Crypto Taxes and Regulation: How the US Taxes Digital Assets, Who Actually Writes the Rules, and Why 564 Federal Filings Produced 56 of Them

There is a widely held view that the United States has no crypto rules. There is an equally widely held view that it has too many. Both are assertions, and both are testable, because every binding action the federal government takes is published in one place. We counted it. Between 2010 and 6 August 2026 the Federal Register carried 564 documents matching the standard digital-asset search terms. Of those, 56 are final rules. Almost everything else is either a proposal that has not become a rule, an announcement, or exchange paperwork that has nothing to do with policy at all. This page explains how the United States actually taxes crypto, who actually writes the rules, and what the published record shows when you count it rather than characterize it.

One thing this page is not: tax advice. It describes published federal rules and how they are generally understood. Your situation is yours, and a return is signed by you.

The measurement: sixteen years of federal filings, counted

We queried the Federal Register’s public API on 6 August 2026 for four terms — cryptocurrency, digital asset, virtual currency and stablecoin — pulled every matching document, and deduplicated by document number. Individually the terms return 294, 397, 158 and 144 documents. The union is 564 unique documents, the earliest published in 2010.

Split by document type, the shape of the record is immediately obvious:

• Notices — 399 (70.7%). Announcements, information collections, meeting notices, filings. Binding on nobody.
• Proposed rules — 101 (17.9%). Rules the government has floated.
• Final rules — 56 (9.9%). Rules that actually apply to you.
• Presidential documents — 8 (1.4%). Executive orders and memoranda.

Sixteen years, fifty-six rules. Filings by year climb steeply — 40 in 2021, 48 in 2022, 72 in 2023, 96 in 2024, 161 in 2025, and 85 in the first seven months of 2026 — which is where the “regulatory onslaught” framing comes from. That framing does not survive the next step.

What happens when you strip out the exchange paperwork

The Securities and Exchange Commission appears on 350 of the 564 documents, 62.1% of the corpus, which is why the record reads as SEC-dominated. It is not. Of the 325 SEC notices in the set, 322 — 99.1% — are self-regulatory-organization filings: notices that an exchange has proposed a rule change, overwhelmingly the listing and trading mechanics of exchange-traded products. That is stock-exchange administration. It creates no obligation for anyone holding or trading crypto.

Remove them and the corpus falls from 564 documents to 242. The composition inverts:

	Raw count	SRO filings stripped
Total documents	564	242
Final rules	56	56
Proposed rules	101	101
Notices	399	77
Presidential documents	8	8
Largest single agency	SEC, 350	Treasury, 80
SEC document count	350	28

The SEC goes from first place with 350 documents to third with 28. The largest actual rulemaker on digital assets in the United States is the Treasury Department, with 80 documents, followed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with 40. Then the SEC on 28, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network on 24, the Internal Revenue Service on 22, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on 19, the Comptroller of the Currency on 16, the Federal Reserve on 13 and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on 10.

That single correction reframes the last decade. The public argument has been about securities law, because securities law is where the litigation happened and litigation is what gets covered. The published rulemaking record is mostly about tax, money transmission and bank supervision. Those are the rules people actually have to comply with, and they have been written by agencies that get a fraction of the attention.

The stripped series by year also tells a different story from the raw one: 12 documents in 2020, 17 in 2021, 31 in 2022, 45 in 2023, 42 in 2024, 29 in 2025 and 48 in the first seven months of 2026. The raw 2025 spike of 161 was almost entirely exchange-traded-product paperwork. On the stripped measure, 2025 was the quietest year since 2021, and 2026 is already the busiest year on record with five months left to run.

Proposals outnumber rules almost two to one

Of the 242 core documents, 101 are proposed rules and 56 are final rules. Proposals outnumber finished rules by 1.8 to 1. Some proposals are pending, some were withdrawn, and some simply stopped. We have not traced each proposal to its outcome — that is a piece of work in its own right and it is named as this page’s sequel below — but the ratio is worth holding onto, because a proposed rule is routinely reported in the same register as a rule, and it binds nobody.

Final rules by year: one each in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2019; five in 2020; four in 2021; two in 2022; nine in 2023; nineteen in 2024; nine in 2025; four so far in 2026. By agency: Treasury 16, CFTC 12, SEC 12, IRS 8, FinCEN 7, CFPB 4, FDIC 3, Homeland Security 3, Federal Reserve 2, Federal Trade Commission 2.

