As a creator you are not in the same position as someone reselling a token. What you sold may be closer to stock in trade produced in the course of a business than to the disposal of an investment, and the characterisation is what drives the income tax treatment. What exactly passed to the buyer matters too: a file, a licence to use it, an ongoing right, or a service you performed to order. Creators and traders of the very same token can sit in entirely different regimes. Work out what you actually supplied before asking what rate applies to it.
NFTs across borders — what should I check first?
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Characterisation drives income tax treatment; the buyer's location and the nature of the rights drive indirect tax. One question decides whether this is a filing or a project.
What to check first
Characterisation drives income tax treatment; the buyer's location and the nature of the rights drive indirect tax. Creators and traders of the same token can be in entirely different regimes.

Where the general answer is wrong
A non-fungible token can be inventory, a capital asset, a licence or a service depending on what the seller actually did — and cross-border sales add place-of-supply questions for indirect tax.
Where to go from here
The full treatment — who it binds, the deadline, the penalty and the fixed fee — is on NFTs across borders. The quote comes before the work, in writing.
Reviewed for the 2025 and 2026 filing seasons by Udit Gupta, International Tax, Cross-Border Tax & Transfer Pricing Expert, Legal Quotient Consultants. General information, not advice for your circumstances — call our 24-hour helpline to discuss your own position.
Cross-border situations we are engaged for
Characterising a creator's first collection as trading stock
The client had minted and sold a collection over several months and reported the proceeds as capital gains, on the basis that art is an asset. What had actually happened was production and sale in a sustained commercial pattern, with costs incurred to create the work. We set out what was supplied on each sale, worked the characterisation from the client's own conduct, and reported on that basis. The engagement produced a written characterisation, corrected returns for the years concerned, and the treatment of production costs that the conclusion made available.
Read how this one runsPlace-of-supply work for a collection sold across several countries
Sales had gone to buyers the client could identify only by wallet address, and the indirect tax position had never been considered. We mapped every sale, listed what the marketplace actually disclosed about each buyer, and agreed a hierarchy of evidence to apply where the disclosure was thin. Each sale was then assigned a place of supply with its evidence recorded. The engagement produced that sale-by-sale schedule, the treatment applied to each group, and a capture routine so later sales record the buyer's location at the time rather than afterwards.
Read how this one runsSeparating a collector's holdings from a trading inventory
One wallet held pieces bought and kept for years alongside tokens acquired and flipped within days. The client had applied a single treatment to everything. We rebuilt the acquisition and disposal history token by token, identified the two patterns, moved the long-held pieces into a separate wallet, and set a rule for which wallet future purchases would sit in. The engagement produced the historic split with evidence for each token, the treatment that followed for each group, and the operating rule that keeps the distinction demonstrable.
Read how this one runsA token whose licence terms changed the treatment
The tokens carried a commercial licence to use the underlying work, granted on terms that survived each resale, and the client had treated every sale as a simple transfer of property. What passed to the buyer was a bundle of rights, and the nature of those rights bears on both the income tax analysis and the indirect tax question. We read the collection terms against the contract that governed the tokens, set out what was actually granted, and characterised the supply accordingly. The engagement produced that analysis and a consistent treatment for the sales in scope.
Read how this one runsTracing secondary-sale royalties to the right behind them
Receipts were arriving from several marketplaces with no clear account of what created the entitlement. Some rested on an enforceable term in the collection's own contract, some on a marketplace policy the platform could change or stop honouring, and one stream had no documented basis at all. Because the analysis follows the right rather than the money, the difference mattered. The engagement produced a schedule of streams mapped to their source and enforceability, the income tax and indirect tax treatment of each, and a note of the stream to stop relying on.
Read how this one runsA commissioned work that resembled a service more than a sale
The client was engaged to produce a piece to a buyer's specification and deliver it as a token, with revisions along the way and nothing in existence before the commission was accepted. Treating this as the disposal of an asset the client happened to own misdescribed the arrangement: what was sold was work performed to order. We set out the sequence, the obligations taken on, and what actually passed on delivery, then characterised the receipt on that footing and dealt with the indirect tax question it raised.
Read how this one runsAn Assignment Priced Without Counting the Days
Nearly every relief in a mobility file — treaty exemption, residence, social security — is decided by a day count that has to be evidenced. The engagement puts the tracking in place at the start, because it cannot be reconstructed at the end.
