Help my Exchange is Dead and My Records Are Gone

If you traded on FTX, you already know what I'm about to say. One day you had an account, a transaction history, and years of data. The next day you had a bankruptcy filing and a claims portal that may or may not let you download a CSV.

FTX is the most famous example, but it's far from the only one. Voyager. Celsius. BlockFi. Genesis. Cryptopia. QuadrigaCX. Mt. Gox. The list of dead, frozen, or liquidated crypto exchanges is long, and it keeps getting longer. In September 2024, German authorities seized the infrastructure of 47 no-KYC exchange services in an AML crackdown (Operation Final Exchange). BitForex went dark with $57 million in unexplained withdrawals. And those are just the ones that made headlines.

Every one of these closures has something in common beyond the lost funds: lost records. And in 2026, with the IRS now receiving Form 1099-DA data from surviving brokers, those lost records are a ticking tax problem.

Dead Crypto Exchanges Cause Tax Problems

Here's what most people miss. When your exchange dies, you don't just lose access to your crypto. You lose access to the data that proves what you paid for it.

Cost basis. Acquisition dates. Transaction histories. The raw material of every line on your Form 8949. Gone. And the IRS doesn't care that your exchange collapsed. They care about what's on your returns.

For anyone who sold crypto in 2025 on a surviving platform like Coinbase or Kraken, that platform filed a Form 1099-DA reporting your proceeds. The IRS has those numbers. What the IRS doesn't have is your cost basis, because for 2025, brokers aren't required to report it. If you can't prove what you originally paid, the IRS may treat your basis as zero. Your entire proceeds look like gain.

I've seen this play out with real clients. Someone who bought $70,000 of Ethereum on FTX in 2021, moved it to a hardware wallet before the collapse, and sold it in 2025 for $80,000. Actual gain: $10,000. But without the FTX purchase records, their return shows $80,000 in proceeds with no documented basis. The IRS sees $80,000 in gain.

It's Not Just FTX

The exchange doesn't have to go bankrupt spectacularly to create this problem. Platforms restrict US accounts. APIs get deprecated. Old CSV download links break. Data retention policies expire. I've had clients who traded on perfectly legitimate exchanges that simply stopped supporting historical exports for accounts that had been inactive for two or three years.

And it's not just centralized exchanges. If you were using DeFi protocols through a non-custodial wallet, there was never a CSV in the first place. Your transaction history lives on-chain, but interpreting it, matching it to the right tax treatment, and converting it into something the IRS recognizes requires specialized tools and expertise that most investors don't have.

The common thread is always the same: by the time someone realizes they need the data, it's harder to get than it should be.

Crypto Exchanges that have Shut Down

This table covers the most significant closures affecting crypto investors. Dozens of smaller exchanges have also gone dark without formal bankruptcy filings. The common thread for all of them: if your transaction history was on the platform, it may be gone.

The 2022 Collapse Class Is Filing in 2026

Here's what makes this moment particularly acute. The wave of exchange failures happened in 2022 and early 2023: FTX in November 2022, Celsius and Voyager earlier that summer, BlockFi and Genesis in the months that followed. Many of those users are only now dealing with the tax consequences, because bankruptcy distributions didn't start arriving until 2024 and 2025.

FTX began repaying customers in early 2025, with distributions valued at petition-date prices (Bitcoin below $18,000, for context). Celsius wound down through 2024. Depending on the structure, these distributions can create taxable income, gains or losses, or other reporting consequences, and the cost basis for calculating those outcomes depends on records from platforms that no longer exist in any functional sense.

If you received a bankruptcy distribution and you can't document your original cost basis, you have a problem that needs solving before you file.

What You Can Do About It

I'm not going to pretend this is simple. But I will say this: the data is almost always recoverable. Blockchain explorers preserve on-chain records permanently. Bank statements show fiat on-ramps. Email confirmations from defunct exchanges still sit in inboxes. Some bankruptcy trustees have made partial transaction data available through claims portals.

The question isn't whether the data exists. It's whether you have the tools and expertise to find it, interpret it, and turn it into something the IRS will accept.

I wrote a detailed guide on exactly this: how to handle missing or inaccurate crypto transaction data, step by step. It covers where the gaps come from, how to reconstruct from blockchain data and available records, what the IRS expects in terms of documentation, and when the situation requires professional help.

Don't Wait for a Notice

The worst time to discover your records are missing is after the IRS sends you a CP2000 notice flagging a mismatch between your return and your 1099-DA. At that point, you're responding under a deadline, with the burden of proof on you, and the IRS has already proposed adjustments. An IRS audit could be next. If your exchange is dead and your records went with it, you're not alone and you're not out of options. But you do need to act. My team at CountDeFi can help. Book a free call, this is what we do.

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