The Woman Fixing Crypto's Broken Tax System

Janna Scott wasn't looking to start a company. She was trying to solve a problem for her accounting clients.

It was December 2021, and the questions coming across her desk were getting harder to answer. Clients with cryptocurrency holdings wanted to know if their tax reports were accurate. Scott, who had spent her career in tax compliance, did what any good accountant would do: she started checking the work.

What she found unsettled her.

Scott took a single crypto wallet and ran it through fourteen of the leading tax platforms on the market. She expected minor variations—different rounding methods, perhaps, or small interpretive differences in how certain transactions were classified. Instead, she got fourteen completely different tax outcomes. On identical data, the spread between platforms sometimes exceeded tens of thousands of dollars.

"I kept seeing the same pattern," Scott recalls. "People thought their taxes were handled until an audit or notice showed up. When I audited crypto tax platforms themselves, I realized many of them couldn't explain their own numbers."

That discovery sent her down a rabbit hole that would consume the next two years. She began collaborating with the SEC, the IRS, and academic researchers at major universities, trying to understand why an industry built on the promise of transparency had produced tax tools that couldn't deliver a consistent answer.

The problem, she learned, was baked into the architecture.

Most crypto tax software operates on a familiar model: users upload CSV files exported from exchanges, the platform processes the data, and a tax report emerges on the other end. The workflow feels modern and efficient. But it carries a fatal flaw. These platforms allow users to manually edit transaction data—adjusting timestamps, reclassifying transaction types, modifying cost basis. Every edit introduces subjectivity. Every subjective decision becomes a liability the moment an auditor starts asking questions.

"Most tools were designed for basic buy-and-sell activity," Scott explains. "Once you introduce DeFi, LPs, bridges, and wrapping, the math breaks. The biggest issue isn't missing features; it's the lack of explainability. If you can't explain how a number was calculated, it won't hold up under audit."

The complexity of decentralized finance has outpaced the software designed to report on it. When a user wraps Ethereum into another token, or bridges assets across blockchains, or provides liquidity to a decentralized exchange, most platforms misread the transaction entirely. "Bridging isn't selling, and wrapping isn't disposal, but most software treats them that way," Scott says. "DeFi activity exposes the cracks in legacy tax logic."

Her solution was to rebuild from the ground up.

DeFi Tax, which launches its paid public platform in January 2026, takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than accepting user-uploaded files, the platform reads transaction data directly from the blockchain. There are no CSV imports. There are no editable fields. The underlying data is immutable, and the calculations are applied uniformly. Run the same wallet twice, get the same answer twice.

"We don't optimize for speed or simplicity at the expense of accuracy," Scott says. "DeFi Tax is built around audit defense. Every figure needs to be traceable, consistent, and defensible. That mindset changes everything about how the system is designed."

The timing of the launch is not accidental. After years of regulatory ambiguity, the federal government is tightening its grip on digital assets. The IRS has expanded its crypto reporting requirements. The SEC has increased enforcement actions. Audits that once seemed theoretical are becoming routine.

"The risk isn't just enforcement," Scott warns. "It's being unprepared when questions come."

For Scott, "audit-ready" is not a marketing phrase. It describes a specific standard: documentation that can survive professional scrutiny. "An auditor doesn't just want totals," she says. "They want to know how you got there. Audit-ready reporting is structured, consistent, and explainable."

The platform is designed for serious participants in the crypto economy—investors with significant on-chain activity, DeFi power users, startup founders, DAOs, and the CPAs and tax attorneys who advise them. Scott has little patience for the notion that crypto investors are trying to evade their obligations.

"Most people aren't trying to avoid crypto taxes," she says. "They're trying to understand them."

Her advice for anyone holding digital assets heading into 2026 is direct: "Don't wait until tax season or an audit to understand your exposure. If you can't explain your report today, that's a signal to fix it."

After years of improvisation, Scott believes the crypto tax industry is approaching a reckoning. The platforms that survive will be the ones that can withstand questions. The ones that can't will be exposed the moment regulators come looking.

"Clarity is the most undervalued feature in crypto finance," she says. "The future of crypto taxes is explainability."

DeFi Tax will be available starting January 2026 at https://defitax.us