The first time most retail crypto investors sit down to file their taxes, they discover something that does not happen with their stock broker: the platform does not produce a single document the tax authority will accept on its own. Instead, it produces several files with overlapping but non-identical data, and it is the customer’s job to reconcile them. The exchange’s help centre will sometimes tell you this in a footnote. The marketing material almost never does.
This article walks through the seven records a typical US or UK retail investor needs to keep for a year of crypto activity, what each exchange actually exports, and where the gaps are. The point is not to scare anyone; it is to make clear what you are looking at when you download a "tax report" from a major exchange and find that the numbers do not match what you put on your return.
What the IRS and HMRC actually require
The US Internal Revenue Service treats convertible virtual currency as property, per Notice 2014-21 and the more recent Revenue Ruling 2023-14 on staking. That means every disposal - a sale, a swap, a payment for goods, even using crypto to pay a network fee on another disposal - is a taxable event with its own gain or loss calculation. The IRS’s Publication 551 (Basis of Assets) sets out what the taxpayer must be able to substantiate: the date acquired, the cost basis (in USD, at the rate on the day of acquisition), the date disposed, and the proceeds.
UK HMRC takes a similar position in its Cryptoassets Manual: each disposal is subject to capital gains tax, valued in pound sterling at the rate on the day, with the section 104 pooling method used for cost basis. In both jurisdictions, the burden of producing the records sits with the taxpayer, not the exchange.
The seven records you need
For a clean filing, a retail investor needs to be able to produce each of the following:
- A complete trade history. Every buy, sell and swap, with timestamps to the second, the asset on each side, the quantity, and the price the exchange used.
- A complete deposit and withdrawal history. So that a coin appearing in your wallet can be traced to where it came from. This is what tells you whether an inbound transfer is a purchase, a transfer between your own wallets (not a taxable event), or income.
- A staking and rewards history. Each reward credit, with the USD or GBP value on the day, because per IRS guidance and HMRC manuals, staking rewards are ordinary income at the moment of receipt.
- A fees ledger. Network and trading fees that increased your cost basis or reduced your proceeds, separated from fees that were themselves a taxable disposal of crypto.
- An airdrop and fork ledger. Date received, fair market value at receipt.
- A transfers-between-own-accounts ledger. The single most common reason an exchange’s built-in "tax report" overstates gains is that it treats a transfer to your own hardware wallet as a disposal. You need to be able to flag those.
- A spot price reference for valuation gaps. When the exchange did not record a USD/GBP value (common for coin-to-coin trades on non-USD pairs), you need an independent price source for the day.
What each major exchange actually exports
None of the major exchanges produces all seven of those records in a single file. They produce subsets, sometimes spread across different download menus, and the format changes from year to year. A short audit of the three largest US-accessible exchanges as of early 2026:
| Exchange | What the "tax" export contains | What it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Coinbase | For US customers, a Form 1099-MISC for staking and rewards income above $600 per the threshold in IRS instructions for Form 1099-MISC, plus a "Gain/Loss Report" CSV that aggregates US-priced trades. | The Gain/Loss Report uses Coinbase’s own cost-basis calculation for assets that originated on Coinbase. Anything transferred in from another wallet has no cost basis attached, and Coinbase explicitly notes this in its tax FAQ. |
| Binance (Binance.US for US customers) | A full "Transaction History" CSV covering trades, deposits, withdrawals and rewards, plus a separate "Tax Statement" PDF for Binance.US customers as described on the Binance.US tax statements page. | Coin-to-coin trades on non-USD pairs are recorded with Binance’s book price, not the IRS-relevant USD spot at the second of execution. Reconciliation against an independent price source is the customer’s problem. |
| Kraken | "Trades" and "Ledgers" CSVs documented in the Kraken account history support article. The Ledgers file is the most complete record any of the three big exchanges exports, including staking accruals as their own line items. | No 1099 for non-US customers. No automatic reconciliation against the year-end balance. Transfers to external addresses are flagged but not classified as same-owner-or-not. |
The pattern is consistent: the exchanges produce raw transaction data competently, and they produce a "tax-ready" view that is roughly correct only if every coin you ever held passed through that one exchange and never left it. The moment you used a hardware wallet, a second exchange, or a DeFi protocol, the in-house report is no longer complete.
Where the gaps usually break the return
Three patterns recur in every tax season:
Inbound transfers treated as zero-basis. If you bought BTC on Exchange A, transferred it to Exchange B, and sold on Exchange B, Exchange B’s tax report will often record the proceeds with no cost basis, producing a gain equal to the entire sale price. The fix is to manually attach the original cost basis from Exchange A.
Internal transfers treated as disposals. Moving coins from a hot wallet on an exchange to your own hardware wallet is not a taxable event. Several exchange exports record it as a "withdrawal" with no flag, and naive tax software will treat the withdrawn quantity as a sale at the day’s spot price. This is the single most expensive misclassification we see.
Staking rewards counted only when sold. Per the IRS revenue ruling cited above, the rewards are taxable as ordinary income at the moment of receipt, at fair market value on the day. They are taxable a second time, as a capital gain or loss, when you eventually sell them. An exchange that only records the eventual sale produces a number that understates ordinary income and overstates capital gains. The two errors do not cancel out, because they are taxed at different rates.
Putting it together with a calculator
The reason crypto tax software exists is that the reconciliation work above is genuinely tedious if you have more than a handful of trades. A good calculator takes the raw exports from each exchange (the trade history and ledgers, not the in-house "tax report"), classifies each line, applies a consistent cost-basis method (FIFO, LIFO or HIFO, where the choice itself matters and is the subject of a separate article in this series), and produces a single set of disposals you can put on Form 8949 or the UK self-assessment capital gains pages.
Our own Crypto Tax Calculator is one such tool, designed exactly around the seven records above. The free preview will read your raw exchange CSV and show you how many disposals, how much income and how many transfers it identified, before you commit to anything. The point of mentioning it here is not to sell it but to explain the shape of the problem: any tool that takes your "tax report" and stops there is producing a number that is at best incomplete.
The minimum you should keep, even if you do not file yet
If you are reading this in a year when you do not yet need to file a crypto return - because you have not realised any gains, or because your jurisdiction does not yet require it - the single most useful thing you can do is download the raw transaction history from every exchange you have ever used and keep it. The exchanges occasionally lose data on accounts that have been inactive for years; we have seen customers locked out of historical exports they thought were permanent. The CSVs are small. Save them, encrypt them, store them somewhere you will still have access to in five years.
The future-you who has to reconstruct a 2026 cost basis in 2030 will be grateful.