Crypto Reporting Rules: What Your Exchange Reports to the Tax Office, and Why the Total Is Not Your Profit

For the current year, your crypto exchange will for the first time report to Germany's Federal Central Tax Office what you have bought, sold and swapped. That report, however, contains not a single figure describing your profit. What it contains are aggregated gross amounts per crypto-asset: the sum of your purchases, the sum of your sales and the market value of every swap from one cryptocurrency into another. Anyone who reshuffles thirty times a year shows up there with a volume that is a multiple of their own portfolio value, while what is left at year-end may be a three-digit gain. The legal basis is called the Kryptowerte-Steuertransparenzgesetz, KStTG in officialese. It transposes the European DAC8 directive into German law and obliges providers of crypto-asset services to transmit data about their customers to a central federal authority, which passes it on to the tax authorities of the federal states. Under the application provision in Section 21 KStTG, these duties apply for the first time to the 2026 calendar year. The year now running is therefore the first one on the books. This article explains which details the report contains, why the sums named in it are systematica...