Tax season 2026 has brought millions of crypto investors face-to-face with a new IRS form. And a serious problem is baked into its design.
​
Form 1099-DA, the first federal tax document created specifically for digital assets, began arriving in inboxes this month. The form reports gross proceeds from crypto sales directly to both taxpayers and the IRS. What it doesn’t report, at least for this first year, is cost basis, the original purchase price that determines how much tax is actually owed.

The gap has created confusion and, in many cases, the risk of dramatically overstated tax bills. An investor who bought crypto for $40,000 and sold it for $70,000 owes taxes on $30,000 in gains. But if that investor—or their software—reports only the $70,000 proceeds figure without accounting for basis, the math looks very different to the IRS.

​Janna Scott saw this coming. The founder of DeFi Tax spent two years studying exactly this kind of structural breakdown before launching her platform this month.

Back in December 2021, Scott’s accounting clients started asking whether their crypto tax reports were accurate. She decided to test the question directly. She took one wallet and ran it through fourteen major tax platforms. The results came back fourteen different ways, with discrepancies sometimes reaching tens of thousands of dollars on identical data.

“I kept seeing the same pattern,” Scott said. “People thought their taxes were handled until an audit or notice showed up. When I audited crypto tax platforms themselves, I realized many of them couldn’t explain their own numbers.”

Why the Form Falls Short
The 1099-DA’s missing cost basis isn’t an accident. The IRS built in a phase-in period because crypto brokers often lack visibility into basis data—especially when assets have moved between exchanges, sat in self-custody wallets, or were purchased on platforms that have since shut down. Full basis reporting won’t kick in until the 2026 tax year, with those forms arriving in 2027.

Until then, taxpayers are on their own.
Scott’s two-year research initiative, conducted alongside the SEC, IRS, and university researchers, revealed why that’s a problem. Most crypto tax software was never built to handle the complexity that now defines the market.

“Most tools were designed for basic buy-and-sell activity,” Scott said. “Once you introduce DeFi, LPs, bridges, and wrapping, the math breaks. The biggest issue isn’t missing features; it’s the lack of explainability. If you can’t explain how a number was calculated, it won’t hold up under audit.”

Decentralized Finance, Centralized Confusion
For anyone who has participated in DeFi, the 1099-DA’s limitations cut deeper. Liquidity pools, token bridges, and wrapped assets do not fit the transaction categories most software recognizes.

“Bridging isn’t selling, and wrapping isn’t disposal, but most software treats them that way,” Scott said. “DeFi activity exposes the cracks in legacy tax logic.”

Traditional platforms let users patch over these gaps by editing data manually, changing timestamps, reclassifying transactions, and adjusting basis. Those edits might quiet an error message, but they also destroy the records that matter when regulators start asking questions.

“Automation without transparency is just a faster risk,” Scott said.

Reading Directly From the Chain
DeFi Tax, now live, abandons the CSV upload model entirely. The platform reads transaction data straight from the blockchain. No imports. No manual edits. No user-adjustable fields. One wallet, one result, every time.

“We don’t optimize for speed or simplicity at the expense of accuracy,” Scott said. “DeFi Tax is built around audit defense. Every figure needs to be traceable, consistent, and defensible. That mindset changes everything about how the system is designed.”

Scott draws a sharp line between producing a tax number and producing documentation that survives examination.
“An auditor doesn’t just want totals,” she said. “They want to know how you got there. Audit-ready reporting is structured, consistent, and explainable.”

The Matching Has Begun
The IRS now receives a copy of every 1099-DA. Automated systems will compare those forms against filed returns. Discrepancies—from missing basis, miscategorized trades, or software inconsistencies—will trigger notices.

“As reporting requirements tighten, crypto audits are becoming more common,” Scott said. “The risk isn’t just enforcement; it’s being unprepared when questions come.”

