For US citizens, tax season has arrived, and for crypto investors, this process entails checking multiple exchanges, wallets, decentralized exchanges and more to organize heaps of data and attempt to comply with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) crypto tax policies, which shift like grains of sand in a desert.
Although President Donald Trump’s administration has proven itself to be dedicated to pro-crypto regulatory reform — and there are even rumors that capital gains taxes could be canceled for Bitcoin (BTC) and some US-based cryptocurrencies — legislative proposals and the actual transformation of policy ideas to law take time. This means US crypto investors are still on the hook for filing their taxes in 2025, just as they have in previous years.
On Episode 56 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung spoke with Taxbit’s director of government solutions, Miles Fuller, to explore the complex world of crypto taxes along with the evolving regulatory landscape under the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE.
To file taxes or not to file taxes: A no-brainer question
When it comes to filing taxes, crypto traders have used a variety of strategies over the years, some of them possibly questionable. Given the lack of direct regulatory clarity from the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission over the past decade, many investors have more or less felt their way through the dark when attempting to file their taxes.
Some traders only report their activity on centralized exchanges and exclude their actions on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and the swaps they may have made on Web3 wallets like MetaMask. Others attempt to report every single transaction, swap and liquidity pool staking that they participated in that year.
When asked which method is smartest, Fuller — who spent 15 years as an attorney at the IRS — said that intentionally leaving certain transactions off one’s tax returns is “an affirmative effort at obfuscating their tax reporting, and those were the things the IRS was looking for.”
“That type of tax fraud was a high priority for compliance in this area,” he added. “It was the idea of people that were trying to split the baby.”
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Fuller strongly suggested that users report all of their transactions, not just some of them:
“There’s a high probability that assets you have in those custodial exchanges, if that comes across the IRS’ desk, and if it, in the big pipeline of the machinations of the government, were to get picked up by the government for an examination, they’re going to discover where assets moved out of those centralized places you reported on, and they will uncover that you had this onchain activity.”
At that point, chances are the IRS will start asking questions about why that user didn’t report the rest of those transactions.
DOGE and the future of crypto regulation
When asked about the recent actions from DOGE to overhaul government agencies, and what he sees as the best imaginable scenario for crypto-beneficial regulation at the SEC and the IRS, Fuller said what’s most important is that some sort of market structure law is passed that clearly defines when cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are securities vs. commodities.
“Even as a tax person, I get lots of questions about, ‘How do I know what the rules are?’” he said. “So, the biggest, most impactful thing could be some legislative framework around all of that to create clarity for the industry.”
“You’re going to get the most return on your investment from that type of legislative framework and getting that pushed through Congress and then building from there.”
To hear more from Fuller’s conversation with The Agenda — including his views on the best practices for those filing crypto taxes — listen to the episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!
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This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
