Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, August 28th, and today we are talking about the new

broker definitions from the U.S. Treasury and all of the scuttle butt around them.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to

bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends. Hope you had a great late summer weekend. Today, we are

getting into news that broke just before the beginning of the weekend, but has continued to

reverberate throughout. The U.S. Treasury has

finally released their definition of a broker as part of broader crypto tax reporting rules.

The nearly 300-page rule proposal was published on Friday to codify language in the 2021

Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The rule would require centralized crypto exchanges,

payment processors, and other

entities that regularly redeem crypto issued by them to report customer transactions to the IRS

in a similar way to stockbrokers. Now, the issue is that the definition of broker is so

broad that it captures some hosted wallet services, some defy applications, and potentially

much more.

In addition to the reporting requirements, the rulemaking introduces a new dedicated tax form,

the 1099 DA, which settles confusion around which form crypto brokers should file.

Minors and validators are expressly excluded from the reporting requirements,

but the rules seek to capture essentially all other web-based services

that provide access to trading platforms within their own user interface.

...