2024 was the year the United States actually regulated crypto, and it was mostly the Treasury doing it. Everything before was preparation and everything since has been slower.

Why our count is an upper bound, not a lower one

We would rather you distrusted this number in the right direction. Term matching finds documents that mention a phrase, not documents that are about digital assets, and we found clear examples in our own results.

Three of the eight presidential documents in the set are incidental: a National Consumer Protection Week proclamation from March 2025, the November 2023 executive order on artificial intelligence, and a January 2021 order on malicious cyber activity. All three mention digital assets in passing. None of them is crypto policy. A fourth — a May 2024 order requiring a mining company to divest real property near a strategic facility — is crypto-specific but is a national-security divestment, not a rule.

So 242 is the ceiling. The number of federal documents genuinely directed at digital assets is lower, and the number that create obligations is 56 at most. Anyone quoting our 564 as a measure of regulatory burden is quoting the wrong end of this page. The figure that means something is 56.

The four presidential documents that are actually about crypto

Named, with dates, because a page that criticizes vagueness should not be vague.

• 14 March 2022 — Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets. The order that set the interagency study process in motion.
• 31 January 2025 — Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology.
• 11 March 2025 — Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile.
• 22 May 2026 — Integrating Financial Technology Innovation Into Regulatory Frameworks.

We are not going to characterize the policy direction of these documents in a standing reference; they are short, they are public, and you should read them rather than read us on them. We list them so that the count above has faces attached to it.

The two agency actions since 2025 that changed the arithmetic

Two final rules in the set do more work than the rest combined, and both are recent enough that a lot of what is written about US crypto rules is now out of date.

23 March 2026 — SEC and CFTC, jointly. A final rule carrying an SEC interpretation of how the federal securities laws apply to particular types of crypto assets and particular transactions, with accompanying CFTC guidance relating to that interpretation. Document number 2026-05635. This is the first time the two agencies have published on the question in the same document. Whatever it does or does not resolve, it is the single most consequential item in the corpus and it is nine words in most coverage.

16 December 2025 — CFTC. A formal withdrawal of the Commission’s interpretive guidance on retail commodity transactions involving certain digital assets. Document number 2025-22872. Withdrawals are rules too, and they rarely get reported at all.

How the United States actually taxes crypto

The foundation has not moved in twelve years. Under IRS Notice 2014-21, digital assets are property, not currency. Everything else follows mechanically from that one classification, and most confusion about crypto tax is confusion about property tax rules that would apply identically to a painting.

Because it is property, you owe tax on disposal, not on appreciation. Holding an asset that has tripled creates no liability. Doing almost anything with it does.

The events that create a tax bill

1. Selling for dollars. Capital gain or loss, measured as proceeds minus basis.
2. Trading one asset for another. A disposal of the first asset at fair market value. This is the one that surprises people: swapping bitcoin for ether is a taxable event even though no dollars moved and no dollars arrived to pay the bill.
3. Spending it. Buying a coffee with appreciated crypto is a disposal of the crypto at the price of the coffee.
4. Receiving it as income. Payment for work, mining rewards and staking rewards are ordinary income at fair market value on the date of receipt. Revenue Ruling 2023-14 addressed staking rewards specifically: income arises when you gain dominion and control, not when you sell.
5. Being paid in it, then selling it. Two events. Ordinary income on receipt, then capital gain or loss on the difference between that value and the eventual sale price.

Holding period does the rest of the work. Held a year or less, gains are short-term and taxed as ordinary income. Held more than a year, they are long-term and taxed at capital gains rates. On a portfolio of any size, the single largest lever available to a US holder is the calendar, and it is free.

Two things that are not disposals, and are routinely reported as if they were: moving assets between wallets you control, and depositing into a wallet you control. No change of beneficial ownership, no disposal.

Broker reporting, and the rule that was repealed

This is where the last two years actually mattered, and the published record is unambiguous because we checked each document rather than relying on coverage.

On 9 July 2024 the Treasury and the IRS published final regulations requiring custodial brokers — exchanges and hosted wallet providers — to report gross proceeds and basis on digital asset sales, with a correction published on 16 August 2024. This is the rule behind Form 1099-DA. It is in force; we searched the register for any subsequent revocation and found none.

