How to export your crypto trades for tax season

Tax season is an export problem wearing a deadline. Every sale needs a story, the story lives in your trade history, and the history is scattered across venues that keep it for as long as they feel like. The single best tax habit in crypto is boring: get your trades out of every venue while the data is still there.

Why export now, not in April

Exchange APIs serve limited windows, some venues cap CSV exports to a year, and accounts get closed, sometimes by you, sometimes not. The trade you cannot document is the trade a tax authority gets to interpret for you. Exports are free today and expensive to reconstruct later.

What a usable export contains

• Timestamps in a known timezone, because a trade at 00:30 UTC can land in a different tax year than your local clock suggests.
• Both legs of every trade: what you sold, what you received, and the price between them.
• Fees, in the asset they were paid in. Fees adjust your cost basis, and ignoring them quietly overstates gains.
• Deposits and withdrawals, so transfers between your own accounts can be matched instead of misread as disposals.

The per-venue reality

Exchanges each hide the export in a different drawer: order history here, transaction history there, sometimes three separate files for spot, futures and funding. Chains are the opposite: the full history is public forever, but raw explorer data does not know your cost basis, only your movements. Both halves need to end up in one place before the math can start.

Reading it in TrueHold

TrueHold pulls trades, transfers and fees from your connected venues continuously, so the export problem shrinks to one button: a tax-ready CSV with realized PnL and cost basis per disposal, split by venue and chain. One file your accountant can open without a decoder ring.

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