Start with the transaction in each account

An exchange that sold something for you did a different thing than an exchange that simply held coins in your account. Form 1099-DA follows the first. Custody alone, a deposit arriving, a withdrawal leaving: none of those is a sale the platform effected on your behalf, so none of them on its own puts a statement in your mailbox.

That is the whole hinge, and it is why a platform's name tells you almost nothing about whether a form is owed to you.

The duty itself comes from IRC section 6045 as amended by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, implemented for custodial digital-asset brokers by final Treasury Decision 10000 (IRS, Digital assets).

T.D. 10000, 89 Fed. Reg.

56480 (July 9, 2024) is what turned that statute into operating rules for brokers (IRS, Instructions for Form 1099-DA). The broker categories it reaches are broader than "exchange": custodial trading platforms, certain hosted wallet providers, digital-asset kiosks and ATMs, and certain payment processors. Noncustodial DeFi front ends are not on that list, because T.D.

10021 was repealed by H.J. Res. 25 / Public Law 119-5 on April 10, 2025 (IRS, Internal Revenue Bulletin 2025-30).

If that is where your activity happened, you can check activity that may not appear on Form 1099-DA rather than waiting on paper that was never coming.

Run this check for each account

Work one account at a time. Five steps, and the fifth is always a next action.

  1. Record the tax year. Write down the year the transaction settled, not the year you noticed it. This is the field people get wrong most often.
  2. Identify the platform's custodial role. Did the platform hold your assets and have the ability to act on them? Hosted wallet providers and kiosks can qualify; a self-custody wallet you control does not.
  3. Identify an effected sale versus custody only. A trade, a conversion, a spend routed through the platform: those are dispositions the platform effected. An incoming deposit or an outgoing transfer to your own wallet is not.
  4. Recognize an exclusion or a noncustodial route. If the activity sits outside custodial broker reporting, stop chasing a form and use check activity that may not appear on Form 1099-DA.
  5. Assign a next step. Pick exactly one of these:
    • Check this account for a statement - custodial platform, effected sale, year identified.
    • Use the activity guide for this transaction - the activity is outside custodial broker reporting.
    • Ask the platform what happened in this transaction - you cannot tell from the record in front of you.

That third outcome is not a failure. When you land there, the question to ask is narrow: which record would establish that a sale occurred and that this platform held the asset? A trade confirmation, an order ID, a fill price.

Ask for that, not for "my 1099."

Match the tax year to the statement season

The sales year and the delivery season are two different years, and conflating them produces more phantom missing forms than any other single mistake.

Brokers must report gross proceeds on Form 1099-DA for covered transactions effected on or after January 1, 2025 (IRS, Digital assets) - so 2025 sales are reported to you during 2026.

For 2025 forms, February 17, 2026 is the stated general recipient-statement furnishing deadline (current figure in the IRS's 2025 General Instructions, page 1, Reminders).

Basis is the part that shifts a year later.

Covered-asset basis reporting begins for sales after 2025, and the relevant covered holdings are defined by acquisition on or after January 1, 2026 with continuous custody at the broker; basis for noncovered holdings is optional for the broker to report (IRS, Instructions for Form 1099-DA).

Whether a specific lot is covered is its own diagnosis, and it lives in the Form 1099-DA guide.

Sales year, reporting scope, and statement season

Sales tax year What the broker reports Statement season Recipient timing
2025 Gross proceeds on covered transactions effected on or after January 1, 2025; basis reporting not yet required 2026 February 17, 2026, the stated general recipient furnishing deadline
2026 Gross proceeds plus required basis for covered holdings acquired on or after January 1, 2026 and held continuously with the broker Following-year season Check the IRS Instructions for Form 1099-DA for the applicable year rather than counting forward on a calendar

One distinction to keep straight while reading that table: the date a broker must furnish your copy and the date the broker must file with the IRS are separate deadlines. They are not the same number, and the filing date is not something to infer from your recipient date.

Separate the deadline from a platform's availability notice

A support page saying "2025 tax forms will be available in your account by [date]" is an operational schedule, not a legal extension. Companies publish those to manage their own queues. The federal furnishing rule does not move because a status page says something later.

Read an issuer notice the way you would read any dated document, checking four fields: which entity is actually named as the issuer, which tax year the notice covers, what availability it states, and through which channel delivery happens.

A notice that is vague on the tax year is the one that wastes your February. For issuer-by-issuer statements, check which exchanges say they issue Form 1099-DA rather than generalizing from one platform's blog post.

