Disclaimer: This article should not be construed as tax or investment advice. Please speak to your own tax expert, CPA or tax attorney on how you should treat taxation of digital currencies, especially when it comes to claiming lost or stolen coins.
In 2022, many crypto exchanges like Celsius, Voyager, FTX + FTX.US, BlockFi, Bittrex, BitForex, Liquid and more paused withdrawals for all customers and eventually ceased their operations entirely. If you were one of the crypto investors affected by these bankruptcies, a challenge you may face is accessing your transaction history from one of these defunct exchanges for the purpose of doing your taxes. In this article, we'll walk through the steps you should take to access and then import your data from a bankrupt exchange into CoinLedger.
Please note that this article will not cover how/whether you can write off your lost or stolen crypto on your taxes. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size fits all answer to this question. You may or may not be able to write off your crypto losses depending on the specifics of your situation. Please see this blog post for more information, and consult with a tax professional before making a decision.
Step 1: Get Access to Your Transaction History
Depending on whether the exchange you are importing from went bankrupt, was dissolved entirely, or became a new entity, you should be able to access your transaction history in one of two ways:
Contacting their support team and requesting a CSV file of your entire transaction history
Logging into your account on their platform and downloading a transaction history file
The most successful option in the majority of cases will be reaching out to a bankrupt exchange's support team directly and requesting a CSV file of your entire transaction history. This is because once an exchange goes bankrupt or closes it doors, their website/app is no longer accessible. So, before proceeding any further, make sure you reach out to the bankrupt exchanges' support team and ask for your transaction history data.
Here are some prominent bankrupt crypto exchanges as well as the contact information for their support teams:
Former Bitrrex users may be able to log into their account and download their transactions under the Orders tab.
NOTE: Former Voyager users can access their transaction history from CoinLedger by following these steps.
Step 2: Import Your Data
Now that you have access your transaction history data, the next step is importing your data. The easiest way to do this is through CoinLedger's Universal Manual Import template. Please see this guide for step-by-step instructions on importing your transactions into CoinLedger using the Universal Template.
Step 3: Consult a Tax Professional on Next Steps
Lost and stolen crypto is a gray area in the world of crypto tax compliance. You may or may not be able to write off your crypto losses from bankruptcy depending on the specifics of your situation. Please see this blog post for more information, and consult with a tax professional before making a decision.
CoinLedger is built to give you the option to report these events however you see fit, but we are not able to give out specific tax advice on these topics. For this reason we always recommend working with a tax professional before you claim a loss on your taxes for coins that you can no longer access.
We have a directory of tax professionals with experience in crypto here on our website who are qualified to assist you with these questions: https://coinledger.io/crypto-tax-accountants
Have any further questions? Reach out to our Support Team anytime at [email protected].