Status as of 24 August 2026. The CLARITY Act is not law. A Senate procedural vote on whether to begin floor debate is scheduled for 15 September 2026. For what the bill does and where it sits, read The CLARITY Act, explained. This post is only about tax.
Here is the finding that surprised us, and it took reading the whole merged Senate text to be confident of it.
The 616-page CLARITY Act contains no meaningful crypto tax reform.
Not a reduced one. Not a partial one. There is no substantive digital asset tax title. The Internal Revenue Code is not rewritten. Sections 6045 and 6045A, which govern broker reporting, are left alone. Basis rules, gain and loss rules, income characterisation rules: all untouched.
The bill is enormous, and every page of it is about who regulates crypto markets and how they register. Almost none of it is about what you owe.
This gets misread constantly, so it is worth going through the specific things people expect and explaining why each one does not happen.
"My tokens become commodities, so I get 60/40 treatment"
No.
The 60/40 rule people are thinking of is Section 1256 of the tax code. It gives favourable blended long and short-term treatment to regulated futures contracts and certain other listed derivatives traded on a qualified board of trade. It is a rule about contracts, not about the underlying thing.
Holding spot gold does not get you 60/40. Holding spot oil does not get you 60/40. Holding a spot token that CLARITY relabels a digital commodity would not either.
And CLARITY does not amend Section 1256 to add anything. The word "commodity" appearing in a Commodity Exchange Act registration framework does not reach into the tax code and change how your disposals are characterised. Different statute, different definitions, different purpose.
"There will finally be a de minimis exemption for small purchases"
There is not one in this bill.
The idea, which is genuinely sensible and has been proposed repeatedly, is that buying a coffee with crypto should not trigger a capital gains calculation on a $4 transaction. Various bills over the years have proposed thresholds of $50, $200, $600.
CLARITY does not contain one. Buying a sandwich with Bitcoin is a disposal on 25 August 2026 and would still be a disposal the day after enactment.
"Wash sale rules will change"
Also no, in either direction.
Section 1091 disallows a loss when you sell stock or securities and buy substantially identical ones back within 30 days. Digital assets are generally treated as property rather than securities, which is why crypto has sat outside that rule in a way that equities do not.
CLARITY does not amend Section 1091. It does not extend the rule to digital assets, and it does not enshrine an exemption from it either. The tax definition of "security" in Section 1091 does not automatically move because a different statute created a new market-regulation category.
Worth knowing: extending wash sale rules to digital assets has appeared in multiple separate proposals over recent years, and has been scored as a revenue raiser. It is the kind of provision that gets attached to a tax bill, not a market structure bill. Do not treat its absence here as a settled outcome.
"Staking and airdrops get sorted out"
Not in this bill. Nothing in CLARITY addresses when staking rewards become income, how mining is characterised, how airdrops are valued, or how any of it interacts with basis.
Those questions remain where they were: governed by existing tax principles and IRS guidance, and argued about in the meantime.
"1099-DA goes away, or changes"
The opposite. It carries on entirely unaffected.
Custodial broker reporting is already live. Gross proceeds reporting applies to covered transactions from 2025. Basis reporting phases in for covered assets acquired and held with the same broker from 2026.
A crypto exchange registering with the CFTC under CLARITY does not stop being a broker for IRS reporting purposes. The two obligations sit in different statutes and neither substitutes for the other. If anything, a registered, licensed, examined exchange is a more diligent filer of tax forms, not less.
"DeFi will start reporting for me"
It will not, and this one has a specific history.
In December 2024, Treasury and the IRS finalised a rule that would have treated certain non-custodial DeFi front ends as brokers with reporting obligations. Congress and the President killed it. Public Law 119-5 gave that rule no force or effect.
CLARITY deals with DeFi extensively, but it deals with it under securities law and anti-money-laundering law. Nothing in it revives the repealed tax reporting rule.
Which means the position is unchanged and uncomfortable: for DeFi activity, you are the record keeper. No form arrives in January. No third party reconciles it for you. If you supplied liquidity, borrowed against collateral, claimed rewards or bridged across chains, the only complete account of it is the one you build.
So what does change, for tax?
Two things, both indirect, and the second one is the one to actually think about.
Cleaner classification helps your records. Knowing with statutory confidence which category an asset falls into makes it easier for platforms to build consistent reporting and easier for you to explain a position. That is a modest, real benefit.
More of your activity ends up on a form the IRS can match. This is the significant one.
The direction of travel is unambiguous. Licensed venues, segregated custody, formal registration, anti-money-laundering programmes, examinations, and broker reporting that already gained basis in 2026. Each step puts more of your trading history into a structured feed that lands at the IRS.
The IRS does not need new tax law to act on that. It needs data, and it is getting it.
Here is the trap. An exchange reports what it can see: proceeds from disposals on its platform, and basis for assets you both acquired and disposed of there. What it cannot see is what you paid for coins you bought somewhere else and transferred in. In that situation the reported basis is frequently missing or wrong, and the mismatch does not resolve itself. It surfaces as a notice, and the burden of proving the real number falls on you.
We wrote about that failure mode in detail in 1099-DA reports the wrong number.
CLARITY makes that world arrive faster and more completely. It does not give you any new tools to survive it.
What to actually do
Nothing on this list depends on the bill passing. That is rather the point.
Keep your own basis records. Acquisition date, acquisition cost, fees, and which platform. Do not rely on an exchange to hold your history, and certainly not one you no longer use.
Export before you need to. Exchange exports get shorter, accounts get closed, platforms disappear. The cheapest moment to pull a complete CSV is always now.
Track transfers between your own wallets. These are not disposals, but they are where basis goes to die. A coin that arrives from an unknown source is a coin an exchange will report with no cost basis at all.
Reconcile the 1099-DA you receive against your own figures. Do not simply file what the form says. Check it, and keep the working that shows why your number differs if it does.
Do not wait for a legislative fix to the parts that are genuinely painful. De minimis relief, staking clarity and wash sale certainty all remain live policy questions, and they will be settled, if at all, in a tax bill. Not this one.
The CLARITY Act may well reshape how crypto markets are regulated in the United States. It is a serious piece of legislation and the change would be structural.
Your return in April is not what it changes.
Moonscape reconstructs cost basis across every exchange and wallet you have used, so the figure you file is one you can evidence. That work is identical before and after CLARITY, which is exactly why it is worth doing now.
This is general information, not tax or legal advice. The bill described here is not law and its text has changed repeatedly. For your own position, speak to a qualified adviser.