Few crypto tax topics have churned as much as "what does Coinbase send the IRS?" — because the answer has changed repeatedly. The 1099-K era (gross transaction volume, terrifyingly misleading) gave way to a 1099-MISC-only interlude, and both are now superseded by the regime that actually resembles stock brokerage reporting: Form 1099-DA. If you're reading an older article about Coinbase 1099-Ks and state thresholds, you're reading history. Here's what Coinbase and other custodial exchanges report today, what the IRS does with it, and the reconciliation step that keeps the automated notice machine away from your mailbox.
Two forms now carry the load. Form 1099-DA is the digital-asset broker form under the §6045 regulations: it reports your gross proceeds from sales and exchanges beginning with 2025 transactions, with cost basis reporting phasing in for assets acquired from 2026 — the crypto analogue of the 1099-B your stock broker has always filed. Form 1099-MISC continues to cover the income side: staking rewards, learning rewards, and similar payments above the reporting threshold, taxable as ordinary income at fair market value when received. What you should not expect: a form computing your actual gain or loss across your full history — that remains your job, for reasons the next section makes concrete. And the old intuition worth explicitly retiring: "no form arrived" has never meant "no tax owed." The forms are the IRS's information; your obligation exists with or without them.
The 1099-DA has a structural blind spot: Coinbase can only report the basis it knows, which means coins purchased elsewhere and transferred in arrive basis-blind — and in the transition years before inter-broker basis transfer reporting matures, that describes an enormous share of holdings. The predictable failure mode: a 1099-DA showing full proceeds with missing or zero basis, which — filed uncritically — taxes you on 100% of the sale rather than the gain. Your own records (or your tax software's lot-level reconstruction, maintained per wallet under the current allocation rules) supply the correction on Form 8949, where broker-reported figures can be adjusted with the appropriate codes. The operational takeaway: treat the 1099-DA as the IRS's opening position, reconcile it against your complete records, and file the reconciled truth — the mechanics are in how to file your crypto taxes.
The same thing it's done with 1099-Bs for decades: automated matching. A return that omits activity a 1099-DA reported will, with increasing reliability, generate a CP2000-style notice proposing tax on the unreported proceeds — often computed at zero basis, i.e., the worst-case number — and shifting the burden to you to demonstrate otherwise, months later, with interest running. This is the enforcement shift that matters more than any rule change: crypto non-reporting is moving from "risk of examination" to "certainty of matching," the same transition stocks completed a generation ago. The rational response is unchanged from every other crypto tax risk: complete reporting, reconciled records, and proactive amendment of any past year the matching will eventually reach.
The season workflow, compressed: download every form Coinbase issued (Documents section) and your full transaction CSV — the forms are summaries; the CSV is the data; import into your tracking software alongside every other platform and wallet, because Coinbase-only records can't compute basis for transferred assets; reconcile the software's proceeds against the 1099-DA and investigate every mismatch (self-transfers misread as sales are the usual suspect); report the 1099-MISC income as ordinary income and record its FMV — that number is also your basis in the rewarded coins, and losing it means double taxation later; and if the reconciliation surfaces years of unresolvable history, that's the signal to hand it to a crypto-specialized CPA rather than file a guess — reconstruction is a service we run constantly. The full rules context lives in the ultimate guide to crypto taxes.