US Tax Reform · September 20, 2026 · 15 min read · By CryptoTaxCalc Team

H.R. 10357 Explained: The Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act and Your Crypto Taxes

The House just advanced the biggest crypto tax rewrite in a decade: a $10 fee exemption, simplified accounting for widely traded coins, a stablecoin redemption rule, a lending safe harbor — and, buried in the trade-off column, the end of the wash-sale loophole. Here's what's actually in the bill, when each piece would bite, and what it changes for the return you're filing right now.

Image: Illustrative purposes. Bill provisions summarized from H.R. 10357 as approved by the House Ways and Means Committee on September 16, 2026. The bill has not been enacted; details may change.

Here's the number that explains why this bill exists: in 2025, the IRS received hundreds of millions of Form 1099-DA filings, and a huge share of them reported disposals so small the tax at stake was measured in pennies. People buying $4 of bitcoin to test an app. Network fees paid in crypto. Dust from decade-old faucets. Every single one of those is technically a taxable property disposal under current Form 8949 rules, and the reporting machinery now exists to catch all of them.

Roughly a quarter of American adults — about 69 million people — hold some crypto. You cannot run a reporting regime that treats every micro-disposal as a compliance event without something breaking. Either people drown in paperwork for gains worth less than a stamp, or they ignore the rules entirely, and both outcomes are bad for the IRS. That's the hole the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act is trying to dig out of.

I've read the committee summary so you don't have to. Some of this bill is genuinely generous. Some of it takes away the single biggest planning trick in US crypto tax. Let's go through it piece by piece.

1. The $10 fee fix: no more taxable dust

The simplest provision is also the one that fixes the most absurd problem. When you move crypto, you often pay the network or transaction fee in crypto. Under current law, that fee payment is a disposal — you disposed of $0.80 of ETH to pay gas, so you have an $0.80 disposal to report, with a gain or loss computed against your basis in that ETH. Nobody does this. Everybody is technically wrong.

H.R. 10357 would add a de minimis carve-out: network and transaction fees of $10 or less would no longer generate their own taxable dispositions. The provision applies to dispositions after December 31, 2027, and it excludes professional traders, dealers, brokers, and anyone who transfers digital assets more than 5,000 times a year — Congress clearly didn't want a hedge fund routing its entire book through the exemption.

Is $10 the right number? Honestly, it's conservative. The de minimis debate has been running for years — the Senate's Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act proposed a flat $200 per transaction, and Germany already waives gains up to about €1,000 a year. A fee-based exemption fixes the gas-fee absurdity specifically, but it does nothing for the person who buys a $50 coffee with bitcoin. That's a deliberate scope choice, and it leaves the coffee problem for another day.

2. Simplified accounting for "widely traded digital assets"

This is the sleeper provision, and it's bigger than it looks. The bill lets you elect simplified accounting for digital assets designated as "widely traded." Under the election, all your gains and losses on those assets are treated as short-term — no holding-period tracking, no sorting lots into long-term and short-term buckets, no date-matching gymnastics in your records.

Who is this for? People who trade a lot but keep terrible records. If you've ever faced a Form 8949 with 900 rows and no idea which lots were held 366 days, the election trades a possibly-lower rate for a clean, simple calculation. Short-term rates top out higher than long-term ones, so active traders with messy books give up some rate optimization in exchange for filing that actually matches their records.

Three limits matter:

• The election is irrevocable for five years. Choose carefully — you can't flip back next April if you regret it.
• Stablecoins don't qualify. The stablecoin problem gets its own rule (next section).
• It applies to tax years after December 31, 2027. This is a 2028-filing-season change, not a today change.

My honest take: most casual holders should ignore this election and keep normal tracking — long-term rates are worth protecting. The election is a pressure valve for people whose record-keeping has already collapsed. If that's you, the smarter move is usually to reconstruct your history with a local CSV import before you volunteer to pay short-term rates on everything.

