also reply that the “PLN” entry is at least “a property right other than virtual currency”, so an exchange did take place. That reply assumes what cannot be proven: that the Zonda client gave up virtual currency. She did not, because she did not have it; she had a claim to it, backed, depending on the currency, at a fraction of a per cent to two per cent. It may reply further that this reasoning undermines the taxation of every exchange, and that tax cannot depend on solvency assessed after the fact. It does not undermine it. On a solvent exchange the claim stands in for the coin, because it is fully backed and enforceable on demand; the taxman rightly does not distinguish, and whoever withdrew got what it was all about and settles as before. The substitution ends where the backing ends, and that is decided by facts, not doctrine: in Zonda’s case not presumed, but established by the trustee and confirmed by the court. A different classification concerns only the entries that nobody ever honoured. It may finally reply that if the client exchanged a claim for a claim, she disposed of a property right and has revenue from property rights (Article 18 of the PIT Act). That reply leads to the same conclusion by another road: the legislature did not exclude revenue from property rights from the cash method, so it arises when the money is received or placed at the taxpayer’s disposal, and the client received nothing. The taxman will say that the złoty entry was placed at her disposal, since in 2026 she used it to buy cryptocurrency in the panel. With one promise she bought a second promise from the same company. What was placed at her disposal was a queue.

The administrative courts, for that matter, did not wait for Zonda. In cases on the taxation of cryptocurrency staking, a different event, then, but the same principle, the Provincial Administrative Courts in Kraków (I SA/Kr 217/23), Warsaw (III SA/Wa 179/24) and Poznań (I SA/Po 434/24) held that revenue requires a real accretion of a determinable value, and the Warsaw court added that where the statute does not define the tax base, the authority cannot patch it by interpretation (Article 217 of the Constitution). A fraction that nobody can point to is not a tax base. The real accretion from an entry in the database of an insolvent company is today a claim against an estate in which the trustee has counted assets equal to less than four hundredths of a per cent of the liabilities.

A one-way ratchet

Let us assume for a moment, however, that the ministry is right and revenue arose on an accrual basis. What does the statute do next, when the price turns out to be uncollectible? A business taxpayer is allowed to deduct a receivable written off as uncollectible, provided he had earlier reported it as revenue due and documented the uncollectibility, for instance with a court order closing bankruptcy proceedings (Article 23(1)(20) and (2) of the PIT Act). The taxpayer settling virtual currencies gets no equivalent. The only costs are documented expenditure on acquisition and costs connected with disposal (Article 22(14)); the authority confirmed in June that the former survive even the loss of the coins, but an uncollectible sale price is not among the costs. Losses on virtual currencies are not set off like other losses (Article 9(3a)(2)); the statute knows only a surplus of costs, carried into the following year and exclusively against future sales of virtual currencies (Article 22(16)).

The ruling shows how this works in practice. The applicant asked what about the fact that in 2026 she had swapped the złoty back into cryptocurrency in the panel. The authority answered that this transaction “will constitute a tax-deductible cost of future sales of virtual currency”. The cost is not tied to those coins or to that exchange; the client will set it against any future sale of virtual currency, if she ever makes one. The coins Zonda credited to her in 2026, holding in its vaults a fraction of what it had credited to clients, will be handed over by nobody after the declaration of bankruptcy. The taxman found the purchase real, the sale real and the exchange existent. Of those three things only the tax exists: 19 per cent on the gain recorded in 2025, payable in real złoty, and a cost recorded in 2026 which may not be deducted from the income of 2025. The legislature foresaw everything except that an exchange might not have an exchange.

The minister set a condition. The Tallinn court met it

The reply to the parliamentary question contains one sentence that reads differently today than in May: a general ruling is not expedient, because “at present it cannot yet be definitively established whether the virtual currencies or funds held at Zondacrypto are wholly or partly unrecoverable”. The condition was reasonable. In its essential part it was met by the court of another country. The order of 27 August finds insolvency, the trustee’s report values the estate, the exchange’s spreadsheets show what is not in it, and the trustee, as I described after the creditors’ meeting in Tallinn, did not receive even the source documents from the company. By the day of the meeting about two thousand claims had been lodged, and the trustee calculates his own workload at 5,295 hours at EUR 189, about a million euros, against an estate counted in thousands.

Two things must be kept apart here. The minister’s condition concerned recovery: on that depend relief and any amendment of the statute. The thesis of this text concerns existence: on that depends whether revenue arose at all. The Tallinn findings serve both, and the National Tax Information Office showed in July that unrecoverability changes nothing for it: it wrote of the exchange’s “bankruptcy” five weeks before it was declared, on the applicant’s word, and found revenue all the same. The ministry announced that “should the need arise for special measures regarding the interpretation of the provisions or legislative changes, they will be taken”. The premises for that assessment lie in Tallinn. The assessment belongs to Warsaw.

Instead of a ruling, the ministry points taxpayers to Article 67a of the Tax Ordinance: deferral, instalments, remission, “in individual cases”, after an assessment of “the taxpayer’s economic situation”. In other words: tax on money that never existed is due, but whoever proves he has no money may pay it in instalments. The state will not take from a taxpayer what he does not have. It will spread it over instalments.

