Form 1099-DA didn't exist a year ago. Now it's sitting in crypto investors' inboxes, and for a lot of people it raises more questions than it answers: why is the cost basis box empty, why did the form show up in March instead of February, and does any of this cover the DeFi trade made back in the spring.
Form 1099-DA, officially titled "Digital Asset Proceeds From Broker Transactions," is the IRS's new mechanism for getting crypto exchange data reported directly to both the agency and the taxpayer. The rule behind it phases in over three tax years, a DeFi-specific version of it was repealed by Congress in April 2025, and several major exchanges are already running behind on this season's deadline. This guide covers what the form actually reports, the full 2025-to-2027 timeline, and, just as important, the crypto activity that never shows up on it at all.
Key Takeaways
- 2025 tax year forms report gross proceeds only, with cost basis not required for this round, so you still need your own records to calculate your gain or loss.
- Cost basis reporting starts with 2026 transactions, but only for "covered securities," assets bought on or after January 1, 2026 and held continuously at the same broker. Those forms arrive in early 2027.
- Congress repealed the DeFi-specific broker rule on April 10, 2025, so only centralized, custodial exchanges are subject to Form 1099-DA reporting today.
- The form doesn't report DeFi swaps, most NFT activity, staking rewards, or wallet-to-wallet transfers between accounts you own.
- Brokers had until February 17, 2026 to furnish 2025 tax year statements, and several large exchanges have already said this season's forms would arrive later than that.
What Is Form 1099-DA?
Form 1099-DA carries the full name Digital Asset Proceeds From Broker Transactions, according to the IRS's own About Form 1099-DA page. Brokers must file it with the IRS and send a copy to the customer. The term covers custodial trading platforms, certain hosted wallet providers, digital asset kiosks, and certain payment processors that take possession of customer digital assets.
It works on the same basic principle as Form 1099-B for stock brokerages: your broker tells the IRS what you sold and, increasingly, what you originally paid for it. That word "increasingly" matters, because the cost-basis half of that promise is being phased in gradually rather than arriving all at once, which is exactly where most of the confusion around this form comes from.
For most investors, Form 1099-DA changes very little about the underlying tax rules themselves. Digital assets remain property, not currency, for federal tax purposes, and every sale, trade, or disposal is still reportable on Form 8949 whether or not a broker sends you a form. What changes is who else already has that same data before you file: the IRS.
That connects directly to a question every filer already answers on Form 1040: whether you received, sold, exchanged, or otherwise disposed of a digital asset or a financial interest in a digital asset during the year. Form 1099-DA gives the IRS an independent way to check that answer against what a custodial broker actually reported, which is a meaningfully different situation than the honor-system reporting that applied before broker information returns existed for crypto at all.
The Reporting Timeline: From Gross Proceeds to Cost Basis
The single most confusing part of Form 1099-DA is figuring out which tax year requires what. The IRS phased the rule in across two stages, and mixing up which stage applies to which form is a common source of confusion.
For the 2025 tax year, the forms issued this filing season, brokers must report gross proceeds for transactions effected on or after January 1, 2025, with no requirement to include cost basis on this round of forms. The number in the proceeds box is what you received from a sale, not your gain, so you still need your own purchase records to work out what you actually owe. For strategies on managing your cost basis, see our guide to crypto tax-loss harvesting.
For the 2026 tax year, cost basis reporting begins, but only for what the IRS calls covered securities, a distinction the next section covers in full. Brokers must report basis on certain transactions effected on or after January 1, 2026, per the same IRS guidance, with those forms arriving in early 2027.
| Tax Year | What's Reported | When You'll See the Form |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Gross proceeds required; cost basis voluntary | Early 2026 (furnished by February 17, 2026) |
| 2026 | Gross proceeds plus cost basis for covered securities | Early 2027 |
| 2027 and later | Same coverage as 2026, custodial brokers only | Early 2028 |
The IRS also built in transition relief for this first filing year. Under its own guidance, the agency will not impose penalties for failure to file and furnish Forms 1099-DA where a broker makes a good-faith effort to do so correctly and on time. That relief protects brokers working through a brand-new reporting format. It does not extend your own filing deadline.
Covered vs. Noncovered Securities: Why the Distinction Matters
Whether your broker owes you a cost basis figure comes down to one distinction: covered versus noncovered securities.
A digital asset counts as a covered security only if you acquired it on or after January 1, 2026 through a broker that provided custodial services, and it stayed in that same custodial account until the broker processed the disposal. Moving it to a different broker breaks that chain: under the current final regulations, any digital asset transferred into a broker's custody is automatically treated as a noncovered security by the receiving broker, with no exception for a transfer statement carrying cost basis along with it. When a digital asset qualifies as covered, your broker must report your cost basis starting with the 2026 tax year.
