Leaving is a taxing event on your entire stack, unless you plan it

Crypto is non-TAP, which means it sits squarely in the assets that get deemed-disposed the day you cease residency. CGT event I1 treats your whole holding as if you sold it at market value on departure, every parcel, whether you touched it or not. For a portfolio that’s run up over a few cycles, that’s a real tax bill with no sale proceeds to pay it from. The cash has to come from somewhere.

You have a choice per parcel. You can let the deemed disposal happen and pay now. You can realise specific parcels this financial year, timing them against your other income. Or you can make the deferral election, keeping those assets in the Australian net so the tax lands later when you actually sell, but the deferral freezes your CGT discount and keeps all future growth Australian-taxable, which is often a worse deal than it sounds.

The parcels held less than twelve months are the ones to watch: no discount, so their timing matters most. And your destination has its own view, some tax crypto disposals after you arrive, some don’t, and staking or DeFi rewards are ordinary income wherever you are, not capital gains.

One more thing worth saying plainly: Australian exchanges report to the ATO under a data-matching program that reaches back years. This is a planning problem, not a hiding problem. Plan it parcel by parcel and the bill is often far smaller than “do nothing” produces.