Huge.
🚨Very big news: the U.S. Treasury Department has officially sent the CARF regulations to the White House for review.
CARF, the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework, is a lengthy, international standard developed by the OECD. Nearly 90 countries have already signed on, agreeing to implement it. Full implementation begins in 2027, which is basically tomorrow in regulatory time.
The core idea of CARF is simple. Every participating country must require all crypto exchanges and service providers, what they call VASPs, Virtual Asset Service Providers, to collect detailed information about their users. That means full KYC, due-diligence data, tax residency, and your tax ID number.
At the end of each year, every exchange must report your activity to your home country.
So, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer using Binance, Kraken, Bybit, Bitstamp, OKX, any exchange operating inside a CARF country, that exchange will send your activity to the United States automatically.
CARF is basically the crypto version of the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), the banking-reporting law the rest of the world already uses to share bank balances. The U.S. didn’t join CRS, it created FATCA instead, but now, Treasury is proposing that the U.S. does join CARF.
Congress already hinted at this. The crypto regulatory bill that came out earlier this year also supported CARF implementation.
So what does this actually mean?
CARF requires the reporting of all transactions, not just sales, but exchanges and transfers. And, when it comes to transfers, CARF requires the reporting of either the to or from wallet address.
Here’s the punchline: The 1099-DA requirements already cover most of what CARF demands.
CARF is basically 1099-DAs coming from foreign exchanges.
But here’s the critical difference: 1099-DAs from U.S. companies go to you as the taxpayer.
CARF reports do not.
You will not get a copy of what a foreign exchange reports about you. It goes straight to the IRS, silently.
The IRS will plug all this data, domestic and foreign, into tools like Palantir and run matching algorithms to see who reported their crypto activity accurately… and who didn’t.
And the ones who didn’t? They’re getting audited.
This is extremely significant.
The era of hiding, ignoring, or “forgetting” to report is ending, and CARF is the global mechanism that makes sure of it.
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