One reader, three account checks

Illustrative accounts, not a real case file. Three checks, three different conclusions:

Account What the record shows Annotation
A A sale executed on a custodial platform during 2025 Match the 2025 statement to the 2026 season - the sales year is not the delivery year
B A single incoming deposit, nothing else This deposit alone does not establish an effected sale
C A line labeled only "conversion," counterparty unclear Identify the transaction before inferring that a form is missing

Callout - fields to read on a platform notice: issuer name as stated · relevant tax year · date the notice was published · delivery channel (in-account download, email link, mailed paper). If any of those four is missing from the notice, you do not yet know what the notice promised you.

Accounts B and C are where readers write to us most often, and the two errors behind them are the same two every season: treating a transfer as a sale, and treating the sales year as the delivery season.

Check your electronic-delivery preference

Electronic delivery of a payee statement runs on your affirmative consent.

Where a customer has not consented, the existing rule contemplates furnishing on paper - that is how Treasury and the IRS described the framework in the proposed rule published March 6, 2026 (Treasury/IRS, Electronic Furnishing of Payee Statements Regarding Digital Asset Sales by Brokers).

That March 2026 document is a proposal at its source date. It would allow a broker to offer electronic delivery without a paper alternative, while still obtaining the customer's positive consent and meeting the proposed delivery safeguards. Its applicability clause starts with statements due on or after January 1 of the calendar year following publication of final regulations, rather than fixing January 1, 2027.

A proposal is not an enacted change.

Practically, this means opening the account's tax or communications settings and reading what you chose, possibly years ago and possibly on the other side of an email address you no longer check. An email announcing that documents are ready is a notification, not the statement. Download the document itself and confirm the form type and the tax year printed on it.

A PDF titled "tax report" generated by a platform's dashboard is a convenience summary; Form 1099-DA says Form 1099-DA on it.

If the form is missing, check these records next

Before you contact anyone, run the five-step check above on that specific account. Most "missing form" cases resolve at step 1 or step 3, because the sale was in a different year than the reader assumed or because the activity was a transfer.

If the check clears and you still have nothing, work through the documents in this order:

  • Tax year on the underlying transaction. Confirm the settlement year from the trade record, not from memory or a dashboard's default date filter.
  • Account activity export. Pull the full-year CSV or statement. Look for an order or fill, with a counterparty on the other side.
  • Platform tax documents area. Check the in-account documents section directly, including prior-year tabs, since an unopened current-year document often sits one click away from where the email link pointed.
  • Delivery preference and contact details. Consent status, email on file, mailing address on file.
  • A focused inquiry to the broker. Ask whether the platform effected a sale in your account for that tax year, and whether a recipient statement was furnished and by which channel. A specific question gets a specific answer; "where is my 1099" gets a link to a help article.

Whatever the platform sends or fails to send, your own obligation to report applicable digital-asset dispositions and income exists independently of receiving a broker information return (IRS, Digital assets).

That is not a statement that custody or every transfer creates tax; it is a statement that the paperwork and the reporting duty are separate things. Where the activity sits outside custodial broker reporting entirely, check activity that may not appear on Form 1099-DA.

If it arrives after you have already filed

A statement landing in late March after an early-February filing is annoying, and it is also common. Nothing about the timing means something went wrong.

Do three things with it. Keep the document - save the PDF with the tax year in the filename. Confirm which tax year is printed on it, because a late arrival is sometimes a prior-year form.

Then put it beside the return you filed and the account records behind it and see whether the figures line up, which is the actual work: compare the statement with your filing records.

If a real difference shows up after that comparison, review the steps for a possible return correction. Comparing is not the same as concluding that a correction is required, and this article does not make that call for you.

FAQ

Do foreign crypto exchanges report to the IRS on Form 1099-DA?

For 2025 sales, a foreign exchange does not automatically owe a Form 1099-DA: the IRS says the requirement generally applies to U.S. brokers, and a customer of a foreign broker may receive no form.

A platform's headquarters alone does not settle the question, since the IRS instructions include certain U.S. branches in the U.S. digital-asset broker definition.

Report your taxable digital-asset transactions on your U.S. return even if that broker sends no Form 1099-DA.

When the form arrives, move to the right next check

One warning to carry into the statement: the proceeds figure a broker reports is not your gain, and reading it as one is the fastest way to overstate what you owe. Decode the fields where they are documented, in read the boxes on your Form 1099-DA.

Activity that never belonged on the form routes to check activity that may not appear on Form 1099-DA instead.

Once you have the statement, read the boxes on your Form 1099-DA and compare what it reports with the records for that account.

Sources