On 30 December 2024 they published a second final rule extending reporting to brokers that “regularly provide services effectuating digital asset sales” — in practice, decentralized front-ends. On 11 July 2025 that rule was removed from the Code of Federal Regulations. Congress passed a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, the President signed it, and by operation of the CRA the rule has no legal force or effect. The removal document, 2025-12967, reverts the affected regulatory text to what it said before.

So the position on our pull date is: custodial venues report on you; non-custodial front-ends do not. If you read anything written between December 2024 and July 2025 asserting that DeFi interfaces must issue tax forms, it was accurate when written and is not accurate now. This is exactly the reason we date every figure on this site.

One more change that gets less attention and hits more people. Revenue Procedure 2024-28 requires basis to be tracked per wallet and per account rather than pooled across everything you own, from 1 January 2025. Anybody who spent years running a single universal cost pool has a records problem rather than a tax problem, and records problems are the ones that become expensive under examination.

What is genuinely unsettled

Being precise about what has been decided means being precise about what has not. These are open in the sense that no final rule in the 56 resolves them.

• Wash sales. The statutory wash-sale rule reaches securities. On the property characterization, digital assets sit outside it, which is the widely held reading and is not contradicted by anything in the published rules we counted. It has also been the subject of repeated legislative proposals, none of which appear as a final rule in this set.
• Which assets are securities. The March 2026 joint SEC and CFTC document is an interpretation, and interpretations are read against facts. It narrows the question; it does not retire it.
• Staking through a validator you do not control. The timing of income when rewards accrue automatically but are not withdrawable is not addressed with the specificity practitioners want.
• Lending and liquidity provision. Whether supplying assets to a protocol is a disposal depends on facts about who holds what, and there is no final rule on the point.
• Charitable and estate valuation for illiquid tokens, where a quoted price may not exist at the moment that matters.

Where a question is open, a professional will give you a position and a confidence level. Anyone giving you a flat answer on the five items above is telling you about their marketing, not the law.

Who regulates what, and what each agency actually claims

Written as a map of claimed jurisdiction rather than a settled hierarchy, because it is not one.

• Treasury Department — 80 documents, 16 final rules. Sanctions, tax regulations, and the coordinating role across the rest. The largest actual rulemaker in the set.
• Internal Revenue Service — 22 documents, 8 final rules. Characterization, broker reporting, basis tracking. The agency most likely to contact you personally.
• Commodity Futures Trading Commission — 40 documents, 12 final rules. Derivatives, and retail commodity transactions where leverage is involved.
• Securities and Exchange Commission — 28 documents once exchange filings are removed, 12 final rules. Whether an asset or a transaction falls under the securities laws, and the listing framework for exchange-traded products.
• Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — 24 documents, 7 final rules. Money transmission registration, anti-money-laundering programs, suspicious activity reporting.
• Banking regulators — FDIC 19, Comptroller of the Currency 16, Federal Reserve 13. What supervised banks may hold, custody and issue.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — 10 documents, 4 final rules. Consumer-facing conduct where a payment or a wallet is involved.

Two consequences of that list are worth stating plainly. A single business can be simultaneously a money transmitter to FinCEN, a broker to the IRS, an exchange to the SEC and a merchant to a state regulator, with no mechanism obliging those views to be consistent. And the agency with the most rules on the books is not the agency that dominates the argument.

This page is deliberately limited to US federal rules, because the Federal Register is the only register we can pull, count and let you recount. State money-transmitter regimes and non-US frameworks are real and are not measured here. We will not summarize a body of law we have not counted.

Keeping records that survive an examination

Boring, and the difference between a straightforward return and a bad year.

1. Every disposal, dated, with the dollar value at the moment it happened. Reconstructing prices years later is the single most common cause of an unnecessary tax bill, because in the absence of evidence the conservative assumption goes against you.
2. Basis per wallet and per account, not a single pool. Required since 1 January 2025.
3. Transfer records between your own wallets, so that a non-taxable movement is not later characterized as a sale. This is what an exchange’s reporting cannot see and will not do for you.
4. Income receipts at fair market value on the date received, for mining, staking and payment.
5. Your own copies. A venue that closes takes its export function with it. We have written separately about what happens when an exchange stops answering.
6. Fees. Trading and network fees generally adjust proceeds or basis and are the most commonly discarded record in crypto.

