Form 1099-DA for creators: what your exchange will report when you cash out crypto tips

Updated September 24, 2026

Form 1099-DA is the IRS form US crypto exchanges and other custodial brokers send for sales of digital assets, starting with 2025. It does not report the tips you receive: it reports what you later sell through the broker. For 2026, the first year brokers must also report cost basis, tips you moved in from your own wallet will usually show proceeds with no basis, and if your broker uses the optional stablecoin method, USDC sales totaling $10,000 or less for the year may not be reported at all.

What is Form 1099-DA, in one paragraph?

It is the digital asset version of the 1099-B that stock brokers send. The IRS calls it "Digital Asset Proceeds From Broker Transactions." Its digital assets page sets out the timeline: brokers report gross proceeds for transactions on or after January 1, 2025, and report basis on certain transactions on or after January 1, 2026. So the forms that arrived early in 2026 showed what you sold for. The forms arriving early in 2027 are the first that can also show what you paid, or what your basis is, for some of those assets.

Who counts as a broker matters more than anything else on this page. A custodial exchange that holds your coins and lets you sell them for dollars is a broker. Your own wallet app is not. More on that below, because for most creators on this site it decides whether a form shows up at all.

Will I get a 1099-DA for tips I received?

No. The form is about disposals: selling, exchanging or otherwise getting rid of a digital asset through a broker. A tip arriving is not a disposal. It is income, and the IRS treats it that way whether or not any form mentions it.

The IRS virtual currency FAQ is plain about the income side. When you receive virtual currency in exchange for services, you recognize ordinary income (Q9), measured at its fair market value in dollars when you receive it (Q12). If you work as an independent contractor, it is self-employment income (Q10). The FAQ does carve out bona fide gifts (Q31), but a payment sent because you made a video, a newsletter or a stream is hard to describe as a gift, and our guide to taxes on crypto tips treats it as income for that reason.

So there are two separate events, and the 1099-DA only ever touches the second one:

• When a tip arrives: income, at its dollar value that day. No 1099-DA. You record it yourself.
• When you sell or swap it through a broker: a disposal, with a gain or loss against what you counted as income. This is what the 1099-DA reports.

Platform payouts sit somewhere else again. A platform paying you for your work, such as Meta's USDC creator payouts or X's Original Content Rewards, sends its own tax paperwork for what it paid. The 1099-DA only enters the picture if you then sell what you received through a broker.

What if I cash out USDC? The $10,000 stablecoin rule

This is the part most creators paid in stablecoins will care about. The 2026 Instructions for Form 1099-DA give brokers an optional reporting method for "qualifying stablecoins." A stablecoin qualifies if it is designed to track one government currency one to one, such as the US dollar, uses an effective stabilization mechanism, and is generally accepted as payment by people other than the issuer. USDC is built to do exactly that, which is why its reserve structure gets so much attention.

Under the optional method, the broker does not have to report your "designated sales" of qualifying stablecoins if your total gross proceeds from them at that broker are $10,000 or less for the year. A designated sale is any sale of a qualifying stablecoin except a swap into a different digital asset that is not itself a qualifying stablecoin. In practice, selling USDC for dollars is a designated sale. Swapping USDC into ETH is not, so it sits outside this aggregated treatment.

If your total goes over $10,000, the broker reports your designated sales of each stablecoin type on a separate Form 1099-DA, as one aggregate figure. You will know it by the form itself:

• Box 11a is checked for "Qualifying stablecoins", meaning box 1f is a yearly total, not one sale.
• Box 11b shows how many transactions went into that total.
• The IRS says boxes 1d, 1e, 1g, 1h, 1i, 2, 3a, 3b, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12a and 12b may be blank on a form reported this way.

Two things follow for a creator. First, a small stablecoin tip jar may produce no 1099-DA at all, and that changes nothing about what you owe: the tips were income when they arrived. Second, because USDC tracks the dollar, the value you recorded at receipt and the price you sold at are normally close, so the gain on the sale is usually small. That is the whole appeal of stablecoin tips at tax time. The form is optional for the broker, though, so do not assume your exchange uses it. Check the form you receive, or its absence, against your own log.

Why does my 1099-DA show proceeds but no cost basis?

Because tips that came in through your own wallet are "noncovered." The IRS instructions describe a covered digital asset as one acquired after 2025 for cash in an account where the broker provided custodial services. Tips that landed at an address you control and were later moved to an exchange were not bought for cash in that account, so the broker does not know your basis and is not required to report it.

On the form, that looks like this. Box 9 is checked, which the IRS says means the asset "was a noncovered security" and boxes 1d, 1g, 1h, 1i, 2 and 6 may be blank. Boxes 12a and 12b show how many units you transferred into the account and the date of the transfer-in, which helps you match the sale to your own records.

