Crypto tax guides

Not every crypto transaction is taxed the same way. Selling triggers capital gains; staking and mining usually count as income; some moves aren't taxable at all. These guides explain each one, when the taxable event happens, and how to report it.

General information, not tax advice. Treatment varies by country and circumstance, check your local rules or a qualified tax professional.

Guides by taxable event

• Staking tax →, income on receipt, capital gains on sale
• Mining tax →, income at receipt, plus the hobby-vs-business split
• Airdrop tax →, often income at receipt, then gains on sale
• DeFi tax →, swaps, liquidity, lending, yield, and wrapping
• NFT tax →, capital gains, creator income, and the US 28% collectible rule
• Trading tax →, selling, swapping, and spending as disposals
• Gifts & donations tax →, giving, receiving, and charity
• Lost, stolen & worthless crypto →, losses and tax-loss harvesting
• Hard fork tax →, when forked coins are income

Guides by coin

The rules follow the activity, not the ticker, but if you mostly hold one asset, these guides frame the common events for it.

• Bitcoin tax →, Ethereum tax →, BNB tax →, Avalanche tax →, Polkadot tax →, Polygon tax →, Chainlink tax →, Litecoin tax →, and Tron tax →.
• Stablecoins & meme coins, USDC tax →, USDT tax →, and Shiba Inu tax →.

Understand the event, then file it right

Most crypto tax comes down to two questions: is this a disposal (capital gains) or is it income? Each guide answers that for one event type, explains when the taxable moment happens, and shows how to report it. Because treatment varies by country, CryptaTax applies your jurisdiction's rules automatically rather than asking you to pick from a menu. For country-specific specifics, see crypto tax by country →.

The crypto tax landscape, and how the pieces fit together

Crypto tax looks like a sprawl of unrelated rules, but almost everything reduces to one underlying question: is a given event a disposal that produces a capital gain or loss, or is it income valued at the moment you receive it? Once you can place any transaction on that spectrum, the rest is detail. These guides exist to help you place each event correctly and then report it the way your country expects. Below is how the topics connect, so you can navigate straight to the one you need.

Disposals, where capital gains come from

A disposal is any time you part with a crypto asset: selling it for fiat, swapping it for another token, or spending it on goods and services. Each disposal produces a gain or loss equal to the proceeds minus your cost basis, and the way you calculate that basis is the single most important mechanic in crypto tax. Start with the trading guide → for how sales, swaps, and spending are treated, then read the cost basis guide → to understand how each disposal is matched to an earlier acquisition. The tax rates guide → covers how the resulting gains are taxed.

Income, crypto you earn rather than buy

When crypto arrives as a reward rather than a purchase, it is usually income, valued in your home currency on the day you receive it. That receipt value does double duty: it is the income you report now, and it becomes the cost basis that follows those coins until you eventually dispose of them. The income guide → gives the overview, and the event-specific guides go deeper: staking →, mining →, and airdrops →. The common thread is that earning crypto is a taxable moment in itself, separate from any later sale.

Complex on-chain activity

Some activity blends disposals and income in ways that need their own treatment. DeFi is the clearest example: a single strategy can involve swaps, liquidity provision, lending, yield, and token wrapping, each with a different tax character. NFTs add their own wrinkles around collectibles, creator income, and royalties. The DeFi guide → and NFT guide → untangle these so you can see which parts are disposals and which are income, rather than treating a whole protocol as one undifferentiated blob.

Losses, planning, and gifts

Not every guide is about what you owe, several are about managing what you owe. Realised losses can offset gains, and understanding the rules around them is where thoughtful planning happens. The tax-loss harvesting guide → explains how losses are used deliberately, while the wash sale guide → covers the rules that govern selling and rebuying around a loss. Giving and receiving crypto has its own treatment, covered in the gifts guide →. These three connect back to the disposal and cost-basis mechanics above, a harvested loss is still a disposal, and a gift still has a basis that has to be tracked.

Timing and holding periods

How long you hold an asset before disposing of it can change how the resulting gain is treated, and many countries draw a line between short-term and long-term holdings. That makes the date of every acquisition and every disposal matter, not just the amounts. The guides on the disposal side feed directly into this: the cost basis guide → determines which lot you are deemed to have sold, and that lot's acquisition date is what sets the holding period. The tax rates guide → then explains how the holding period maps to the rate you pay. Because the precise thresholds and treatments differ by jurisdiction, the holding-period rules that apply to you sit on crypto tax by country →, the guides explain the mechanism, your country page supplies the numbers.

Why ordering and consistency matter across guides

The guides are deliberately consistent with one another because crypto tax events do not happen in isolation, the basis you establish in an income guide is consumed in a disposal guide, and a loss you harvest under one guide changes the gains you report under another. Reading them as a connected set, rather than as standalone articles, is what gives you an accurate overall position instead of a patchwork of individually-correct-but-disconnected figures. This is also why doing the whole thing in one place pays off: when a single system holds every event, it keeps the basis, dates, and losses consistent across all of them automatically.

How to use these guides together

Most people do not read every guide, they read the two or three that match what they actually did. A practical path is to start with the event that describes your activity (sold something, earned something, used a protocol), confirm whether it is a disposal or income, then follow the links into cost basis and rates to see how the number is finally calculated. Because treatment varies by country, each guide explains the principle while your jurisdiction's specifics, methods, holding-period rules, and forms, live on crypto tax by country →. CryptaTax applies those country rules automatically rather than asking you to pick treatments from a menu, so the guides are there to help you understand and verify, not to make you do the work by hand.

