Kraken: what to export, and what the numbers leave out
Getting your Kraken 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 Kraken history
- Kraken → History → Export
- Choose Ledgers, 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 Kraken
These are not hypotheticals: each one is a case our own importer handles or deliberately refuses to guess at.
Kraken's ledger uses legacy asset codes — XXBT is BTC, ZUSD is USD, and staking assets appear as ETH2.S or ATOM.S. We normalize them back to the coin you actually hold, so your BTC does not split into two unrelated assets.
A trade is two ledger rows joined by a refid, never one line. Reading rows individually produces half-trades: a disposal with no acquisition, or an acquisition with no cost. We pair them before anything reaches the ledger.
Ledger rows carry no USD price. For staking and reward rows that means the value has to come from a price source, not from the file — and where we cannot defend a price, the row is skipped visibly instead of being booked at zero.
What the reporting leaves out
Kraken reports what left the account. Coins you sent in from a wallet or another exchange carry no basis on the form, so their entire sale price is treated as gain.
Staking rewards already taxed as income keep that value as basis — a link the form does not make for you.
This importer is drafted from Kraken'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 Kraken 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.
Coinbase · 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.