Does Coinbase report to the IRS?

What the rule actually says

Under the final digital-asset broker regulations, custodial brokers (centralized exchanges, hosted wallet providers, some payment processors and kiosks) must report gross proceeds from digital-asset sales on the new Form 1099-DA for transactions effected on or after January 1, 2025; those first forms were furnished to customers and filed with the IRS in early 2026. Decentralized/non-custodial brokers that never take possession of the assets are not covered by this filing requirement.

Cost-basis reporting is phased in one year later: brokers must report basis only for 'covered' digital assets, meaning assets acquired for cash or property on or after January 1, 2026 in an account with that same broker and held there until the broker effects the disposition. For the 2025 tax year, IRS copies of Form 1099-DA carry gross proceeds only (several brokers still showed basis on the customer copy, marked as not reported to the IRS).

A digital asset transferred into a broker from another platform or from a self-custody wallet is expressly a NONCOVERED security under the Form 1099-DA instructions, and the broker is not required to report its cost basis. The broker checks the noncovered box (box 9) and may leave the basis, acquisition-date and gain/loss boxes blank without penalty. In practice this means a 1099-DA from the platform where you sold will usually show proceeds with missing or platform-guessed basis whenever the coins were bought somewhere else and moved in - the taxpayer, not the broker, has to supply the true basis.

The number no form contains

A broker reports what it can see: the proceeds of a sale it executed. It cannot report what you paid on a different platform, in a wallet, or years earlier — and under the final regulations it does not have to. Coins that arrived from somewhere else are noncovered: the basis box can be blank, and no penalty follows. The IRS matching computer then treats a blank basis as zero, so the entire sale price reads as profit. That gap is not an error by the exchange; it is the design, and it is yours to close with evidence.

Sources

• Coinbase Help - IRS Form 1099-DA — retrieved 2026-08-23
• IRS - Digital assets (broker reporting timeline) — retrieved 2026-08-23
• IRS - Final regulations and related IRS guidance for reporting by brokers on sales and exchanges of digital as — retrieved 2026-08-23
• IRS - Instructions for Form 1099-DA (rev. Feb. 18, 2026): covered vs noncovered, transferred-in assets — retrieved 2026-08-23

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