Common mistakes these guides help you avoid

Reading the relevant guide before you file heads off the errors that catch people out most often. Almost all of them come from misplacing an event on the disposal-versus-income spectrum, or from letting cost basis slip.

• Treating a crypto-to-crypto swap as non-taxable. It is a disposal, even though no fiat moves, the trading guide → covers why.
• Forgetting income on rewards. Staking, mining, and airdrop receipts are taxable when they land, not only when sold, see the income guide →.
• Counting self-transfers as sales. Moving coins between your own wallets is not a disposal; it only looks like one if the two sides are not matched.
• Losing the basis of earned coins. The receipt value of income becomes its cost basis; drop it and you over-report the later gain.
• Ignoring losses entirely. Unused losses are missed opportunities to offset gains, the tax-loss harvesting guide → explains how they work.

Record-keeping behind every guide

Whatever the event, the same records make it filable: the date and value of every acquisition and disposal in your home currency, the receipt-day value of anything you earned, and a clear link between transfers so movements between your own wallets are never mistaken for sales. Keeping these as you go, rather than reconstructing them at filing time, is what turns the principles in these guides into a return you can actually defend.

How CryptaTax does this

These guides explain the rules; CryptaTax applies them to your actual transactions. Connect your exchanges and wallets and CryptaTax classifies each event as a disposal or income, prices it on the right date, matches disposals to acquisitions using your country's cost-basis method, and accounts for losses, then produces a report formatted for where you file. You can read any guide to understand a treatment, then see it reflected directly in your numbers. Start with the crypto tax calculator → or browse crypto tax by country →.

Which crypto tax guide should I read first?

Read the one that matches what you did. If you mostly bought and sold, start with the trading guide → and cost basis guide →. If you earned crypto through staking or rewards, start with the income guide →. If you used DeFi protocols or traded NFTs, the DeFi → and NFT → guides are the place to begin.

Is every crypto transaction taxable?

No. Buying crypto with fiat and simply holding it is generally not a taxable event, and moving coins between wallets you control is not a disposal. Tax arises when you dispose of an asset, sell, swap, or spend it, or when you receive crypto as income. The guides exist to help you tell those apart for each specific situation.

How do the income guides relate to the disposal guides?

They are two halves of the same coin. When you earn crypto, the income guides → tell you to report its value on receipt, and that value then becomes the cost basis the cost basis guide → uses when you later sell. So a single batch of staking rewards is touched first by an income guide and later by a disposal guide.

Do these guides replace country-specific advice?

No. They explain the principles that apply broadly, but the exact methods, holding-period rules, and forms depend on where you file. For that, follow the links into crypto tax by country →, and for anything genuinely unusual, check with a qualified local professional.

Can I use losses from one type of crypto to offset gains from another?

In most jurisdictions a realised loss on one crypto disposal can offset a gain on another, since they are the same class of asset, but the precise rules vary. The tax-loss harvesting → and wash sale → guides cover how losses are used and the limits that apply, and your country page confirms the local position.

Where to start in these crypto tax guides

If you are not sure which guide you need first, start with the two that underpin everything else: cost basis, because it sets the gain on every disposal, and income, because it decides what is taxed on receipt versus on sale. From there, read the guides that match what you actually do, staking and mining if you earn rewards, trading and DeFi if you are active on-chain, NFTs if you create or collect, and airdrops or gifts for the less obvious receipts.

Two guides are worth reading before you file in any year: tax-loss harvesting, which can reduce what you owe, and wash sale timing, which determines whether a harvested loss actually counts in your country. Underneath all of them sits the same principle: the tax follows your transactions, so the real work is keeping a complete, reconciled record, which is exactly what CryptaTax builds for you before any of these rules are applied. Whichever guide you start with, the country-specific detail lives on your crypto tax by country page.

However you use these guides, treat them as the general shape of each topic rather than the last word for your situation. Crypto tax rules vary by country and change over time, so the specific rates, allowances and deadlines always come from your own country's guidance, the guides here explain how the mechanics work so those specifics make sense when you apply them, and so you know which questions to ask before you file.

Building a once-a-year crypto tax routine

The guides in this hub explain the rules, but most of the pain at filing time comes from doing everything at once after a year of forgetting. A light routine fixes that. Treat your crypto tax as a habit you touch a few times a year rather than a panic you face once: keep every exchange and wallet connected so activity is captured as it happens, glance at anything unusual while you still remember the context, and read whichever guide matches a new kind of transaction the first time you make it. By the time a filing deadline approaches, the work is mostly review rather than reconstruction.

A practical order helps. Start each season by confirming your accounts are all linked, then separate what you earned from what you disposed of, the two halves every guide keeps returning to. Earned crypto follows the income guide and its event-specific siblings; sales and swaps follow the trading guide and the cost basis guide. Only then do the country-specific numbers come into play, which is why the rate, allowance and deadline detail always lives on your crypto tax by country page rather than in the guides themselves.

The reason this works is that crypto tax events are cumulative: the basis you set this year becomes next year's opening position, so a clean record compounds into less work every season, while a neglected one compounds into more. CryptaTax is built around exactly this rhythm, it holds your full history in one place, keeps basis and dates consistent across years, and turns the principles in these guides into a report you can actually file. The guides teach you to recognise each event; the routine keeps that knowledge from going to waste the moment you close the tab. None of this asks you to become a tax expert, it asks you to keep a complete record and read the right guide at the right moment, and to let the calculation follow from clean data rather than heroic year-end reconstruction. Get that habit in place once and each subsequent year is mostly a quick review of a position that was already kept current as you went.