Sharing a simple checklist that helped me get more clarity on crypto taxes. Posting this in case it helps others.
- Track every transaction early – trades, swaps, staking rewards, airdrops, NFTs. Don’t rely only on exchange P&L; wallets and DeFi matter too.
- Understand what’s taxable – selling, swapping, and spending crypto are usually taxable events; “no bank withdrawal” doesn’t automatically mean “no tax.”
- Separate capital gains vs income – staking, rewards, and airdrops are often treated differently from trading gains.
- Keep raw records – CSVs, wallet addresses, transaction hashes. Tools can change, but raw data is your proof.
- Don’t ignore losses – they can sometimes offset gains if reported correctly.
- Fix past gaps sooner – correcting old records voluntarily is far less stressful than doing it after a notice.
I’m not a tax expert, just documenting what reduced my own confusion.
If you’ve learned something useful, feel free to add to this checklist.
Speaking from the Aurum FSG side (we handle a lot of multi chain reconciliations every year), this checklist is honestly spot on. These are exactly the habits that save people the most headaches.
A few things we’d add based on what we keep seeing:
• Don’t skip old years. Most problems come from trying to fix 2024 or 2025 without cleaning up 2021–2023. Bad cost basis just snowballs.
• Bridges and LP positions matter more than people think. Half the “missing transactions” we deal with are from old liquidity moves or forgotten bridges.
• Always export data before closing an exchange account. Lost history is one of the biggest reasons reconciliations get expensive.
Your list + these few points pretty much cover the major mistakes we see every season.
It’s a good list. Honestly more practical/useful than a lot of “guides” I see.
In particular I want to highlight points 1 & 4 because I have seen so many clients lose access to exchange data. Whether it be bankruptcy, or just scammy exchanges like MEXC where they delete your data on a rolling basis.
If you make a habit of pulling your transaction data as a csv it can save a ton of headaches later.
Setting up a crypto tax software to store the data and ensure completeness of the records is also a great practice.
If you have taxable events from multiple exchanges (Robinhood, Uphold, binance us) for the same year, what's the best way to have it centralized when filing, and what forms do the exchanges send you to use? I'm assuming 1099-misc, but not sure what else.
Sukesh from Kryptos(Crypto Tax Software) here,
Just use any crypto tax software to pull all data and then generate your 8949, 1040 forms automatically.
Its a nightmare. I moved to Thailand to not have to do this.