HOBOKEN, NJ — Three days before the federal filing deadline, 28-year-old retail investor Brendan Mosley sat down at his kitchen table Saturday with a cold brew, a printout from Coinbase, and the dawning realization that the IRS does not, in fact, view his year of frantic memecoin swapping as ‘basically one big thing.’
According to the spreadsheet Mosley generated at 9:14 a.m. and immediately closed at 9:14 a.m., he executed 8,431 separate trades in 2024, each one a discrete capital gains event requiring its own cost basis, holding period, and disposition value, a fact he learned from a Reddit comment titled ‘lol you’re cooked.’
‘The thing he doesn’t understand,’ said Eliza Hartwick, a CPA at Manhattan tax boutique Linnaker & Voss who specializes in distressed crypto returns, ‘is that swapping FartCoin for ToiletCoin and then ToiletCoin back into Solana an hour later is, from the agency’s perspective, three taxable events. He thinks it’s vibes. It is not vibes. It has never been vibes.’
Mosley’s situation is reportedly complicated by the fact that roughly 1,200 of the trades occurred on a decentralized exchange that issued no 1099, exists on a blockchain he can no longer remember the name of, and was last seen in November 2024 announcing a ‘strategic pivot’ before the website became a single GIF of a frog.
‘He keeps asking me if he can just put down a number,’ said Hartwick, who has now received 14 voice memos from Mosley, the most recent of which is 41 seconds of him saying the word ‘okay’ at increasing volume. ‘I told him the IRS would prefer the correct number. He asked if there was a range. There is not a range.’
Mosley, who netted approximately $312 in actual profit for the year after fees, gas, and one rug pull involving a token that promised to ‘tokenize friendship,’ is expected to spend roughly 60 hours reconstructing wallet histories in order to report a tax liability his accountant estimates at $84.
As of press time, Mosley had filed for a six-month extension, opened a second cold brew, and was staring at a browser tab containing IRS Form 8949 with the expression of a man who has just been told the ocean is, technically, also paperwork.