Does Kraken Report to the IRS?

Yes. Kraken is a custodial broker. For tax year 2025, it files Form 1099-DA and, when you hit the threshold, Form 1099-MISC with the IRS and with the state listed on your account. The US exchange entity named on the form is Payward Interactive, Inc. The full TIN goes to the IRS even when your copy shows only the last four digits.

That reporting is the T.D. 10000 custodial-broker rule. Kraken says the 1099-DA covers activity on Kraken.com, Kraken Pro, Krak, and related apps. It does not cover Kraken Wallet or Ink. Those DeFi apps sit outside this form until a different regulation applies.

Eligibility turns on a specific date. To get a 2025 1099-DA, you had to be a US tax resident client of Kraken's US Digital Asset Broker with an address in the United States or a US territory as of December 31, 2025. If your address was outside the US on that date, Kraken did not issue one and says reporting may, in the future, fall under the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework instead. Kraken's stated position is one report, not two, though it acknowledges that coordination between the frameworks is still developing.

For 2025, eligible US clients receive a combined Form 1099 that combines 1099-DA and 1099-MISC into a single PDF. Kraken issued no 1099s of any kind for tax year 2024 because US staking was shut down in 2023, and 1099-DA was not required until 2025. It also declined to issue an optional 1099-B or 1099-K for 2024 sales.

Form 1099-DA. Issued if you sold crypto on Kraken, Kraken Pro, or Krak, or sent crypto to another person or business via Krak, in 2025. Crypto includes stablecoins such as USDG and USDC. There is no minimum. A $1 trade is reportable. Buying and holding, with no sale and no Krak send, does not trigger the form.

Form 1099-MISC. Issued if staking rewards, airdrops, deposit rewards, and referral rewards total $600 or more. The IRS copy is Box 3, Other Income. Below $600, Kraken still shows the number on your reports and does not send it to the IRS. If you hold several Kraken accounts under the same name and TIN, the $600 test applies to the combined total, and you can get a form for each account even if one of them is under $600 on its own. Staking USD values are converted using a volume-weighted average price.

Rewards on the 1099-MISC are ordinary income at that USD figure, and that figure becomes basis when you later sell the tokens.

Kraken now sells US stocks and, through xStocks, tokenized equities. Neither belongs to the crypto 1099-DA discussion above, and the two are not treated the same way.

Ordinary US stocks and ETFs are securities. They are handled by Kraken's securities entity and reported on that entity's own form set, separate from anything on your combined crypto 1099.

Tokenized equities are the odd case. Under the IRS instructions for Form 1099-DA, a tokenized security is reported on Form 1099-DA rather than Form 1099-B, so it can appear alongside your crypto. But it is still stock for section 1091 purposes, which means wash sale losses apply and get reported in Box 1i. Sell NVDAx at a loss and rebuy within 30 days, and the loss is disallowed. Do the same with bitcoin, and it is not, because digital assets are not currently considered securities for wash-sale purposes.

If you trade both, do not assume one rule covers the account.

Gross proceeds, adjusted for fees, plus the date sold, the asset, the units, and whether units were transferred in. Kraken's own table is blunt: for 2025, Box 1f proceeds went to you and to the IRS. Box 1g cost basis, Box 1d date acquired, and Box 6 gain or loss went to you only, calculated with FIFO. Box 2 (basis reported to the IRS) is not checked. Box 9 (noncovered security) is checked for every transaction.

A blank or "unknown" basis on a transferred-in lot is not a $0 basis. The IRS instructions are explicit that a broker enters zero in Box 1g only when the asset actually had a basis of zero. Kraken's own example: you bought 1 BTC for $50,000 elsewhere, sent it in, and swapped it for $110,000 of ETH. The 1099-DA may show $110,000 of proceeds with unknown basis. The gain is $60,000 before allocable fees, not $110,000. Filing software that reads unknown as zero reports the phantom $50,000.

Your statement groups totals as short-term, long-term, and unknown holding period. Unknown means Kraken could not determine when you acquired the asset, usually because it was transferred in. Those lots still have a holding period. You have to supply it.

From January 1, 2026, Kraken will also report acquisition cost, acquisition date, gain or loss, and short-term versus long-term character for positions acquired on or after that date. Anything transferred in and anything acquired before 2026 is yours to document.

The form uses UTC. A trade at 8 p.m. Pacific on December 31 can print as January 1. Kraken says that is a timing difference, not an error, and you should not request a corrected 1099-DA for it. Report the trade in the year your own confirmations show. Tiny fee lots can print as $0.00 proceeds. Liquidations of collateral are still sales: the crypto was disposed of to pay a balance, even if you never clicked Sell.

Two formatting quirks worth knowing. Kraken did not include a Document ID on the 2025 forms, so tax software that requires one will not accept a manual import. Use the CSV export or connect the account directly instead. And names and addresses get truncated to IRS byte limits, roughly 40 bytes per field, so "Apartment" becomes "Apt" and long asset names become tickers. That is expected and not worth a support ticket.

