Customer-provided acquisition information is the acquisition date, cost and lot detail a customer gives a digital asset broker for units the broker did not acquire on the customer's behalf, typically units transferred into the account. It lets the broker fill in what its own records cannot show, on the customer's say-so.
A broker knows the acquisition details of units it bought for a customer and nothing about units that arrived by transfer. Some brokers let the customer enter the missing details for transferred-in digital assets: the date the units were originally acquired, what they cost, and which lots they belong to. The broker stores that information against the units and can use it when the units are later sold. The broker does not verify it. The customer is describing their own history, and the accuracy of the description is theirs.
Information given to a broker in this way serves two different purposes. It can tell the broker which units to treat as sold, which is digital asset identification, and it can give the broker a basis figure for units it would otherwise report with a blank field. The two are related but separate: identifying a lot fixes which units go out, and the basis of those units is whatever the customer said they cost.
Under Regulations section 1.6045-1 a transferred-in unit is a noncovered digital asset, and the broker is not required to report its basis. A broker that holds acquisition information the customer supplied may use it to report a basis figure for the sale, and the form indicates that basis was reported and on what footing. The customer's information does not turn the unit into a covered digital asset; covered status depends on the acquisition having taken place in the account at that broker, not on how much the broker has been told about it.
For the taxpayer the practical effect is that a basis figure now reaches the IRS that started life in the taxpayer's own records. If the information given to the broker was right, the return matches the form. If it was wrong, the error is visible on the broker's copy, and the return has to carry the correct cost basis with the Form 8949 adjustment for basis that was reported incorrectly. The taxpayer cannot point to the broker: the broker reported what it was told.
The information also has to be consistent with the rest of the taxpayer's history. Since January 1, 2025 basis is tracked per wallet and per account, and a lot's basis follows it into the broker account from the specific wallet it left. Acquisition details entered at the broker have to match the lot that actually moved, so that the same basis is not claimed twice, once at the broker and once against units still sitting in the wallet.
An investor gives the exchange acquisition details for transferred-in BTC using a spreadsheet that pooled every purchase across all wallets and averaged the cost. Under wallet-by-wallet tracking the lot that moved has a specific basis, not an average. The broker reports the averaged basis to the IRS, the investor's own reconciliation produces the lot-specific basis, and the two disagree on a figure the IRS now holds. Information given to a broker should come from the same lot records the return will be built on.
Read our 1099-DA accounting and cost basis reconciliation
CountDeFi prepares lot-level acquisition records that tie to your broker forms, including wallet-by-wallet basis, transfer matching and Form 8949 adjustments. See pricing.