DeFi Tax serves investors, DeFi participants, startup founders, DAOs, and the CPAs and tax attorneys who advise them. Scott rejects the idea that crypto holders are looking for loopholes.

“Most people aren’t trying to avoid crypto taxes,” she said. “They’re trying to understand them.”

Her advice for anyone staring down an April deadline:
“Don’t wait until tax season or an audit to understand your exposure. If you can’t explain your report today, that’s a signal to fix it.”

“Clarity is the most undervalued feature in crypto finance,” Scott said. “The future of crypto taxes is explainability.”

A ​ UK-based journalist who was among the first participants in Johns Hopkins University’s landmark psilocybin trials has published a memoir that arrives as a critical intervention in debates about psychedelic medicine’s commercialization. Erica Rex’s Seeing What Is There: My Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic Era, now available through Simon & Schuster, documents her journey from cancer patient to vocal critic of an industry she believes has lost its way.
Rex won a National Magazine Award for fiction and has reported for The New York Times, Scientific American, The Independent, Salon, and Poets & Writers. Her 2014 essay “Calming a Turbulent Mind” in Scientific American Mind offered one of the earliest patient accounts of clinical psychedelic therapy following her 2012 participation in Hopkins trials testing whether psilocybin could treat depression in cancer patients.
The memoir traces psilocybin research to origins often overlooked in American accounts: the French Museum of Natural History, where first clinical trials were conducted at a Paris psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. This historical recovery forms part of Rex’s broader argument that psychedelic medicine’s current trajectory risks repeating mistakes of the past by prioritizing profit over genuine healing.
Rex’s critique draws from extensive platform work examining psychedelic therapy’s evolution. She has contributed multiple episodes to the Psychedelics Today podcast, including discussions on “Understanding Bad Trips: The Power and Potential of Adverse Psychedelic Experiences” and “Clinical Trials and Spontaneous Mystical Experiences.” Her 2021 presentation at the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute’s psilocybin speaker series, “A Breast Cancer Patient’s Perspectives on the Uses of Psychedelics in Medicine,” ran 44 minutes and remains available online.

Articles for Mad in America—”Psychedelic Therapy Will Not Save Us” and “The Culture Is the Poison: Why Psychedelics Are Dangerous Medicine in a Neoliberal Society”—articulated concerns about venture capital’s entrance into trauma treatment. For The Independent, she wrote “Magic mushrooms and cancer: My magical mystery cure?” while “The Power of Psychedelics” appeared in Scientific American.
Currently serving as an advisor to the Congressional Psychedelic Therapy Caucus, Rex has presented at NIH psilocybin research series and maintains regular podcast contributions examining psychedelic research integrity, adverse experiences, and the intersection of pathology and mystical states.
Her personal history informs the book’s perspective. As daughter of two psychiatrists—her mother trained under Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray, whose experiments reportedly influenced Theodore Kaczynski—Rex experienced childhood psychiatric treatment resulting in Complex PTSD. The memoir positions this experience within broader examination of systems claiming to heal while potentially deepening wounds.
Asked about venture capital’s impact on trauma treatment, Rex offers unsparing assessment: “Commercialization is designed to create efficiencies of scale, maximizing throughput as though humans and healing were components of computing systems. By its nature, commercialization removes all of the curative humanistic and cultural ingredients from the experience in order to maximize profit. These include: community, authentic connections with other human beings, taking part in a ritual or sacramental curative process. All venture capital exists to do is to extract the maximum profit out of any material or any generative system, including human relationships and cultural practices. It is murderously destructive to institutions that serve precisely the people who stand to benefit most from psychedelic treatment, and voids any consideration of the aspects of the psychedelic experience which make us human.”

