Coinbase: what to export, and what the numbers leave out
Getting your Coinbase history out takes about thirty seconds. Making it produce a defensible tax number takes more, because every platform loses something on the way — and the parts it loses are the parts your tax authority never sees either. Here is exactly what we read from this export, what routinely breaks, and what a free scan shows you before you pay anything.
Export your Coinbase history
- Open Coinbase on the web → your profile → Reports
- Generate a transaction-history report — all time, CSV
- Drop the file into the free scan
Drop the file straight into the free scan — the format is detected automatically, nothing is uploaded to a third party, and unsaved scans delete themselves after seven days.
What happens when you drop it in
The format is fingerprinted from its own column headers, every row becomes a ledger entry with the source row cited beside it, and lots are rebuilt wallet by wallet. Rows we cannot price defensibly are listed as skipped with the reason — never booked at zero and never averaged away.
What breaks on Coinbase
These are not hypotheticals: each one is a case our own importer handles or deliberately refuses to guess at.
Convert rows are two taxable events, not one. “Converted 1.0 ETH to 25.0 SOL” disposes of the ETH and acquires the SOL at the same USD value. Tools that read it as a single line both lose a disposal and invent a missing-basis gap on the coin you received — we read the counter-leg out of the Notes column and book both sides.
Coins that arrived from another exchange or a wallet have no purchase price here. Coinbase reports the sale; the cost lives in the export you have not uploaded yet. Until you add that source we mark the lot conservatively and show the gap rather than filling it in silently.
Rewards, staking income and Coinbase Earn are ordinary income at the value on the day they landed — and that same value becomes the cost basis of those coins. Miss the link and you are taxed twice on one event.
What the reporting leaves out
The 1099-DA reports proceeds Coinbase can see. It cannot report what you paid on another platform, so transferred-in coins arrive with a blank or zero basis and the whole sale reads as profit.
Fees baked into a Convert are frequently missing from the basis side of the form — a small, systematic overstatement across many rows.
This importer is drafted from Coinbase's documented export format and is locked against real exports as customers supply them. Where a row does not match what we expect, the scan says so instead of quietly dropping it.
See what your Coinbase history actually says
Free, about three minutes, no account and no card. You see the corrected numbers and the gaps before deciding whether any of it is worth paying to fix.
Other platforms
Every guide follows the same shape: the export, what we read, what breaks, what the reporting misses.
Kraken · Binance · Crypto.com · KuCoin · Cash App · Crypto tax, platform by platform
integrations-2026.1 · reviewed Aug 2026 · ClearBasis is tax software, not a law firm, accounting firm or tax preparer. Platform names are used to describe file formats we read; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.