What the data does not show

• The count is not a measure of regulatory burden. One rule can impose more compliance cost than a hundred notices. We counted documents, and documents are not weighted by consequence.
• It is not a measure of enforcement. Litigation, settlements and consent orders do not appear in the Federal Register, and they have driven more behavior in this sector than the rules have. We have not counted them.
• Term matching over-collects. As set out above, at least four of the eight presidential documents are incidental mentions. The same effect will apply across the other document types at a rate we have not measured.
• Term matching also under-collects. A rule about digital assets that never uses any of our four phrases is invisible to this method. We do not know how many exist, which is a real limitation and not a rhetorical one.
• Nothing here covers state law or any non-US jurisdiction.
• None of it is advice. This page describes published rules. It does not tell you what to do about your return.

What would change these conclusions

1. Federal legislation. A statute would move the center of gravity from agency rulemaking to Congress and make this measurement much less informative. Nothing in our 56 is a statute; the Federal Register does not carry them.
2. A reversal on wash sales. A final rule or statute extending the wash-sale rule to digital assets would change the arithmetic for every active trader in the country, and would be the single largest tax change since 2014.
3. Reinstatement of non-custodial broker reporting. The December 2024 rule was revoked by Congress, not struck down. A differently drafted version could return.
4. The 2026 pace holding. Forty-eight stripped documents in seven months is a record rate. If it continues, 2026 will be the most active rulemaking year in the history of the sector, and the “no rules” framing becomes indefensible.
5. Any of our counts being wrong. The method is four search terms against a public API on a stated date. If you rerun it and get a different figure, we want to hear about it, and the correction will carry your name if you want it there.

Where this sits in the rest of our coverage

This page is the standing reference for US crypto taxes and regulation. It is re-measured quarterly at this URL, with the revision date and a changelog line, rather than republished as a new post.

• Crypto Exchanges Explained — the venues that now report your disposals to the IRS, and what proof of reserves does not prove.
• Self-Custody and Wallets — why per-wallet basis tracking is now a records problem, and how to check the hardware holding your keys.
• DeFi Explained — the front-ends that were briefly required to report and now are not.
• Ethereum and Layer 2s — where the transactions that create these tax events increasingly happen.
• Stablecoins Explained — the instrument most directly in the path of Treasury and banking rules.
• Bitcoin Explained — the asset named in a presidential document establishing a federal reserve of it.
• Our earlier regulation guide — the narrative overview this page replaces as the standing reference.
• Our earlier tax explainer — the short version, kept for readers who want the mechanics without the measurement.

This page’s sequel: the survival rate of proposed rules. There are 101 proposals in this corpus against 56 final rules, and we do not know how many of the 101 became rules, were withdrawn, or simply expired. Every proposal in the Federal Register carries a docket, so the trace is possible and the result is countable. We will publish the method whether or not the answer is interesting, and we will publish the failure if the dockets turn out not to be traceable — as we did when exchange volume could not be verified.

Revision history

6 August 2026 — first publication. All counts pulled 6 August 2026 from the Federal Register API using four search terms, deduplicated by document number: 564 unique documents, 242 after removing 322 SEC self-regulatory-organization filings, 56 final rules. Next scheduled re-measurement: November 2026.

Sources. All counts pulled 6 August 2026 and stated as of that date. Document counts, types, agencies and dates: Federal Register API, searched on the terms cryptocurrency, digital asset, virtual currency and stablecoin, deduplicated by document number. Named documents cited by their Federal Register document numbers: 2026-05635 (SEC and CFTC, 23 March 2026), 2025-22872 (CFTC withdrawal, 16 December 2025), 2025-12967 (CRA revocation and removal, 11 July 2025), 2024-30496 (non-custodial broker reporting, 30 December 2024). Tax treatment as described in IRS Notice 2014-21, Revenue Ruling 2023-14 and Revenue Procedure 2024-28. The API is public and unauthenticated and the counts above are ours, computed from the raw responses; anyone can repeat the query and should get the same figures for the same date. This page is not tax advice. Comments are closed sitewide. Corrections to corrections@coinagereport.com.