Kraken Missing Cost Basis: How to Fix It

What does missing cost basis mean on Kraken?

Your cost basis is what you originally paid for your crypto, including fees. It's the number Kraken subtracts from your sale price to calculate your gain or loss.

When that number is missing, Kraken doesn't know what you paid, so it can't calculate your real gain.

You'll usually spot the problem in one of a few places: the Kraken U.S. Tax Center, your ledger and trade exports in the Documents tab, or your Form 1099-DA. In each one, the cost basis field shows up blank, as "unknown," or marked "non-covered."

Remember, a missing cost basis is a records problem, not a tax you actually owe. The crypto still has a real purchase price. Kraken just doesn't have it on file.

Why is my cost basis missing on Kraken?

Kraken can only track what you paid if you bought the crypto directly on Kraken. Anything else can leave the cost basis blank. Here are the most common reasons it happens.

You transferred crypto into Kraken

This is the most common cause.

If you bought crypto on another exchange or in a self-custody wallet and then transferred it to Kraken, Kraken never saw the original purchase. It knows the coins arrived, but not what you paid for them.

When you later sell, Kraken has proceeds but no cost basis to subtract.

You unstaked after Kraken shut down US staking

In February 2023, Kraken settled with the SEC and agreed to end its staking-as-a-service program for US clients. As part of that settlement, Kraken automatically unstaked its US customers' assets.

That forced unwind is a basis problem waiting to happen. Every staking reward you earned was income at the moment you received it, and each reward is its own tax lot with its own cost basis, equal to its fair market value on the day it landed. When a program is unwound and rewards are returned in bulk, it's easy to lose track of which lots you hold and what each one was worth when you received it.

So when you later sell coins that trace back to those rewards, Kraken often has proceeds but no clean record of the per-lot basis.

You earned staking or reward income

Crypto you received rather than bought, like staking rewards or other incentives, often lands in your account with no purchase price attached.

Kraken reports that reward income on Form 1099-MISC, but that form reports the income you received, not the cost basis you carry when you later sell those coins. Their basis equals their fair market value on the day you received them, and Kraken doesn't always carry that figure into your gain/loss calculation.

Your assets are non-covered on Form 1099-DA

Starting with the 2025 tax year, Kraken issues Form 1099-DA to report your crypto sales.

For the 2025 tax year, exchanges report your proceeds only, not your cost basis. Any crypto you bought before January 1, 2026, or transferred in from another platform, is treated as a non-covered asset, which means Kraken has no obligation to track or report its cost basis. On these, the cost basis field is blank by design.

For a deeper look at the form itself, check out our guide to the Kraken Form 1099-DA.

What happens if you file with $0 cost basis?

This is the part that scares people, and it's worth understanding clearly.

If cost basis is missing, the IRS treats it as $0. That means your entire sale price is counted as profit, even if you barely made any money. Your Form 1099-DA shows gross proceeds, not profit, so reading it as-is can make a modest gain look enormous.

Michael's actual gain is $2,500, not $4,000. His cost basis was $1,500, it just wasn't recorded on Kraken.

If he files straight from the $0 figure, he pays tax on an extra $1,500 he never earned.

Luckily, there's an easy fix. You are allowed to report your own cost basis, as long as you have documentation to support it.

How to fix missing cost basis on Kraken

You have a few options, from a quick manual edit to a complete fix across all of your accounts.

Fix it in the Kraken U.S. Tax Center

The Kraken U.S. Tax Center, which is powered by CoinTracker, includes a flow for correcting missing cost basis. You can filter your transactions to the ones flagged "missing cost basis," open one, and enter the original purchase price and acquisition date by hand.

This works fine if you're only missing a handful of transactions and you know exactly what you paid.

However, it has real limits. The Tax Center only sees your Kraken-side activity plus whatever you connect there, so it can't reconstruct the origin basis of assets Kraken never saw, like the coins you transferred in from another platform. Fixing each transaction by hand also gets slow and error-prone once your history is spread across several wallets and exchanges.

Export your Kraken history

To gather your own records, go to the Documents tab in your Kraken account and export your ledger history and trade history as CSV files, along with your account statements.

These give you a complete picture of your Kraken-side activity. What they can't give you is the cost basis of anything that started life on another platform, since Kraken never recorded those purchases.

Track down your original records

Your true cost basis lives wherever you first bought or acquired the crypto.

That means digging up the buy records from the other exchange or wallet, matching each transfer to the sale it eventually became on Kraken, and calculating the gain by hand. For reward lots, it means finding the fair market value on the day you received each one.

This is doable for a few transactions. It becomes a real project once you've moved crypto between several platforms over a few years.

Import everything into CoinLedger

The cleanest fix is to bring your full history back together in one place.

Crypto tax software like CoinLedger connects to Kraken and hundreds of other exchanges and wallets, then imports your complete transaction history by API or CSV. Because it sees every platform, it can match the crypto you transferred into Kraken back to its original purchase, so your cost basis carries across instead of resetting to $0.

Its reconciliation system flags missing cost basis and other errors before you file, so you can fix them in one pass instead of hunting through transactions one at a time.

How to report the correct cost basis on your taxes

Here's the reassuring part: a blank cost basis on Kraken or on your 1099-DA does not lock you into overpaying.

Under IRS rules, you report your capital gains and losses on Form 8949. You're allowed to use your own cost basis figures there, as long as you have documentation to support them.

You don't need to request a corrected Form 1099-DA. Because exchanges aren't required to report cost basis for non-covered assets, a blank or "non-covered" field isn't an error to dispute, it's a number you're expected to supply yourself.

Remember, the IRS cares most about complete reporting. Report all of your activity with accurate cost basis, keep your records, and a blank field on Kraken's version is a non-issue.

The per-wallet cost basis rule

One recent change matters here.

Starting January 1, 2025, the IRS requires you to track cost basis on a per-wallet basis (under Revenue Procedure 2024-28), instead of pooling every account together. Each wallet and exchange account keeps its own set of cost basis records.

That makes the transferred-in problem more visible, not less. When crypto moves into Kraken from another account, its cost basis has to follow it correctly. Importing every source into one place is what makes that possible.

Get started with CoinLedger

A missing cost basis on Kraken almost always comes down to the same thing: your crypto has a history Kraken can't see, whether that's a purchase on another platform or a reward lot from before the staking shutdown. The Kraken U.S. Tax Center only sees your Kraken-side data. Pull the full history back together, and the problem disappears.

CoinLedger connects to Kraken and hundreds of other exchanges and wallets, matches your transfers, and rebuilds your cost basis across every account, including staking-reward lots and per-wallet records, so you can file with accurate numbers instead of a $0 placeholder.

CoinLedger is trusted by more than 700,000 investors around the world.

Get started with a free account today.