I learned the hard way that “it’s all on Ethereum so I’ll sort taxes later” is pure cope.

Last cycle I did almost everything on ETH… Uniswap, random DeFi farms, a few NFT mints, bridging in and out of L2s. I barely withdrew to my bank, so when tax season came I just reported the clean Coinbase stuff and pretended the on chain mess didn’t exist.

Months later I get a letter basically saying they think I moved way more money than I told them and I need to explain. They had exchange volume and third party reports, and suddenly every flip from ETH to USDC and back looked like income until I could prove what was actually trading and what was just moving funds.

Now I’ve spent weekends living inside Etherscan and old wallets, trying to rebuild cost basis for trades I barely remember, just to show I wasn’t some profit god, I was mostly spinning my wheels and paying gas. I eventually dumped all my wallets and CEX data into a crypto tax tool (Awaken in my case) just to get a halfway decent starting point and then manually cleaned up whatever it mis-tagged.

Not tax advice, obviously. But if you’re deep on Ethereum and leaving “future you” to fix your records, there’s a version of you down the line that might seriously hate that decision.