The book documents experiences with psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT while examining exploitation risks in settings where emotional exposure is extreme and regulation minimal. Rex addresses why women particularly face dangers in psychedelic therapy environments and questions spiritual language disguising commercial interests.
Narrative structure deliberately rejects conventional memoir arcs. “Yes. If you want accounts of romps with psychedelics or ‘how I ate ‘shrooms/went to the ayahuasca retreat/microdosed with LSD/smoked DMT and saw stuff’ there are plenty of books and articles to read. This isn’t one of them,” Rex states.
Joe Moore, Co-Founder and CEO of Psychedelics Today, writes: “This important memoir critiques psychiatry and the psychedelic movement, exploring trauma, healing, and the ethical challenges of contemporary psychiatry. Through her journey with psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT, Erica Rex reveals the promise of transformation while advocating for a future where true healing includes social support, equity, and community. Students of psychedelics and psychiatry would do well to read this book.”

Stephen Mills, author of Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood, describes it as “an extraordinary, beautifully written account of one woman’s lifelong journey out of unimaginable childhood trauma… Hers is a singular and prophetic voice, summoning the healing power of community in a culture that has pathologized human suffering.”
Jeffrey Masson, author of Assault on Truth, calls the work “brave, passionate, and powerful” noting it “combines research and lived truth. Difficult at times, but impossible to put down—it will leave you wiser, shaken, and opened in ways few books ever do.”
Rex returns to the United States on Friday, February 20th for the book’s launch at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. The evening event at 28 Adams Street runs 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, followed by formal Q&A and book signing.
Seeing What Is There: My Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic Era is published by She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster. Trade paperback retails $17.99, ebook $12.99, available through Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

Peruda gets at something that rarely makes it onto stages, even progressive ones: the sheer accumulation of it all. The medical appointments where you weren’t believed. The workplace conversations where you had to explain something three times while a man said it once and got the credit. The constant, low-grade threat assessment that runs in the background of walking home, taking transit, existing in a body that other people feel entitled to comment on, touch, evaluate. None of this is dramatic. All of it adds up.
“Displaying the ironies and pitfalls women are forced to endure is hilarious and cathartic in a pee-yourself-a-little kind of way,” Peruda says. The show doesn’t abandon humor for sermon. It uses comedy to point directly at the absurdity of what women are expected to tolerate, then refuses to wrap it up neatly. There’s no moment where the lights soften and everyone learns a lesson. There’s just the mess, the recognition, and the relief of being in a room where nobody’s pretending.
The feminist comedy landscape has expanded in recent years, but there’s still an unspoken expectation that women will make their pain charming. Relatable. Something that goes down easy. All the Rage skips that entirely. Peruda isn’t here to reassure anyone that things are getting better, or that anger can be channeled into something productive and tidy. She’s here to say the thing out loud and let it sit there.

“I’m taking the gloves off,” she explains. “I’m pulling the curtain back to reveal the wizard is a scared man with scrawny legs that probably doesn’t pay his child support.”
As for why now, Peruda doesn’t mince words. “If you have to ask that you’re not paying attention. My feed is filled with furious women desperate for answers, for something to do with their inescapable rage they carry with them when they go to work, when they drop their kids off at school, or when they bravely try to go on a first date.”
Her central argument lands like a dare: “Anger is the key. The greatest trick Patriarchy ever pulled was convincing women their anger was wrong and shameful. When in fact it is the key to our liberation, and the path to rebuild the World.”
It’s a line that could scan as bumper-sticker feminism, except that Peruda earns it. The show isn’t built on slogans. It’s built on specificity—the particular texture of being dismissed, the exact weight of being told you’re overreacting when you know you’re not. That’s what makes the comedy land.
Peruda’s path to this work wasn’t linear. “I come from a single mom home with siblings who tortured and loved each other fiercely,” she says. “I had a difficult upbringing which taught me that humor can not only soothe but bring people together. I was a good kid, until I wasn’t. I railed against the World and nearly destroyed myself in the process.” Now, she says, she still rails against the world—”but with a deadly wit and the knowing that I can do great things.”

