Lately, dealing with taxes and reporting has really been messing me around so much that I’ve even considered quitting the market outright—maybe just uninstalling a couple wallet plugins too... But after cooling down and thinking it through, I realize that if I really uninstall them, it would only push the headache further down the road, and year-end reconciliation would be even more unbearable.

My current dumb method: whenever I do big rebalances, cross-chain transfers, farm/get airdrops, or move funds in and out of a vault, I quickly dump the transaction hash, the time, the counterparty, and what I was doing at the moment into a table, with notes written in plain human language—like “deposit to the XX protocol” or “move back from L2 to the mainnet.” Otherwise, when you get to year-end and see a bunch of swaps + bridges + claims, you can’t even tell which ones are costs and which ones are income. The on-chain records are all there, but if you don’t label them, it’s basically as if you don’t have any records.

While we’re at it, let me vent about all the recent stuff around MEV and sorting fairness. It’s also normal that retail investors feel like they’re constantly getting “cut in line”—big slippage and the actual fills are completely different from what you thought, and it’s an even bigger disaster for tax reporting: you think you’re buying A, but the executed price has had a chunk taken out... So I’d rather do fewer trades than leave behind a pile of messy, impossible-to-explain scraps of records. For now, that’s it—slowly keeping the books complete is better than anything else.