The blockchain analytics company Chainalysis reported that at least $457 billion in potentially taxable crypto activity occurred on-chain worldwide in 2025. It contends that the primary international standard for reporting rules, namely, the OECD Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), covers just 14 percent of the transactions.
North America led $457B in potentially taxable crypto activity
According to Chainalysis’s report published on August 26, 2026, this amount includes capital gains, income from crypto mining, staking, and lending, and crypto-denominated transactions across six major blockchain networks. This statistic intentionally excludes crypto trading and any other operations performed inside centralized exchanges.
The largest share of $457 billion is attributable to North America, which generated almost $134.6 billion. The second-largest was generated by the European Union, at $125.1 billion. On its own separate report page, Chainalysis subdivides the same on-chain activities into crypto trading gains, on-chain income, and digital payments, and highlights the flows of stablecoin payments as the largest and most internationally distributed ones.
CARF targets crypto exchanges while DeFi remains harder to track
CARF, developed by the OECD in 2022, mandates the disclosure of information on transactions to the local tax authority of the provider, which may forward the information to the country in which the taxpayer resides. Collection has begun on January 1, 2026, in 48 countries, including the United Kingdom and the European Union, per reports from Chainalysis. Service providers in scope now collect additional customer information and tax residency.
The framework focuses on intermediaries. Chainalysis’s explanation of CARF, published in 2022, states that CARF targets “Reporting Crypto-Asset Service Providers” or service providers like exchanges, brokers, dealers, and ATM providers involved in exchange transactions for customers as a business. It was stated in the same document that “there is no broad carve-out for the different types of decentralized exchanges that exist,” although bulletin board platforms and pure software providers could fall out of CARF.
CARF misses 86% of potentially taxable crypto activity
According to Chainalysis, the total amount of transactions covered by CARF comprises only 14% of all taxable on-chain activities that were detected by the company. The remaining 86% are conducted through decentralized exchanges, peer-to-peer transactions, income streams, and payments that do not have any organization taking commissions and having custody of the money.
Colby Mangels, an adviser to the OECD who once participated in developing CARF, has reportedly stated that the framework was developed for those organizations that facilitate cryptocurrency transactions, which is why most DeFi solutions are excluded from its scope. This may change in the future. According to Mangels, tax authorities are monitoring developments in the field of anti-money laundering regulations that will make some DeFi platforms or their operators reportable service providers.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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