While reviewing my transaction history, I genuinely recommend that you don’t wait until the end of the year to catch up on your “homework.” Otherwise, those memory fragments of “what exactly did I swap and on which chain” can get really messy. My method isn’t complicated either: every time I move a large amount into or out of an exchange, do a cross-chain transfer, or swap stablecoins, I conveniently dump the screenshots and the hashes into a single table, and add a note saying “why I did this.” In plain terms, it’s leaving a trail for my future self.

Especially now, with a new round of incentives for L1/L2s constantly rolling out to pull in TVL, everyone mines while proposing, while selling—after all the back-and-forth on-chain, the books look lively, but when it comes time to report, it’s all fragmented. Keeping records feels like both bookkeeping and writing a diary: if you’re lazy once, you’ll have to make up for it twice later. Anyway, I stick to two lines—“funds in and out” and “source of costs.” That’s it.