Ledger Co-Founder Calls for Protest Coin
Summary
• French lawmakers passed a crypto tax amendment requiring all self-custody wallet holders to declare their crypto’s market value annually, sparking backlash.
• Ledger co-founder Eric Larchevêque posted a video urging users to create a protest coin called 1649AC, designed to overload the reporting system with absurd valuations.
Read the full story
The token 1649AC emerged as a coordinated protest against a new French tax law - Article 1649 AC bis - which requires all self-custody wallet holders to annually declare the fair market value of their crypto holdings. The amendment, adopted on December 9, triggered privacy concerns in France’s crypto circles.
On December 11, Eric Larchevêque, co-founder of Ledger, posted a two-minute video on X where he denounced the policy and called for the creation of a valueless token named 1649AC. His plan: every crypto holder in France buys 1-2 tokens. If the token is engineered to display a €1B per-token value by December 31, declared assets become meaningless to tax authorities.
Influencer Pow shared the token in his Telegram channel framing it as one of the few narratives where the community - not insiders - could actually steer the outcome, tying it back to Larchevêque’s original call for a decentralized protest.
The amendment is not yet law - it awaits a full Assembly vote - but the coin's protest is already live. 1649AC hit $2.2M MC within 9 hours of launch.
