Do I owe tax just for holding crypto?

No. Buying and holding is not a taxable event. Taxable events are sales, swaps (crypto-for-crypto), spending crypto on goods or services, and earning crypto as income (staking, airdrops, mining, hard forks).

What if I lost my private keys or had crypto on FTX?

Losses from theft, fraud, or exchange bankruptcy can sometimes be claimed — the rules are narrow and have changed multiple times since 2017. We work through whether your situation qualifies.

Do I need to report transfers between my own wallets?

Transfers between wallets you own are not taxable. But your exchange's data export often flags them as sales. Identifying and reversing those mis-flagged events is a big chunk of the reconciliation work.

What about wash sales for crypto?

As of now, the wash sale rule doesn't apply to crypto (it applies to stocks and securities). That may change — proposed legislation has appeared in Congress multiple times. We plan based on current law, not speculation.

Most crypto returns are quoted as a base fee plus a per-transaction or per-wallet adder, depending on volume and complexity. Lower for a few hundred transactions on two exchanges; higher for active DeFi or thousands of trades. Quoted on the discovery call.

Crypto tax

Crypto tax, done right the first time.

Five exchanges, three wallets, a few NFT trades, and some staking rewards. Most preparers won't touch this — and the ones who will charge a fortune to do it badly. We reconcile the data, calculate your gain/loss in FIFO or specific-ID, and file a clean 8949 + Schedule D.

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What this is

Mostly data work — done properly.

Crypto tax prep is mostly data work: pulling exports from each exchange, spotting transfers between your own wallets (not taxable, though the data often flags them as sales), matching cost basis to each disposal, and producing a Form 8949 that reconciles against the 1099-DAs brokers began issuing for 2025 — the first of which landed in early 2026. Those first forms report your gross proceeds but not your cost basis, so the actual gain-or-loss math is still on you. Basis is now tracked wallet-by-wallet, too — the IRS ended universal basis as of 2025. One client can show up with 3,000+ transactions in a year. We do this with software built for the volume (Koinly, CoinTracker, or CoinLedger, depending on your situation), backed by manual review of the edge cases.

Many sources

Exchanges, self-custody wallets, DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces.

One clean ledger

Normalized, de-duplicated, internal transfers flagged — not counted as sales.

Gain / loss

Cost basis matched to each disposal in FIFO or specific-ID, wallet by wallet.

Filed + matched

A Form 8949 and Schedule D that tie out to the 1099-DAs the IRS already has.

The part everyone gets wrong

What’s taxable — and what isn’t.

Taxable events

Selling crypto for dollars
Swapping one coin for another
Spending crypto on goods or services
Earning it — staking, airdrops, mining, hard forks

Not taxable

Buying crypto and holding it
Moving it between wallets you own
Receiving it as a gift
Donating it to a qualified charity

What we handle

A standard Schedule D has 10–50 lines. Crypto-active clients can have 500–5,000+ taxable events in a year. Reconciling exchange data, fixing gaps in the exports, identifying internal transfers, matching cost basis — that's hours of work before the actual return even starts. And now that brokers file 1099-DAs, a mismatch is easy for the IRS's systems to flag. We charge a separate fee (or a per-transaction adder on the base return) that reflects the real time involved. The tradeoff: a return that ties out to the 1099-DAs already in the IRS system, with documentation you could hand an auditor if it ever came to that.

Common questions

What people ask us about this.

Often paired with

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Don't file a guess.

The IRS now gets 1099-DAs directly from exchanges. If your return doesn't match, you get a letter. We make sure it matches.

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