Workhouse grieves the loss of the Asbury Park Casino—iconic history turned to dust. To those committed to preservation, we are prepared to offer pro bono service and resources to advance viable alternatives to demolition.
#asburypark #asburyparkboardwalk #asburyparknj

Cracks in Crypto’s Tax SystemDaniel FuschJanuary 12, 2026

Janna Scott discovered the problem the way most people discover structural flaws: by accident, and then by obsession.
It was late 2021, and Scott—a former government fiscal analyst who’d spent years reviewing Treasury reports and compliance audits—was doing something millions of Americans were attempting that year: filing taxes on cryptocurrency trades. Her wallet contained roughly 300 transactions. Nothing extraordinary by crypto standards. A few trades, some DeFi experiments, the digital equivalent of a moderately active portfolio.
She ran her data through one of the popular crypto tax platforms. Got her numbers. Then, more out of professional habit than suspicion, she ran the same wallet through a second platform.
The results didn’t match.
So she tried a third. Then a fourth. Fourteen platforms in total—essentially the entire landscape of crypto tax software available to American taxpayers.
Not one produced the same result.
One platform reported tens of thousands in taxable income. Another showed a capital loss. The variations weren’t marginal—they were fundamental disagreements about the same financial reality, derived from identical data, with no explanation for the contradictions.
“It wasn’t noise in the data,” Scott says. “It was the math itself that was broken.”
For most people, that discovery would have prompted a call to an accountant and a decision to pick the most conservative estimate. For Scott, whose career had been built on identifying exactly these kinds of systemic vulnerabilities, it was an invitation to look deeper.

