Clarity Act Won't Drive Crypto Adoption Without Tax Reform!

The Clarity Act may redraw the regulatory map for U.S. crypto, but a structural flaw is quietly undermining its promise: the tax reporting framework hasn't kept pace. Form 1099-DA, the IRS's new crypto broker reporting instrument, is generating tax forms that often omit reliable cost-basis data, mishandle holding periods, and ignore non-custodial activity entirely — leaving retail investors to manually reconcile thousands of transactions across exchanges, wallets, bridges, and DeFi protocols.

The core contradiction is hard to ignore. Washington is signaling support for domestic crypto leadership while simultaneously imposing a reporting regime that treats decentralized, cross-platform asset movement as if it were a single brokerage account with perfect data continuity. Those two positions cannot both scale.