For 2025, Kraken used first-in, first-out solely to calculate and display cost basis and estimated gains on your copy of the statement. It did not solicit a lot-relief election. FIFO is the default when you do not identify lots. Those FIFO figures were not reported to the IRS.

You may use a different method on Form 8949 if you adequately identified the units by the time of sale and kept records. Switching to HIFO after the fact, with no contemporaneous identification, generally fails. Kraken's Tax Center, built with CoinTracker, can apply alternative methods going forward. Using it does not change what has already been sent to the IRS.

FIFO on Kraken's books is also incomplete. Kraken tracks basis only for assets acquired and later sold inside the same Kraken account. Send coins to a Ledger, a DEX, or another exchange, and Kraken stops. Send them back, and the inbound transfer is a new deposit. Prior basis is not restored. Revenue Procedure 2024-28 already requires per-account identification from January 1, 2025. The number on the PDF covers Kraken only, not your full history.

On the 1099-DA: selling crypto for dollars, swapping one crypto for another (including BTC for USDG or USDG for USDC), sending crypto to another person or business through Krak, and liquidations of positions or collateral. Transfers between wallets or accounts you own are not sales.

On the 1099-MISC, at $600 or more: staking, airdrops, deposit rewards, and referrals.

Not on the 1099-DA, per Kraken's list matching Notice 2024-57: wrapping and unwrapping, liquidity-provider transactions, staking transactions (the deposit into the contract), lending, short sales, and notional principal contracts. Staking rewards still sit on the 1099-MISC. Kraken Wallet and other DeFi apps are not on this combined statement.

Forms live in the Tax Center on the website, not in the mobile apps. Kraken's 2025 delivery ran late. The March 16 and March 30, 2026 help articles said 1099-DA and 1099-MISC were still being generated and would populate as they finished. If you do not meet a reporting threshold, Kraken emails you. The underlying transaction data is still in the Tax Center either way.

Download the combined PDF from Tax Center or Documents on Kraken.com or Pro, and save your own copy. Then export the full-year CSV. Confirm name, last four of TIN, and state. If those are materially incorrect, or if the proceeds are incorrect, open a support ticket. If only FIFO basis disagrees with your records, do not request a correction. That column never went to the IRS.

Yes, and the form is not the tax. Notice 2014-21 treats convertible virtual currency as property. A sale, a swap, a Krak send to someone else, or a liquidation is a capital gain or loss: proceeds minus basis. Held more than a year, most gains use the 0%, 15%, or 20% long-term rates. Held a year or less, ordinary rates.

Staking, airdrops, and referrals are ordinary income when you have dominion and control, even if you never sold the coins. Buying and holding is not a tax event. Moving coins between accounts you control is not a tax event, though you still have to track the hop so basis follows the coins.

Separate from the annual 1099s, the IRS already has a historical dump. In May 2021, a Northern District of California court authorized a John Doe summons on Payward Ventures, Inc., a different Kraken entity from the one that files your 1099, for US persons with at least $20,000 in cryptocurrency transactions in any year from 2016 through 2020. After Kraken fought the scope, a June 30, 2023 order enforced a narrowed production. Kraken's own notice to clients says the $20,000 test is the sum of deposits, withdrawals, and trades. You did not have to trade. Name, date of birth, TIN, address, phone, email, and 2016-2020 transaction history went over. IP addresses, employment, net worth, and bank details did not. Kraken said it expected to produce the files in early November 2023.

If those years are still open and unreported, that is an amend problem, not a 1099-DA problem. You can amend past returns, and filing crypto taxes late is better than not filing. TokenTax can rebuild the file. Work through a preparer rather than calling the IRS directly, so nothing you say on the phone becomes part of the record before the numbers are settled.

The IRS matches 1099s against filed returns. When Box 1f proceeds do not show up on your Form 8949, the usual letter is a CP2000: a proposal to tax the proceeds as if basis were missing. It is neither an audit nor a bill. You still have to answer it. The common case is someone who reported nothing because the basis field looked blank, or who reported proceeds and skipped the basis, and now owes tax on a gain they never made.

1. Download the combined 1099 from Tax Center. Confirm name, last four of TIN, state, and proceeds.

2. Export the full-year CSV, including fees and transfers. UTC dates on the PDF can disagree with your local-time fills.

3. Rebuild basis for anything transferred in. Kraken will not restore it if the coins left and came back.

4. Label self-transfers so a hop to your own wallet is not a sale. Label Krak sends to other people as disposals.

5. Do not let software treat unknown Box 1g as zero. Do not copy FIFO onto Form 8949 unless that is the method you actually used and identified.

6. File proceeds minus basis on Form 8949 and Schedule D. File rewards as ordinary income, even under $600.

TokenTax imports Kraken via API or CSV, matches hops across other exchanges and wallets, and produces totals that reconcile with Kraken's filings. Where 2016-2020 is still open, or the 2025 1099-DA shows large proceeds against blank basis, higher-tier plans add accountants who reconcile it and can review IRS correspondence.