Crypto Capital Gains: How to Track, Report, and Keep More of Your Crypto Profits

When you sell Bitcoin, swap Ethereum for Solana, or cash out an airdrop token, you’ve triggered a crypto capital gains, a taxable event that occurs when you sell or trade cryptocurrency for more than you paid. Also known as cryptocurrency profit tax, it’s not optional—you’re legally required to report it in most countries, including the UK, US, and Taiwan. Many people think if they didn’t cash out to fiat, they didn’t owe taxes. That’s wrong. Trading one coin for another? Taxable. Sending crypto to a friend as a gift? Taxable. Using crypto to buy a laptop? Also taxable. The IRS, HMRC, and other tax agencies treat crypto like property, not currency.

Tracking crypto capital gains, the profit or loss from selling or exchanging digital assets isn’t just about filling out forms. It’s about knowing exactly what you bought, when, and for how much. Did you buy 0.5 BTC in 2021 for $30,000 and sell it in 2024 for $65,000? That’s a $35,000 gain. Did you swap 10 ETH for 200 SOL in 2023? Even if you didn’t touch USD, you still owe tax on the value of ETH at the time of the swap. Tools like Koinly or CoinTracker help, but you still need to understand the rules. In Taiwan, profits over NT$40,000 per month are taxed at 20%. In the UK, you get a £3,000 annual allowance before taxes kick in. In the US, short-term gains (held less than a year) are taxed as ordinary income—sometimes over 37%.

And it’s not just about selling. token burns, the permanent removal of coins from circulation don’t trigger gains. But airdrops, free crypto tokens sent to wallet holders do. If you got 1,000 SLD tokens in 2021 from Shield DAO and later sold them for $100, that $100 is taxable income—even if the tokens later became worthless. Same with the ZooCW ZOO tokens or OneRare ORARE NFTs. The moment you receive them, they have value. The moment you trade or sell them, you owe tax on the gain.

Most people lose money on crypto. But if you made even $500 in profit across 12 trades last year, you still need to report it. Ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. Tax agencies are getting better at tracking blockchain activity—cross-chain monitoring tools now flag suspicious flows, and exchanges are required to report user data under AML rules. The people who get audited aren’t the ones with big losses. They’re the ones who made small profits and didn’t file.

What you’ll find below are real breakdowns of how crypto taxes hit traders in different countries, how to track gains from obscure tokens like WATCH or ASAFE, and what happens when a project dies but your tax bill doesn’t. No theory. No guesswork. Just what actually happened to people who traded, swapped, and cashed out—and how they handled the tax fallout.