Read how this one runsTrips That Added Up to a Filing Obligation
Short visits are tracked against a treaty threshold that is measured over a moving window rather than a calendar year. Where the threshold is passed, the obligation reaches back over the whole period.
Read how this one runsAll case studies — every published engagement in one place.
Core International & Cross-Border Tax Services
Strategy and compliance for income, assets and families spread across borders.
Industries & Client Types We Serve Worldwide
- Foreign VAT / GST / sales tax registrations
- Marketplace withholding reviews
- Inventory nexus & PE analysis
- Multi-currency books reconciled
- Cross-border revenue sourcing & withholding
- IP structuring with real substance
- Equity for cross-border teams
- U.S. expansion: entity & PE setup
- Reg 105 / 102 waivers
- Permanent establishment risk
- Partner mobility planning
- Cross-border withholding recovery
- Section 216 rental returns
- FIRPTA withholding recovery
- Section 116 clearance
- Treaty credit optimization
Related-party purchasing, customs value versus transfer price, and foreign-affiliate structures put trading businesses inside the s.247 documentation rules.
Goods crossing a border move the tax question from income to indirect: registration thresholds, place of supply, the customs value and the transfer price between related entities all have to agree with each other. When they do not, the adjustment arrives from two authorities at once and each one uses the other's number.
- Transfer pricing documentation (s.247)
- Customs value vs transfer price
- Foreign affiliate reporting (T1134)
- Country-by-country reporting
- Reg 105 & U.S. CWA agreements
- Multi-state & country calendars
- Touring income allocation
- Royalty & image-rights withholding
- Residency analysis before moving
- Employer payroll exposure
- Totalization & social security
- Foreign tax credits
- Treaty access & PPT reviews
- FAPI & surplus computations
- Withholding-efficient routing
- Governance & substance
NFTs across borders — the questions that follow
Indirect tax runs on different rails from income tax. It turns on where the buyer is and on the nature of the rights transferred, neither of which the token itself tells you. That makes cross-border sales a place-of-supply question, and the answer can differ from sale to sale within one collection depending on who bought. The practical difficulty is evidence: a marketplace sale may give you a wallet address and nothing else. Decide what you will treat as evidence of the buyer's location, capture it at the time of sale, and record the basis for the treatment applied.
It can be. A token bought to be resold at a profit, in a pattern of similar transactions, looks much more like trading stock than like a capital asset held for its own sake, and the characterisation is worked out from what was actually done rather than from what the asset is called. The same token can be inventory in one person's hands and a capital asset in another's. So the answer comes out of your own pattern of acquisition and disposal, the holding periods, and what you can show you were trying to achieve.
Usually yes, because it arises from a right you kept rather than from parting with the asset. A creator who retains a resale entitlement is being paid for the use of something they still hold, which points towards a licence-type analysis rather than a disposal, and that distinction can change both the income tax treatment and the indirect tax position. The paperwork matters: what the collection's terms actually grant, and what obliges anyone to pay on a secondary sale. Establish where the entitlement originates and how it is enforced before deciding how the receipts are taxed.
Often you do not, and that is the real problem with the place-of-supply question rather than a detail of it. A marketplace may pass on nothing but an address on a public ledger. So the work is to decide, in advance, what you will accept as evidence of a buyer's location and to capture it at the point of sale: whatever the platform discloses about the buyer, the currency and settlement route used, any registration or wallet information available, and the terms the sale was made under. A position supported by a stated method applied consistently is defensible. A gap is not.
Either, depending on the holder and the activity. The same token can be inventory to the person who minted a collection to sell, a capital asset to a collector who bought one piece and kept it, and something else again to a dealer turning them over weekly. That is why the question cannot be answered from the token's description or its metadata. Look at what the holder did: how the token was acquired, how long it was held, how many similar transactions there were, and what the holder set out to achieve.
Double taxation means the same income being taxed by two authorities. It comes in two forms: juridical, where two countries each tax one person on one amount, and economic, where two different people are taxed on the same underlying profit — a company on its earnings and a shareholder on the dividend paid out of them. Relief comes from a treaty, a foreign tax credit, or an exemption, and which one applies depends on the income type. How to avoid double taxation sets out the routes.
It depends on the country, and a day count is only ever the start. Many use a threshold in a tax year, some also look at averages across several years, and some have no day test at all and decide on where your home and life are. Two countries can both conclude you are resident, which is what the treaty tie-breaker exists to settle. Counting days without checking the tie-breaker is how people end up filing as resident nowhere. See the residency tie-breaker.