The Architecture of Error
What followed was a nine-month investigation that unfolded with the methodical precision of academic research and the urgency of a detective story.
Scott went to the source: the blockchain itself. She began manually validating thousands of transactions, pulling raw data directly from distributed ledgers, checking cost basis calculations, timestamps, token movements line by line. She developed her own APIs to bypass the CSV files exported by exchanges—files that, she discovered, often served as the shaky foundation for most tax software—and instead retrieved immutable records directly from the chain.
The patterns that emerged were troubling.
The same wallet produced tax liability swings exceeding $25,000 depending on which platform processed it. Coinbase might report significant taxable income while a partner tax service showed a loss on identical data. In some cases, routine transfers between a user’s own wallets were being classified as taxable sales, creating what the original article describes as “phantom income”—tax obligations on transactions that never actually occurred.
More concerning still: Scott found that many platforms allowed users to edit core transaction data. “These platforms allow users to edit the date, time, value, and currency of a blockchain transaction,” Scott explains. “The moment you do that, the audit trail is gone.”
The implications extended beyond individual tax returns. This was infrastructure failure at the foundation of an emerging asset class.
Scott brought her findings to federal regulators. In March 2023, the IRS quietly suspended crypto audits after reviewing her research and concluding that their CSV-based audit methodology was unreliable. Universities were brought in to peer-review Scott’s analysis. The conclusion held: none of the fourteen platforms tested could consistently produce accurate tax reports from blockchain data.
The Growing Divide
While regulators paused to reconsider their approach, cryptocurrency adoption continued its upward trajectory. Approximately 6 million Americans reported crypto on their 2023 tax returns—roughly double the previous year. Meanwhile, through exchange subpoenas and transaction records, the IRS maintains data on nearly 50 million U.S. residents who have interacted with cryptocurrency at some point, whether they’ve reported it or not.
Scott describes this widening gap between regulatory visibility and reporting accuracy as a “tax time bomb.”
“Crypto evolved,” she says. “Tax software didn’t.”
Most crypto tax platforms, she explains, were designed for straightforward transactions: buying and selling digital assets. But decentralized finance introduced complexity those systems weren’t built to handle—liquidity pools, cross-chain bridges, wrapped assets, staking rewards, yield farming. The old categorical logic doesn’t accommodate the new financial behaviors.
CSV exports from exchanges frequently lack essential data: timestamps, transaction hashes, accurate pricing information. Software fills the gaps with assumptions. And assumptions, in tax reporting, create liability.
“Automation without transparency is just a faster risk,” Scott says.
After presenting her findings to the fourteen companies whose platforms she’d tested, ninety percent declined to address the structural issues she’d identified. That response—or lack thereof—prompted Scott and her team to build an alternative.
Designing for Scrutiny
DeFi Tax launches publicly this month with a different foundational premise. It doesn’t accept user-edited spreadsheets. Instead, it retrieves raw, timestamped transaction data directly from blockchains and exchanges, structures it into a transparent audit trail, and generates reports that can be traced and verified line by line.
“Run the same wallet twice, you get the same answer twice,” Scott says. “That’s not a feature. That’s the baseline for compliance.”
The platform is designed for users with complex on-chain activity—DeFi participants, crypto founders, decentralized organizations, and the accounting professionals who serve them—who need more than speed or simplicity. They need audit readiness: documentation that explains exactly how every calculation was derived and can withstand professional scrutiny.
“Audits don’t ask which tool you used,” Scott says. “They ask how you calculated your numbers.”
With the IRS preparing to expand digital asset reporting requirements and new 1099-DA forms on the horizon, Scott believes the industry is entering a new phase—one where trust-based assurances are no longer sufficient for software handling tax obligations.
Transparency as Design Principle
There’s a particular irony in Scott’s work. Cryptocurrency’s foundational promise was transparency—immutable public ledgers, cryptographic verification, systems designed to operate without requiring trust in centralized authorities.
Yet when it came to the practical task of accounting for activity on those transparent ledgers, the industry largely defaulted to opaque tools that couldn’t explain their own calculations.
“Most people aren’t trying to avoid crypto taxes,” Scott says. “They’re trying to understand them.”
Her research suggests that the barrier to compliance isn’t willful evasion—it’s infrastructure inadequacy. People using flawed tools to meet complex obligations they don’t fully understand, in an emerging regulatory landscape that’s still taking shape.
DeFi Tax’s public launch arrives at a moment when that understanding is becoming essential. As regulators prepare to resume audits and millions of Americans face increasingly sophisticated reporting requirements, Scott’s work offers something that’s been notably absent: clarity derived from verifiable calculation.
“Chaos is optional,” she says. “Clarity is a design choice.”
For an ecosystem that built its identity on transparency and trustless verification, it may be the most important design principle of all.
Those seeking transparent, blockchain-verified tax reporting can find DeFi Tax at https://defitax.us

New Jersey Film Academy
proudly presents Breaking In Lecture Series with

ARMAND ASSANTE

Join us for an evening with this award-winning actor. Learn how he entered the world of storytelling and remains in iconic films such as

Gotti
The Mambo Kings
American Gangster
Private Benjamin
and currently in Revival

Don’t miss this special opportunity to ask your questions and experience a night with this Hollywood icon.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026 @ 6:30pm
Brookdale Community College
Navesink Room, Student Life Center
Parking Lot 7
765 Newman Springs Road
Lincroft, NJ 07738
Breaking In Moderator: County Commissioner Director Thomas Arnone
To RSVP: Call Daniel Colaianni 732-224-2683 or email [email protected]

Tickets are $25
*FREE for Brookdale Students

MEDIA: If you have interested in interviewing Armand Assante, media please contact Workhouse, CEO, Adam Nelson [email protected] 

New Jersey Film Academy
Where the best in the biz begin

Partner Colleges:
ATLANTIC CAPE CC, BROOKDALE COMMUNITY COLLEGE, CAMDEN COUNTY COLLEGE, COUNTY COLLEGE OF MORRIS, ESSEX COUNTY COLLEGE, HUDSON COUNTY CC, MERCER COUNTY CC, MIDDLESEX COLLEGE, RAITAN VALLEY CC, ROWAN OF SOUTH JERSEY, UNION COLLEGE OF UNION COUNTY

inside the historic halls of the Jersey Shore Arts Center, a sold-out crowd gathered for the AP'N3 Film Premiere Screening!— an evening that felt less like competition and more like communion.