3. Stablecoins finally get sensible treatment (sort of)

For USDT and USDC holders, the bill borrows an idea from the GENIUS Act framework. For stablecoins issued by GENIUS Act–licensed issuers, gains and losses would be measured against the redemption price, with a tolerance band of 99.5% to 100.5% of face value. Price movements inside the band wouldn't generate tax events at all.

Think about what that kills. Today, every stablecoin swap is a property disposal — I broke down the fractional-cent accounting nightmare in the stablecoin guide. Under the new rule, moving USDC between exchanges, paying with USDC at $1.003, or routing through a stablecoin pair inside the tolerance band would stop being a reportable event for licensed-issuer coins. That eliminates a large share of the 1099-DA line items the IRS has been drowning in.

The fine print: it only covers licensed issuers, and it applies to tax years after December 31, 2026 — so this is the earliest-biting major provision, potentially relevant to your next return if the bill becomes law soon. Algorithmic stables and unlicensed offshore issuers stay fully taxable under the property rules. The depeg risk that got UST to zero is exactly why Congress won't extend the tolerance band to every token with a dollar sign in its name.

4. The trade-off: wash sales and constructive sales come to crypto

Now the part that hurts. Today, you can sell a coin at a loss and rebuy it thirty seconds later, and the loss is fully deductible — because the wash sale rule in IRC Section 1091 only reaches "stock or securities," and crypto is property. I explain the whole exemption in the wash sale guide, and it's the engine behind every crypto tax-loss harvesting strategy.

H.R. 10357 would extend both the wash sale rules and the constructive sale rules to digital assets. Same-asset repurchases within the 30-day window would disallow the loss and push it into the basis of the replacement coins, the same way stocks work. The sell-and-rebuy harvesting loop that works today would stop working the day this is enacted.

A few things worth saying out loud:

• The current window is still open. Nothing has passed. If you have 2021-era losers and unrealized gains to offset, harvesting under current law remains legal and fully deductible.
• There's no announced transition relief for existing positions. The committee materials don't grandfather positions opened before enactment. If you're mid-harvest-plan for 2026, doing it this year — under the rules that actually apply to this year — is the conservative read.
• Loss harvesting doesn't die entirely. You can still sell and realize losses; you just can't rebuy the identical asset inside the window. Swap into a different but correlated asset, or wait 31 days, the same way stock investors have always done it.

The politics here are actually coherent: Congress was never going to hand crypto a fee exemption and a simplified regime without taking back the loophole the IRS has complained about in every budget proposal since 2021. This is the payment for everything else in the bill.

5. Crypto lending gets a §1058 safe harbor

Quieter, but genuinely useful: the bill extends the Section 1058 securities-lending safe harbor to digital assets. Today, lending your BTC through a lending desk or collateralized borrow platform sits in a gray zone — a technically aggressive position is that the loan is a disposal, since you gave up your coins and got back "identical" ones later, which is exactly the fact pattern §1031-style and §1058 rules exist to resolve for securities.

Under the new safe harbor, a qualifying digital-asset loan — written agreement, return of identical assets, payments equivalent to interest — would not be treated as a disposal by the lender. That's clarity for the Aave-style deposit question too: I covered how proposals wanted to treat aToken deposits as dispositions in the lending guide, and a statutory safe harbor pulls a big chunk of DeFi lending out of that ambiguity. Interest income stays taxable as ordinary income, of course. Only the transfer mechanics get blessed.

6. The quieter provisions most coverage skips

The bill is a grab bag, and a few items deserve at least a paragraph each:

Dealer and trader mark-to-market election. Qualifying digital-asset dealers and traders could elect mark-to-market treatment under the Section 475 framework, converting their inventory gains from murky property-accounting into clean ordinary income. This mirrors the existing election for securities traders — if you've read the trader-vs-investor guide, this is the §475(f) machinery extended to crypto.

Mining and staking clarity. The bill specifies the source and character of mining and staking income — where it arises and how it's categorized, including for cross-border and treaty purposes. Not a rate change; a definitional cleanup that matters mostly for people mining in one country while resident in another.

