- Crypto Tax Scrutiny: The IRS monitors omitted crypto transactions, increasing risks for traders who fail to report all activities.
- Trump’s Crypto Push: Speculation rises over Bitcoin tax cuts, but investors must still comply with IRS regulations in 2025.
- Regulatory Uncertainty: Experts stress the need for clear laws on crypto classifications to guide SEC and IRS enforcement.
Spring is nearly approaching, indicating that it’s time for cryptocurrency investors to settle their dues — the IRS. Miles Fuller from Taxbit explains to The Agenda how Trump and DOGE are disrupting regulation.
Crypto Tax Regulations Under the Trump Administration
For American citizens, tax season is upon us, and for cryptocurrency investors, this involves reviewing various exchanges, wallets, decentralized platforms, and more to compile extensive data and try to adhere to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cryptocurrency tax regulations, which change as frequently as sand in a desert.
Despite President Donald Trump’s administration demonstrating a commitment to pro-crypto regulatory reform — with speculation that capital gains taxes might be eliminated for Bitcoin and certain US cryptocurrencies — legislative initiatives and the transition of policy concepts into law require time. This indicates that crypto investors in the US must still be responsible for filing their taxes in 2025, similar to prior years.
In Episode 56 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung interviewed Miles Fuller, Taxbit’s director of government solutions, to delve into the intricate realm of crypto taxes and the shifting regulatory environment during the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, referred to as DOGE.
Common Tax Reporting Practices Among Crypto Traders
In terms of tax filing, crypto traders have employed various strategies throughout the years, some of which may be debatable. Due to the absence of clear regulations from the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission in the last ten years, many investors have largely navigated their tax filings without proper guidance.
Certain traders only disclose their activities on centralized exchanges, omitting their actions on decentralized platforms such as Uniswap and any swaps conducted through Web3 wallets like MetaMask. Some try to document each individual transaction, exchange, and liquidity pool staking that they participated in that year.
When questioned about which approach is the most intelligent, Fuller — who worked for 15 years as a lawyer at the IRS — stated that purposefully omitting specific transactions from tax returns is “a deliberate attempt to obscure their tax reporting, and those were the aspects the IRS was monitoring.”
“That form of tax fraud was a top concern for compliance in this field,” he remarked. “It was the notion of individuals attempting to divide the baby.” Fuller emphatically recommended that individuals declare all their transactions, rather than just a few.
The Crypto Regulation and Market Structure Laws
“There’s a strong likelihood that the assets you possess in those custodial exchanges, if they happen to reach the IRS’ attention, and if they are flagged in the vast operations of the government for scrutiny, they will reveal where assets were transferred from those centralized locations you disclosed, and they will find out about your onchain activities.”
At that stage, it’s likely the IRS will begin inquiring why that user failed to report the remaining transactions. When questioned about DOGE’s recent efforts to reform government agencies and his vision for the ideal situation regarding crypto-friendly regulation at the SEC and IRS, Fuller emphasized that the key priority is the enactment of a market structure law that distinctly outlines when cryptocurrencies and stablecoins qualify as securities versus commodities.
“Even as someone in taxation, I receive numerous inquiries about, ‘How can I find out what the regulations are?’” he stated. “Thus, the most significant, influential aspect might be a legislative structure encompassing all of this to establish clarity for the sector.”