The recipient instructions on the form then say the thing to remember: if box 1g is blank, "you will need to determine your basis based on your own books and records." For a tip received as income, the IRS FAQ (Q13) sets that basis as the fair market value in dollars when you received it. In other words, the number you wrote down the day the tip arrived is the number that stops you paying tax on the same money twice.

One more line on the form deserves attention. If box 1g has any entry, including zero, the IRS says that figure "has been reported to the IRS as basis." A zero where you know the real basis is higher is not something to copy blindly onto your return. Use your records, and let your tax preparer handle the adjustment on Form 8949, the form the Tax Adviser notes is used for digital asset transactions whether or not a 1099-DA was furnished.

A worked example with round numbers

Take a creator who, over 2026, receives 3,000 USDC in tips at their own wallet, plus 0.5 ETH from a handful of fans. They log each tip on arrival with its dollar value, the way our page on confirming a tip arrived suggests. The ETH was worth $1,400 in total on the days it came in.

• Income for 2026: $3,000 of USDC plus $1,400 of ETH, $4,400 in all, reported by the creator. No 1099-DA covers this.
• In November they move everything to an exchange and sell it for dollars. The USDC sells for about $3,000. The ETH, which has risen, sells for $1,700.
• The USDC sale: total stablecoin proceeds at that exchange are under $10,000, so if the exchange uses the optional method there may be no 1099-DA for it. The gain is roughly zero either way.
• The ETH sale: a 1099-DA shows $1,700 in proceeds, box 9 checked, box 1g likely blank, and 0.5 ETH transferred in on the date in box 12b. The creator's basis is the $1,400 already counted as income, so the gain is about $300, not $1,700.

The failure case is the creator who has no log. They see $1,700 of proceeds and no basis, and either overpay on the full amount or guess. Neither holds up well.

Does my self-custody wallet or a DeFi app send one?

No, and that is by design rather than a gap that will close next year. In December 2024 the IRS finalized a rule that would have treated certain DeFi front ends as brokers. Congress overturned it under the Congressional Review Act, and the resolution was signed on April 10, 2025. The Treasury and IRS then published a notice in the Federal Register on July 11, 2025 confirming the rule "has no legal force or effect" and removing it. As the Tax Adviser summarized in March 2026, noncustodial brokers, such as decentralized exchanges and unhosted wallet providers, are outside the scope of the regulations.

For a creator using a non-custodial tip jar, this cuts both ways. Nobody reports your wallet activity to the IRS on a 1099-DA, and nobody hands you a tidy summary either. The trade-offs are the same ones we cover in self-custody versus an exchange for payouts: holding your own keys means holding your own records.

Moving coins between two wallets you own is not a sale. The IRS FAQ (Q38) calls a transfer between your own wallets or accounts a non-taxable event. Keep the transaction hash anyway, since it is how you prove the coins in the exchange are the same tips you already counted.

When does the form arrive, and what do I do with it?

For the 2025 tax year, the IRS General Instructions for Certain Information Returns set February 17, 2026 as the date brokers had to furnish Form 1099-DA to customers. The 2026 forms follow the same annual cycle, so expect them around mid-February 2027.

When it arrives, the recipient instructions say receiving one generally means you sold, exchanged or otherwise disposed of a digital asset, so you should answer "Yes" to the digital asset question on page 1 of Form 1040. That question also asks whether you received a digital asset "as a reward, award or payment for property or services," which covers tips, so a creator taking crypto tips usually answers yes whether a 1099-DA arrives or not.

Then match it line by line against your own log. The practical steps before year end:

1. Finish your tip log for 2026 now, while the transactions are easy to find: date, token, network, amount, dollar value on the day, and transaction hash.
2. Note every transfer from your wallet to an exchange, with its date and hash. That is what boxes 12a and 12b will be matched against.
3. Add up your stablecoin sales per exchange. If one exchange will see more than $10,000, expect an aggregated form with box 11a checked.
4. Make sure the exchange has your correct taxpayer details. The form says a broker generally must backup withhold if you did not furnish your TIN, and any withholding shows in box 4.
5. Keep the form and your log together for whoever prepares your return. If the two disagree, your records win, but only if you have them.

Creators in the UK: a similar system has started

The UK is running its own version under the Cryptoasset Reporting Framework. From January 1, 2026, UK cryptoasset service providers collect details of their users. HMRC's guidance on reporting cryptoasset user and transaction data says the first reports are submitted between January 1 and May 31, 2027, covering January 1 to December 31, 2026, and include users who are tax resident in the UK. Unlike the US form, this is a report the provider sends to HMRC rather than a statement mailed to you, so your own records still carry your tax return. The receipt-is-income logic in our tips tax guide applies in the UK as well. If you are wondering how to get money out in pounds in the first place, see cashing out USDC to your local currency.

This page explains how the IRS describes Form 1099-DA as of September 24, 2026, based on the 2026 form and instructions, the IRS virtual currency FAQ and HMRC guidance. It is not tax advice. Rules and forms can change; check irs.gov/Form1099DA and a tax professional who handles crypto for your own situation.