Subpart F and PFIC rules extended. Foreign crypto funds and offshore entities holding digital assets get pulled into the existing anti-deferral frameworks. If you hold crypto through a foreign corporation or fund, this tightens the screws — one more reason the offshore-exchange era is ending, alongside CARF reporting.

IRS voluntary disclosure program. A digital-asset-specific voluntary disclosure initiative with penalty relief for people who come forward about unreported past activity. Given how many 1099-DA mismatches the IRS is sitting on, this is effectively an advertised off-ramp before enforcement ramps up.

Charitable donations and gambling losses. The bill folds in simplifications for donating digital assets to charity (cleaner fair-value deduction mechanics) and restores gambling loss deductions that a 2025 law had trimmed. Neither is crypto-specific, but both ride along in the package.

7. When each piece would actually take effect

Read that table again and notice the sequencing: the relief arrives in 2027–2028, but the harvesting clock is different. The wash sale extension is the one provision where waiting costs you.

8. How it compares to the other bills you've heard about

Three crypto tax proposals have been floating around, and coverage keeps blending them together:

The Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act (S. 4171) is the $200-per-transaction de minimis bill — no gain or loss on personal transactions up to $200, applying to transactions after December 31, 2026. It's the boldest relief for everyday spending, and it's been introduced in some form since 2020 without going anywhere.

The Digital Asset PARITY Act (H.R. 8899, introduced May 2026) targets one thing: treating qualifying payment stablecoins as cash-equivalents so everyday stablecoin spending isn't taxable. Single-issue, stablecoin-focused.

H.R. 10357 is the comprehensive package. Its fee-based de minimis is narrower than S. 4171's $200 — it fixes fee dispositions, not coffee purchases — but it bundles accounting relief, stablecoin rules, lending clarity and the wash sale trade-off into one vehicle with actual committee momentum behind it. In September 2026, this is the one with a pulse: 38–5 out of committee versus years of stalled single-issue bills.

9. What this means for the return you're filing now

Nothing has changed yet. Your 2025 filing (the one with the first wave of 1099-DAs) and your 2026 tax year are governed by exactly the rules that were in force yesterday — full Form 8949 reporting, no de minimis, no wash sale rule. Anyone telling you the "new law" changed this year's numbers is ahead of the actual statute.

But three moves make sense before this bill moves further:

• If you're going to harvest losses, do the math now. The tax-loss harvesting calculator shows what harvesting actually saves you at your marginal rate. Under current law a same-day rebuy keeps the loss; after enactment it wouldn't. Don't wait for a signed bill to start planning — by then the window may be shut.
• Reconstruct your basis records this year, not in 2028. The simplified accounting election is a trap for people who could have fixed their records instead. Pull exchange CSVs, run them through the free local batch import, and know your real numbers before you'd ever consider paying short-term rates on everything.
• If you have unreported past years, watch the voluntary disclosure program. Between 1099-DA matching and CARF data arriving from 2027, the matching machine is only getting sharper. A penalty-relief program is a significantly better exit than a CP2000 letter — see what happens when you simply don't report.

Bottom line

H.R. 10357 is the first crypto tax bill with real momentum in years, and it's a genuine trade: sensible relief for small transactions and stablecoins, clean rules for lending — paid for with the wash sale rules the IRS has wanted since 2021. The relief mostly arrives in 2027–2028. The harvesting window closes on enactment. It hasn't passed the House, let alone the Senate, so treat every provision here as provisional until the President signs something. The 69 million Americans holding crypto deserve certainty; this bill is the closest Congress has come to actually providing it. Until it's law, file under the rules that exist — and position yourself for the rules that are coming.

General information, not tax advice. H.R. 10357 has not been enacted; provisions and effective dates described here reflect the bill as approved by the House Ways and Means Committee on September 16, 2026 and may change during floor action or Senate consideration. For significant amounts, consult a tax professional.

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