A survey of 1,000 US crypto investors conducted in August by Awaken Tax found that 21% of respondents who had filed or planned to file a tax extension were still waiting for information they needed from an exchange or crypto platform. A further one in five said their 2025 Form 1099‑DA was either incomplete or they were unsure whether it accurately reflected their transactions. Taxpayers who filed for an extension have until Oct. 15 to submit their returns.
For the 2025 tax year, brokers were generally required to report only the proceeds from digital asset sales, not the cost basis. This means a Form 1099‑DA may show the $10,000 sale price of Bitcoin while omitting the $9,000 purchase price needed to determine a $1,000 gain. Chris Herbst, managing director of CountDeFi tax reporting, said that for active traders the reported proceeds can be many times the actual gain because each sale is counted at full value with no offset.
Tax professionals are already seeing problems when trying to reconcile the forms with their own records. Sharon Yip, founder of Crypto Tax Advisors, noted discrepancies between the 1099‑DAs received by clients and the crypto tax reports her firm prepared, including missing trades and varying statement formats. She cited one client with more than $300,000 in stablecoin trades on an exchange in 2025 whose 1099‑DA showed less than $100,000 in proceeds.
Andrew Duca, founder of Awaken Tax, said exchanges such as Kraken only sent 1099‑DA forms two weeks before the April 15 deadline, and some forms contained no transaction information at all. He advised taxpayers to compare the forms with their complete transaction history rather than accepting the figures blindly.
Andrew Gordon, executive director of Digital Asset Tax Action, argued that brokers should provide machine‑readable files alongside each 1099‑DA to enable direct import into tax software, noting that manual entry can require hundreds of individual entries for active traders. He also urged exchanges to maintain complete transaction histories, including acquisition dates, amounts paid, fees and transfers.
Looking ahead, from 2026 brokers must generally report cost basis for covered digital assets, which will give taxpayers more information to calculate gains and losses. However, assets transferred to a broker from another exchange or wallet may still fall outside those requirements, meaning taxpayers will continue to need their own records to determine what they owe.
