Does Uphold Report to the IRS?

Uphold is a multi-asset trading platform where you can buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency alongside other asset classes, including four precious metals and a range of national currencies. It was founded in 2014 as Bitreserve, rebranded the following year, and now operates in more than 140 countries.

Its distinguishing feature is what Uphold calls Anything-to-Anything trading: you can move directly from bitcoin to gold to euros in one step, without selling to dollars in between. That is convenient in the app, and it produces a taxable disposal every time, which is the thing Uphold users most often get wrong at tax time.

Uphold is custodial. It holds the private keys and stores customer crypto in pooled wallets rather than giving you an address you control. That distinction drives the rest of this page, because custodial platforms are brokers under US tax rules and brokers file information returns.

Yes. Uphold reports your crypto sales, swaps, and rewards to the IRS, and sends you copies of the same forms. As a custodial broker, it falls under T.D. 10000, the July 2024 rule that requires custodial platforms to file Form 1099-DA for digital-asset sales on or after January 1, 2025.

One condition applies. Uphold issues tax forms to registered US customers who have submitted a W-9 with their Social Security number. If that is not on file, no forms are generated, and nothing about that changes what you owe. Uphold uses a third-party provider to generate these forms, so your W-9 data may be shared with that vendor.

Here’s how to treat Uphold tax forms you may receive, at a glance:

On the 1099-DA: selling crypto for US dollars, swapping one crypto for another, spending crypto, including debit-card transactions that convert crypto to fiat, and other disposals executed on the platform. Uphold's debit-card FAQ says using dollars does not trigger a tax event, and that using crypto to fund the card or make purchases "can trigger a taxable event, as it's considered a sale."

On the 1099-MISC, above $600: staking rewards, both Boosted and Flexible, plus airdrops and certain distributions.

Not reported by Uphold at all: anything that happened before you transferred assets in, activity on other exchanges, DeFi, and self-custody wallet transactions. Equities are a separate matter. US stocks and ETFs are held through Uphold Securities Inc., a distinct entity, so those trades are reported by that entity on its own form rather than appearing on your 1099-DA.

For 2025 activity, in most cases, only gross proceeds. Brokers were not required to report cost basis in the first year, so the basis column on many forms is blank, zero, or marked unknown.

That matters because a blank is not a zero. The recipient instructions say a blank means you determine basis from your own books, and that a printed zero, unlike a blank, has been reported to the IRS as basis. Filing software often reads a blank as zero, which results in your entire sale amount being reported as a gain. If you sold $9,000 of bitcoin you had paid $8,000 for, the difference between handling that correctly and letting the blank stand is $8,000 of phantom gain.

From January 1, 2026, brokers report cost basis, but only on covered assets, meaning crypto both acquired and disposed of at the same broker after that date. Anything you transferred into Uphold from an exchange or a wallet stays noncovered, and its basis stays your responsibility.

Some activity is not on the form at all. Qualifying stablecoin sales are reported only when your total designated sales exceed $10,000. NFT sales under $600 are subject to an optional reporting exception. Notice 2024-57 tells brokers they need not file a 1099-DA for wrapping, liquidity-provider, lending, and staking transactions until the Treasury issues further guidance. That exception does not apply to staking rewards, which is why Uphold still issues a 1099-MISC above $600. None of those reporting exceptions makes the activity untaxable.

Uphold automatically applies the highest-in, first-out method when calculating your cost basis. Its 2025 help article says so in those words: it assumes you sold your most expensive crypto first.

HIFO generally produces the lowest current gain, so on a complete lot set this works in your favor. Two things complicate it.

First, Uphold applies HIFO to the transactions it can see. If you bought bitcoin on Kraken in 2021 and moved it to Uphold before selling, Uphold has no record of the Kraken purchase, so its HIFO calculation runs on an incomplete lot set. The number it produces is not the number your full history produces. Deposits from outside Uphold are marked at mid-market when they hit the account, and the in-app "average price paid" figure is a third formula entirely. None of those screens is Form 8949.

Second, since January 1, 2025, Revenue Procedure 2024-28 and Treas. Reg. § 1.1012-1(j) require basis to be tracked wallet by wallet and account by account rather than pooled across everything you own. Your method must be applied consistently and identified for each account. If Uphold's default and your own calculation disagree, the reconciliation is on you, and your return is what the IRS assesses.

Recipient copies of Form 1099-DA are generally due to taxpayers in mid-February. Uphold's 2025 crypto tax forms article, updated April 13, 2026, said those PDFs were then available in the app. In the app, open the Account Center, tap Activity, then the form icon, choose your form, and tap Generate report. Uphold emails you a download link rather than serving the file directly, so check the address on your account. On the web, the same files live under Documents.

Download the forms, then export your full-year transaction CSV separately. The CSV is what matters most, because it carries fees, timestamps, and transfers that the 1099 does not. Monthly PDF statements are a separate thing, available only to users in Canada and the state of Texas, plus a dedicated monthly statement for USD Interest Accounts. Neither is a 1099.

Yes, and what you owe depends on what you did, not on which forms arrived. Notice 2014-21 treats convertible virtual currency as property.

Selling, swapping, or spending crypto is a disposal, producing a capital gain or loss measured as proceeds minus basis. Gains held over a year are taxed at 0%, 15%, or 20%. Held a year or less, they use your ordinary rates.

Rewards and interest are ordinary income at the value on the day you received them. If you later sell those tokens, that is a second, separate taxable event.

Buying and holding is not taxable. Moving crypto between accounts you control is not taxable, though you must track it so basis follows the coins.

The IRS matches information returns against filed returns. When a 1099-DA shows proceeds your return does not account for, the mismatch generates a notice, typically a CP2000 proposing additional tax based on the reported figure. A CP2000 is neither an audit nor a bill. It is a proposal, but you still have to answer it.

The common version of this is not evasion. It is a taxpayer who reported nothing because the basis column was blank, or who reported the proceeds and forgot the basis, and now owes tax on a gain they never made.

Keeping your own accurate records and reconciling your forms to your exports reduces the odds of issues down the line. Use crypto tax software like TokenTax to simplify your crypto tax reporting.

Here are six simple steps you can follow to keep yourself out of trouble with the IRS and stay compliant.

1. Download your Uphold forms. All of them, including the USD Interest Account 1099 if you earned interest.

2. Export the full-year transaction CSV. Fees and transfers included.

3. Rebuild basis for anything acquired elsewhere. Pull original acquisition dates and costs from the source platform. This is where people overstate gains.

4. Label your self-transfers. Otherwise, a transfer in from your own wallet looks like a purchase and a transfer out looks like a disposal.

5. Check the 1099-DA basis column. If it is blank or reads "unknown," do not let the filing software treat it as zero.

6. Reconcile, then file. Your calculated totals go on Form 8949 and Schedule D, with rewards and interest reported as income.

TokenTax imports your Uphold history alongside every other exchange and wallet you have used, rebuilds the basis across the full picture rather than a single platform's slice, and produces totals that reconcile with what Uphold filed. Where a year involves missing lots and a 1099 the IRS already holds, higher-tier plans add accountants who reconcile it and can review IRS correspondence.