2019’s decentralized finance (DeFi) boom that has led to more than $785 million being locked in crypto assets is giving accountants serious headaches.

Antoine Scalie, the CEO of accounting startup Cryptio says complex assets and transactions make it for the accounting to be more difficult. For this reason, Winklevoss Capital and Dragonfly Capital have invested millions in accounting startups like TaxBit. Alex Pack, the co-founder of DragonFly Capital thinks there are many blockchain attacks around pseudonymity and anonymity, and that the IRS doesn’t really know how to stack DeFi products, since clear categories for experimental assets don’t exist.

It seems DeFi users who used financial products not offered by exchanges and MakerDAO loans have to enter details about their transaction manually, so they pretty much rely on the help of the Certified Public Accountants and tax attorneys working for TaxBit’s support line.

Both Cryptio and TaxBit are making efforts to make their systems capable of automatically flagging the events in the DeFi ecosystem that have potential to be taxed. Cryptio doesn’t provide retail users a Turbo Tax option like TaxBit does. However, it helps its DeFi clients record information on smart contracts that have been “touched” by the asset.

Since the accounting requirements aren’t at all clear, Credit Karma has conducted a survey and discovered only 0.04% of Americans have reported their crypto transactions for the 2018 taxation, whereas 4% of the population in the country reported they used crypto that time.

This had the IRS issuing an update on the crypto-oriented guidance, back in 2019. Crypto and TaxBit representatives agree the complexity of tax reporting is impeding the crypto adoption. People have no idea how the technology for this works without filling in paperwork. The startups’ role is to make the usage more compliant and mainstream.

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