Chainalysis reports that global potential taxable cryptocurrency activity will exceed $457 billion in 2025, with the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) covering only 14% of the total.

Chainalysis has released a report showing that the scale of global on-chain potential taxable cryptocurrency activity in 2025 reached at least $457 billion, covering gains from centralized and decentralized exchanges, plus income from mining, staking, lending, gambling, crypto payments, and other sources. Since transactions, staking, and lending activities within centralized exchanges cannot be directly observed on-chain, this figure may actually underestimate the size of the global crypto economy. By region, North America’s 2025 potential taxable crypto activity hit $134.6 billion, the EU $125.1 billion, and East Asia $54.7 billion. The U.S. ranked first among individual countries at $112.6 billion, followed by Germany at $24.1 billion. Chainalysis noted that a significant share of global crypto activity remains outside the scope of traditional tax information reporting systems. The OECD launched the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) in 2022, with dozens of countries committing to start exchanging relevant information from 2027, and more expected to join in 2028 or 2029. However, only around 14% of 2025’s global on-chain potential taxable activity falls under CARF’s coverage; the remaining ~86% involves activities including DEX trades, peer-to-peer transfers, self-custody wallets, on-chain mining and staking income, lending income, and crypto payments. Additionally, CARF is not a retroactive system, and issues such as missing cost bases and transactions on offshore platforms may prevent tax authorities from accurately calculating taxable gains. Chainalysis said blockchain analytics can help tax authorities directly observe on-chain activities, track fund flows between wallets, identify transactions on offshore and decentralized platforms, reconstruct digital asset cost bases, and uncover income sources like mining, staking, lending, and liquidity provision, thereby filling the coverage gaps of CARF and traditional tax information reporting systems.