Ten finalists from the On Location category — novice, emerging, and professional filmmakers — stood shoulder to shoulder, each given the same creative constraints: a theme, a prop, a line of dialogue, and a city. And yet, from those identical sparks came wildly different fires. Subversive. Humorous. Caustic. Dramatic. Heartbreaking. Together, they formed a kaleidoscopic love letter to City of Asbury Park— a olace that never stops inspiring reinvention.

Deep gratitude to the Asbury Park Arts Council and the festival’s founders for building this cinematic playground — a space where constraint becomes catalyst, and storytelling thrives in all its raw, local glory.

For me, it was an honor to share this night, and this film, with my family — my father- and mother-in-law, my beloved Nicole, our baby Viva, and cousin Jessica — all of whom appear onscreen. To create something personal, then witness it projected among this community of dreamers, is the rare kind of full-circle only film can offer.

None of it exists without Gary Hanna — the director, editor, and cinematographer whose eye finds poetry in desolation and light in wreckage. His precision gave Food for Thought its pulse.

So tonight, as we release the full three-minute film publicly for the first time, I’m reminded that filmmaking is still alchemy — the collision of chaos and will, of patience and faith.

Food for Thought — written & featuring Adam Nelson
Directed, edited & cinematography by Gary Hanna
Music by Adam Nelson in collaboration with ElevenLabs
Cast includes Nicole Abbruzzese Nelson, Jan Abbruzzese, Edmondo Abbruzzese, Jessica Abbruzzese, and introducing Viva June

Presented by the Asbury Park Arts Council

For those who couldn’t make it — here it is. Our small, salt-rusted dream on film.

#FoodForThought #APN3FilmChallenge #AsburyPark #ShortFilm #IndependentFilm #Workhouse #AdamNelson #GaryHanna #FilmPremiere #AsburyParkArtsCouncil #SupportPublicArt

Adrift on the Asbury Park Boardwalk, a half-starved sailor searches for scraps — of food, memory, and meaning. Sun-struck and drifting between hallucination and history, he wanders through the ruins of a world that left him shipwrecked.

That’s Food for Thought — a surreal, salt-rusted meditation on hunger, erasure, and the price of progress.
Created for the AP’N3 Film Challenge by the Asbury Park Arts Council, Asbury Park’s fiercely inventive three-week filmmaking competition, the project was built under pressure: three minutes, one city, one chance to make it count. On Day One, each team received a theme, prop, line of dialogue, and location — the only ingredients allowed. In the On Location category, every frame had to be filmed entirely within Asbury Park’s borders, transforming the city itself into both subject and character.

We’re honored that Food for Thought has been named a Finalist, one of the top selections advancing to the festival premiere, where both the jury awards and the Audience Award will be decided live.
​
Join us for the premiere:
Sunday, November 9
Jersey Shore Arts Center, Ocean Grove, NJ
Tickets $17.85

Visit:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/apn3-film-challenge-premiere-tickets-1670935034669?fbclid=IwY2xjawNSWQ9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHkDUptnmrAYaRCwBmS-K-wyDG1zTbI8EavyQkwnauTXl2OZA_6fv9ppswaJE_aem_4Ei3hDYkS1HNu-wQO6GR-g

Written & Featuring Adam Nelson
Directed, Edited & Cinematography by Gary Hanna
Original Music by Adam Nelson in collaboration with ElevenLabs
Food for Thought — a film about hunger, memory, and what survives the wreck.
#FoodForThought #APN3FilmChallenge #AsburyPark #ShortFilm #IndependentFilm #GaryHanna #AdamNelson #Workhouse #FilmFinalist #Premiere Film Asbury Park