Everything else counts as a noncovered security, according to the IRS's Form 1099-DA instructions. That includes any digital asset acquired before 2026, anything bought elsewhere and transferred into a broker's custody afterward, and holdings tied to certain exempt accounts. For noncovered securities, cost-basis reporting is voluntary. A broker can check the box to report it anyway, but the instructions confirm there's no penalty under the standard information-return rules for leaving it blank.
In practice, that means an investor who has held the same coins since 2021 and moved them between exchanges a few times shouldn't expect a broker-supplied cost basis anytime soon, even once the 2026 rules take effect. Your own transaction records, reconciled across every wallet and exchange you've used, remain the only reliable source for that number for the foreseeable future, including when calculating crypto losses.
Your cost basis, tracked automatically
CoinTracking imports your transaction history from over 400 exchanges and wallets and calculates your cost basis lot by lot, whether or not your broker's 1099-DA includes one.
What Gets Reported on Form 1099-DA
Beyond the proceeds-versus-basis distinction, the Form 1099-DA instructions set a few reporting thresholds worth knowing before you assume every transaction shows up.
| Transaction Type | De Minimis Threshold |
|---|---|
| PDAP (processor of digital asset payments) sales | $600 per year |
| Qualifying stablecoin sales | $10,000 per year |
| Specified NFT sales | $600 per year |
Backup withholding also applies to Form 1099-DA the same way it applies to other information returns. If you haven't furnished your taxpayer identification number correctly, your broker must withhold a flat 24% rate from your proceeds. The IRS's Form 1099-DA instructions also point to Notice 2025-33, which provides transitional relief from backup withholding specifically for this early rollout period, so check with your broker before assuming the full 24% applies to your account.
Even the reporting rules above are still being refined. The IRS released corrections to the 2025 instructions in January 2026, including updates to the de minimis rules covered above, and Form 1099-DA remains excluded from the Combined Federal/State Filing Program for the 2025 tax year, per the IRS's own About Form 1099-DA page. A new information return this complex getting corrections within its first year isn't unusual, but it's a reason to check the current instructions rather than assume last season's rules still apply exactly as written.
What Form 1099-DA Does Not Report
The form looks like it covers everything at first glance, but plenty of common crypto activity never appears on it, at least not yet.
- DeFi swaps and trades through non-custodial protocols. Since the April 2025 repeal covered below, decentralized and non-custodial platforms sit outside broker reporting entirely.
- Wrapping and unwrapping tokens, providing liquidity, and certain lending arrangements, which stay excluded for now pending further guidance under Notice 2024-57.
- Staking rewards, crypto interest, and other reward payments, which fall under a separate reporting framework rather than Form 1099-DA itself.
- NFT sales below the $600 threshold, and NFTs that don't meet the instructions' definition of a "specified" NFT.
- Wallet-to-wallet transfers between accounts you own. Moving crypto from an exchange to your own hardware wallet isn't a disposal, so nothing gets reported as a sale, and our guide on whether you have to report crypto if you don't sell covers why that holds even when large amounts move.
None of this means that activity is untaxed. It means Form 1099-DA is one useful data point among several, not a full substitute for reconciling every platform you've actually used during the year.
The DeFi Broker Rule Repeal, Explained
Much of the confusion around what Form 1099-DA covers traces back to a rule that no longer exists.
In December 2024, the Treasury finalized a rule, later designated Treasury Decision 10021, that would have classified certain decentralized finance platforms and front-ends as brokers, pulling them into the same Form 1099-DA reporting regime as centralized exchanges. On April 10, 2025, President Trump signed H.J. Res. 25, a resolution passed under the Congressional Review Act that formally disapproves that rule.
Under the Congressional Review Act, a disapproved rule can't be reissued in substantially similar form without new legislation from Congress. That makes this more than a temporary pause. The practical effect, confirmed by the IRS's own final regulations, is that decentralized or non-custodial brokers are excluded from current requirements. Only platforms that take custody of your digital assets, meaning centralized exchanges, hosted wallet providers, kiosks, and certain payment processors, remain covered by Form 1099-DA today.
A swap executed directly through a decentralized exchange protocol (such as Uniswap), with custody never passing to a centralized intermediary, doesn't generate a Form 1099-DA regardless of trade size. It's still a taxable disposal you're required to report yourself on Form 8949. The repeal changed who reports it to the IRS on your behalf, not whether it's taxable in the first place.
Wallet-by-Wallet Cost Basis and the Rev. Proc. 2024-28 Safe Harbor
Before this broker-reporting regime existed, many crypto investors calculated cost basis by pooling every unit of a given coin across every wallet and exchange they used, often called a universal method. That approach doesn't work under the current rules, which require basis to be tracked separately for each wallet or account. The IRS addressed exactly that problem in Revenue Procedure 2024-28, which created a one-time safe harbor for splitting a pooled cost basis into separate wallet-level buckets.