Meanwhile the tax administration has gone crypto-hunting in the simplest possible way: tax offices summon to file PIT-38 the people in whose bank statements they see transfers to the exchange’s payment operator and back, and for 2026 there will be added the data that exchanges report to the tax authorities under DAC8. The office sees deposits and withdrawals, the only two things in this story that really happened. Everything in between it sees from a panel whose backing the trustee and the Tallinn court have just counted. An authority conducting tax proceedings is bound by Articles 122 and 187 § 1 of the Tax Ordinance to establish the truth and gather all the evidence. The material exists and is within the authority’s reach: the court order is published, the trustee’s report lies in the case file, to which a tax authority may reach through administrative cooperation, the transaction data have been seized by the prosecutors, and part of the findings has been published in the texts I link to.

What follows for PIT-38

Five things follow; none is a guarantee, and each will be contested by the first-instance authority.

First, the burden of proof. The ministry reminds us that reporting revenue and costs “is the taxpayer’s obligation, on whom the obligation to prove those amounts also rests”. Until April the taxpayer could prove only that he had received no payout, and the ministry replied that this was irrelevant. Since August he can show something else: that the object of the exchange existed at most in a fraction, and shift onto the authority the burden of establishing what was really sold. The Estonian court’s order, the trustee’s report and the exchange’s reconciliations are documents of court proceedings, not a counsel’s theses.

Second, the description of the facts. Whoever applies for a ruling, answers a summons from the tax office or corrects a return should describe the exchange as the court established it, not as the panel displayed it. Not “I converted cryptocurrency into złoty and could not withdraw”, but “in the panel of a company whose books, according to its accountant, did not reflect reality, and whose balances were backed at two per cent, I changed an entry for a claim denominated in a cryptocurrency the company did not hold into an entry for a claim denominated in złoty the company did not pay out”. That is not a play on words. It is the difference between a question the authority has already answered twice and a question nobody has yet put to it. The June ruling shows how not to do it: do not declare that the assets were virtual currency and, in the same application, doubt whether they existed; do not ask the authority to “accept as an element of the facts” that the exchange was a tool of a crime, because the authority will accept it and nothing will follow; do not rely on the cash method, which the authority dismisses in a single paragraph. Facts from the files, not doubts, and Article 17(1f), not Article 11. One must also reckon with a request to supplement the application: the authority usually demands that the applicant himself classify his assets as virtual currency (Article 14h in conjunction with Article 169 § 1 of the Tax Ordinance), and whoever refuses to classify may find the application left unexamined (Article 14g § 1). The ruling route may therefore break off at the threshold; the Tallinn documents carry weight where evidence is taken, that is, in answering a summons from the tax office, in a correction, and before the administrative court. Every further ruling issued on the old description entrenches the answer to a question nobody asked.

Third, the measure. The only thing that can be verified is what flowed into the exchange and what flowed out of it: deposits in złoty to the payment operator’s account and transfers back, transfers of coins from one’s own wallet and to one’s own wallet. Everything in between is an entry in the system of a company whose books did not reflect reality. This is not a statutory settlement method; it is the set of events that really happened, and only to those must the authority fit a classification, because the statute has none ready. How the right to correct returns for previous years and to claim an overpayment follows from that measure, I described in April. A correction requires showing a specific error in a specific return, not merely the exchange’s bankruptcy; what has changed since April is the evidence with which that error can be shown.

Fourth, costs. Whoever bought cryptocurrency and did not sell it in the panel has, according to the June ruling, a cost that survives the loss of the coins and carries forward to subsequent years without limit. The condition is reporting it in PIT-38 for the year it was incurred, even where there was no revenue (Article 30b(6a)). Whoever did not file those returns should file them for the years not yet time-barred, because the surplus of costs carries forward only from a return.

Fifth, the June and July rulings protect only the applicants, and only in the facts they described. Towards other taxpayers they are the authority’s position, with which one may disagree before the administrative court; each applicant could have appealed her ruling to the Provincial Administrative Court within thirty days of service, and whether they did is not known. The applicants themselves are protected only if they comply with the rulings and if their exchange was as they described it. The Tallinn files say it was not.

What is behind the mirror

In April I asked whether the number on the screen is a reflection of wealth or its illusion. The Tallinn files have answered: at the end of 2025, 2 to 3 per cent of what the reflection showed stood behind the mirror, and the company, according to the trustee, may have been insolvent since the end of 2022. The taxman taxed the reflection. That can be done for a while, as long as nobody looks behind the mirror. The prosecutors looked, the trustee looked, the court looked. The object of taxation under Article 17(1)(11) is the currency, not a rumour of it.

The ministry wrote in May that it monitors the situation. It now has what was missing in May: the findings of a court. A general ruling need not invent a new method. It is enough for it to say three things: that an entry in the panel of an exchange that was not holding the assets is not a disposal of virtual currency for consideration, because there is no object of disposal; that the burden of showing that the object existed may not be shifted onto the client of a company whose books were a copy of the panel; and how to classify what the client really received from the exchange. That would not be an act of grace. It would be a finding that income tax concerns income.

Robert Nogacki

Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.

The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.

Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.

He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.

Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.

Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.

He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.