Bull Bitcoin petitions French court to annul DAC8 decree, calling EU crypto surveillance ‘Kill Your Customer’

Bull Bitcoin just picked a fight with the entire EU regulatory apparatus. The non-custodial Bitcoin exchange, operating through its French entity Léonod SARL, filed a petition on February 24 to annul Decree No. 2025-1276, the French implementation of the EU’s DAC8 directive that mandates crypto service providers hand over extensive user data to tax authorities.

It’s the first formal legal challenge to DAC8 anywhere in the European Union. And the company isn’t being subtle about its reasoning: CEO Francis Pouliot has rebranded the directive’s implications from “Know Your Customer” to “Kill Your Customer.”

What DAC8 actually requires

The directive, adopted by the EU Council on October 17, 2023, forces crypto-asset service providers to collect and report detailed user information to national tax authorities — personal identification, home addresses, and full transaction histories, all fed into centralized government databases.

Data collection requirements kicked in on January 1, 2026, with reporting obligations phasing in afterward. The French decree implementing these rules, Decree No. 2025-1276, was published on December 19, 2025.

Bull Bitcoin argues this creates a honeypot problem. Centralized databases containing the financial details and physical addresses of crypto holders create security risks. The company estimates that somewhere between 40 and 135 million Europeans could face heightened surveillance and physical safety risks as a result.

Bull Bitcoin’s unusual position

What makes this challenge particularly interesting is who’s bringing it. Bull Bitcoin isn’t some regulatory outlaw operating from the shadows. The company secured its MiCA license in June 2026, making it a fully compliant operator across the EU.

Bull Bitcoin runs a non-custodial, Bitcoin-only model. Users maintain control of their own private keys, meaning the company never actually holds customer funds. It managed to obtain its Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation license without abandoning that self-custody principle.

The legal challenge is also significant because it represents the first pushback against the OECD-aligned Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, known as CARF, which DAC8 mirrors at the EU level.

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