Under that safe harbor, taxpayers holding digital assets acquired before January 1, 2025 could reasonably allocate their existing unused basis to the specific units held in each wallet or account, using either a specific-unit method that tracks the actual acquisition date and cost of each unit, or a global allocation method that orders units and allocates basis to the remaining pool within each wallet. Once made, that allocation is irrevocable. The completion deadline runs separately for each type of digital asset you hold, not for your portfolio as a whole, so Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example, are tracked independently rather than as one combined window.
A specific-unit allocation for a given coin had to be completed before the earlier of your first disposal of that coin on or after January 1, 2025, or the due date, including extensions, of your 2025 federal return, which can fall as late as October 2026. For global allocation, only the written rule describing your method had to be in your records before January 1, 2025; actually completing the allocation isn't due until the later of those same two dates, so it can extend past the point where a specific-unit allocation for the same coin would already have closed.
If you didn't document a specific-unit allocation for a coin before your first 2025 disposal of that coin, that option is off the table for that coin specifically, and its wallet-by-wallet cost basis instead follows the default ordering rules under the regulations, generally first-in, first-out calculated separately within each account. For any coin you haven't sold yet, both a specific-unit and a global allocation may still be available under the timing above. Our dedicated guide on Revenue Procedure 2024-28 walks through the allocation mechanics in more depth.
Stop reconstructing cost basis by hand
CoinTracking reconciles every exchange and wallet you've used into one accurate cost basis, so your Form 8949 doesn't depend on whether your broker's 1099-DA arrived on time.
Why Some Form 1099-DA Statements Are Arriving Late This Season
Brokers were required to furnish 2025 tax year Form 1099-DA statements to recipients by February 17, 2026, according to the IRS's general instructions for information returns. Several major exchanges missed that window this filing season regardless.
According to industry reporting, Coinbase told customers that 2025 tax year Form 1099-DA statements wouldn't be available until mid-March 2026, roughly a month past the IRS deadline. Other large exchanges pointed users toward similarly delayed timelines while working through first-year compliance with a form that didn't exist for the 2024 tax year.
The IRS anticipated some of this. Its good-faith transition relief for the 2025 filing season gives brokers room to get a brand-new reporting format right without an automatic penalty for early mistakes, but that relief doesn't extend your own filing deadline. Your return is still due on the standard date regardless of when your broker's form actually shows up.
If your Form 1099-DA hasn't arrived yet, treat that as a reason to start reconciling your own transaction history now rather than a reason to wait. Exchange CSV exports, wallet records, and your own purchase confirmations already establish your cost basis and holding period, whether the official form is running on time or not.
It's also worth double-checking a late or newly arrived Form 1099-DA against your own records rather than filing it at face value. First-year information returns for a new asset class are where errors tend to cluster, whether that's a missing transaction, a duplicated one, or proceeds attributed to the wrong tax year. Catching a mismatch before you file is far less painful than amending a return after the fact.
What to Do With Your Form 1099-DA
Once your Form 1099-DA arrives, whether on time or late, every disposal it reports needs to make its way onto Form 8949 and then get summarized on Schedule D. That's true whether or not the form includes a cost basis figure.
For 2025 tax year forms, since cost basis reporting was voluntary and most brokers left it out, you'll need your own records, purchase price, acquisition date, and any fees, to complete that side of the calculation yourself. Reconciling that by hand across even a handful of exchanges gets tedious fast, and it gets harder once wallet-by-wallet tracking factors in. Crypto tax software like CoinTracking imports transaction history from over 400 exchanges and wallets and calculates cost basis, holding period, and gain or loss automatically, which matters most in exactly this transition period, before brokers are doing that work for you. For the complete walkthrough of every form involved, from Form 8949 through Schedule D and the digital-asset question on Form 1040, see our full guide to reporting crypto earnings, or our broader guide to US crypto taxes for the complete picture.
Conclusion
Form 1099-DA is a genuine expansion of how much visibility the IRS has into crypto activity, but it isn't a complete picture yet. This season's forms show what you sold and nothing about what you paid for it, DeFi activity sits outside the reporting regime entirely since the April 2025 repeal, and even the fuller version arriving for 2026 transactions only covers assets bought after the cutover. Until broker reporting catches up, the responsibility for an accurate cost basis across every wallet, exchange, and tax year still sits with you.
Get your full crypto tax picture, not just the broker's half
CoinTracking has tracked crypto portfolios and calculated taxes for over 2.2 million users since 2012, across more than 400 exchanges and wallets, filling in exactly the cost-basis gap Form 1099-DA still leaves open.
Disclaimer
The information provided in this article is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, tax, or legal advice. Form 1099-DA reporting requirements are being phased in over several tax years and remain subject to further IRS guidance and change. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with a qualified tax professional about their specific situation before making decisions based on the information presented here. The author and publisher are not responsible for any losses or damages incurred as a result of using the information in this article.
