Tracking what a crypto holding originally cost is harder than the equivalent exercise with stocks, and the difficulty is structural rather than a matter of poor record-keeping.
A brokerage keeps the chain of custody
When shares are bought and sold at one broker, the broker records the purchase price, holding period and disposal, and reports the result.
Transfers between brokers carry basis information along with the position under established procedures, so the history follows the asset.
That infrastructure developed over decades under reporting rules, and it means an investor rarely has to reconstruct anything themselves.
Crypto transfers carry no history
Moving an asset from an exchange to a personal wallet is a blockchain transaction that records an amount and two addresses. It carries no purchase price.
The receiving platform sees an incoming balance with no origin information. It cannot distinguish a transfer of an owned asset from a newly acquired one.
Platform reporting therefore describes only what happened on that platform, and an asset that arrived from elsewhere has no basis attached to it there.
Ordinary use creates many small events
Trading one token for another is a disposal of the first, not just an acquisition of the second, and both sides need valuing at the time it happened.
Network fees, staking rewards and airdrops each create their own records with their own timing, and activity on decentralized protocols may run to hundreds of transactions.
Whether any particular event is taxable and how it should be valued depends on rules that continue to develop, which makes professional guidance more useful here than in most areas.
Reconstruction depends on data that expires
The blockchain preserves transactions permanently, but the price at the moment of each one lives in market data rather than on the chain.
Platform export files are the practical source for that information, and platforms close, change formats and limit how far back exports reach.
An account that becomes inaccessible takes its trade history with it, even though the on-chain movements remain visible to anyone.
The record-keeping that actually holds up
Exporting complete transaction history from each platform at least annually preserves data that may not be retrievable later.
Recording transfers between one's own wallets separately from acquisitions and disposals prevents the most common error, where a self-transfer is later read as a sale.
Because reporting requirements in this area are being extended and revised, what a platform reports this year is not a guide to what it reported previously or will report next.