FTX cost basis: records, claims, and what the docket says

What happened, on the record?

On November 11, 2022 and November 14, 2022, FTX Trading Ltd. and 101 affiliated debtors filed Chapter 11 petitions in the District of Delaware [4]. On December 13, 2022 the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced an eight-count indictment of the founder, and the SEC filed its own complaint the same day [1] [2]. The SEC’s complaint said FTX had raised more than $1.8 billion from equity investors [2].

The criminal case ended in a conviction. On March 28, 2024 the founder was sentenced to 25 years in prison, after a jury found him guilty on seven counts, including two counts of wire fraud [3]. Those are the charged and adjudicated facts. This guide names no one else.

The bankruptcy ran on its own track. The court confirmed the plan on October 8, 2024, and the plan went effective on January 3, 2025 [4]. The customer bar date, the last day to file a customer claim, was September 29, 2023 [4].

The exchange’s own token has a page in the dead-token registry: FTX Token (FTT), with the court record behind its status.

What records existed, and where did they go?

A customer’s trade history lived on the exchange. Every buy, sell, deposit, and withdrawal was a row in FTX’s own database, exportable while the site was up. When the site went down, the export went with it.

What survived is the claim. The debtors scheduled each customer’s account balance as of the petition date, and the customer schedules and the customer FAQs are posted on the claims agent’s case site [4]. A scheduled claim states what the account held on November 11, 2022. It does not state what was paid for any of it.

How does a customer get the records now?

The route is the claims agent. Kroll Restructuring Administration is the debtors’ claims and noticing agent, and its case site carries the docket, the customer schedules, the bar date orders, and the customer FAQs [4]. The customer claims portal is the place a claim was filed and a distribution is tracked.

Two things a customer gets that way are worth keeping. The scheduled balance fixes the amount held on the petition date, per asset. The distribution records fix what came back, when, and in what form. Neither is a trade history, and neither carries a basis.

How is a basis rebuilt without the export?

The order is the one in the cost-basis guide, applied to an exchange that will not answer. An export saved before November 2022 is the strongest record and settles every buy it lists. For tokens withdrawn from FTX to a wallet, the chain shows the date and the amount that arrived, and a dated price from a named source stands in for the purchase price. For tokens that never left the exchange, the scheduled balance fixes the quantity and nothing on the docket fixes the cost.

The IRS FAQ’s records rule applies to all of it. A holder needs records sufficient to establish the positions taken on the return [6]. A basis rebuilt from a bank statement showing the dollars sent to FTX, plus the scheduled balance showing what those dollars bought, is a record. A basis remembered is not.

Since January 1, 2025 a rebuilt basis is tracked wallet by wallet, and Rev. Proc. 2024-28 gave a safe harbor for sorting old basis into the wallets that held the tokens [8]. Tokens withdrawn from FTX and later sold at a US broker reach that broker’s Form 1099-DA as a transfer in, in boxes 12a and 12b, and for a noncovered asset box 1g, the basis, may be left blank [9]. The basis the return carries is the rebuilt one.

What about the distributions?

The debtors published their own tax FAQ for customers. It says the debtors treat the formation of the wind-down entities on the effective date as a taxable exchange of claims, and that the gain or loss is the difference between the adjusted basis in the claim and the claim’s fair market value on that date [5]. It also says the debtors are not giving tax advice and the law’s application to the plan is not certain [5].

That is the debtors’ stated position, and this site has found no IRS document that adopts or rejects it. So this guide prints no rule for the distributions. What it can say is what the loss rules need: a closed transaction, and in the Chief Counsel’s reading a holder who still has a claim has not closed one [7].

Where does a sale go on the return?

Form 1099-DA covers broker sales of digital assets on or after January 1, 2025 [8], so no FTX trade from before the shutdown is on one. A short-term digital asset sale with no Form 1099-DA goes on Form 8949 under box I, and a long-term one under box L [10]. A sale reported on a 1099-DA that shows no basis goes under box H or box K instead, and in every case the basis goes in column (e) [10].

A token bought on FTX that later died is a loss only once a transaction closes it [7]. The worthless-token calculator works through what a closed loss offsets.