Who sends you a tax form, and who sends nothing

How it works

A document arrives because somebody is in a position to produce it. That takes three things, and which of them a venue has decides everything else on this page.

Somebody has to hold an account for you. Not a wallet you control and a smart contract you interact with — an account, on their books, with a balance they are answerable for. That is the party that knows what you paid, what you received and what it charged you in between.

Somebody has to know who you legally are. A record of trades attached to an address is not attached to a person. Identity arrives through KYC, and on the venues discussed here it is a separate step from having an account at all — see Why a venue is unavailable where you are for what that check is actually doing.

What you hold has to be denominated in money. A currency that cannot be withdrawn, sold or exchanged produces no proceeds figure, because there is no transaction in money to describe.

Those three conditions sort the catalogue into four groups, and the groups do not line up with what most readers expect. The regulated US venues are not uniform. The on-chain venues are uniform, and the uniform answer is nothing.

The party that sends is the party that clears

On a US event exchange there are usually at least two legal entities between you and the contract, and the paperwork comes from the one holding the money rather than the one listing the market.

Kalshi is unusual in running both halves itself: members sign a separate agreement with Kalshi Klear LLC, its clearing organisation, and it is that agreement — not the exchange's member agreement — that contains the tax clause. Paragraph W of the copy stamped 5.25.26 in its footer has the member consent to electronic delivery of all tax forms, "including, without limitation, IRS Form 1099-B, or such other tax forms as Klear may determine are required." Polymarket US carries the same clause in the same place: paragraph 23 of the Individual Participant and Clearing Member agreement, version 1.4, last updated 6 August 2026, has you consent to electronic delivery of all tax forms "including, without limitation, IRS Form 1099-B."

Read those clauses for what they are. Both are consents to a delivery method and a reservation of the right to issue; neither is a statement that a particular form will be issued, for a particular kind of activity, in a particular year. A consent to receive is not a promise to send.

ForecastEx is the clean case at the other end, because it has no direct retail members at all. Rule 304 of the rulebook — version date 17 September 2026 — provides that a person not eligible to become a Member may enter into Forecast Contracts only by becoming a Customer of an FCM Member or a Sponsored FCM, and that the FCM "shall be financially responsible for all of the Customer's activity." Rule 305 puts the customer account requirements, the segregated-funds computations and the daily statements on the FCM as well. The account is at the broker. So is the identity check, so is the record, and so is anything that arrives in January. The word "tax" appears exactly once in that rulebook, in a housekeeping rule about how long ForecastEx keeps its own income tax returns.

That is the general shape: ask who clears, and you have asked who sends.

What each venue's own writing says

Kalshi: four forms, none of them about your trading

Kalshi's help centre has a Taxes and Documents collection with three articles, and the central one — dated 22 June 2026 — enumerates what members who hit IRS reporting thresholds receive. It is worth reading the list slowly, because what is on it is not what a reader assumes:

• 1099-INT, described as containing interest payments from Kalshi.
• 1099-MISC, described as containing credits and rewards from Kalshi.
• 1099-B, described as containing transaction proceeds from broker transactions, with "crypto transfers" given in parentheses as the example.
• 1099-DA, described as digital asset transaction reporting from ZeroHash.

Interest, promotional credit, crypto movements and digital-asset dispositions. Nothing in that list is described as the proceeds of buying and selling event contracts. The number covering that lives elsewhere on the same page, in a different kind of object: a Profit and Loss statement, downloadable per year from the Tax Info page in the Account tab, computed First-In-First-Out, inclusive of fees and rebates, and refreshed on the first morning of each month rather than continuously. The article says in terms that this is a tool to assist members, that it is not tax advice, and that the member remains responsible for the accuracy of their return.

The identity step sits behind this and is narrower than it looks. A separate article states that a Social Security Number is used for identity verification and required tax reporting, gives a 1099-MISC for credits and rewards as the example, and then says that SSN verification is not required for depositing, for trading, or for withdrawing by non-crypto methods. Read together with the form list, that is coherent: the identity Kalshi needs is the identity a payment from Kalshi requires, and your own trading result is not a payment from Kalshi.

Robinhood: an annual statement, and no 1099, stated outright

Robinhood is the venue that says the quiet part in its own help centre, and the article is the most direct primary source on this page. Under a heading of Taxes it states that the IRS has not issued specific guidance on the tax implications of trading event contracts, and that as a result: event contract trades are not reported to the IRS by Robinhood; Robinhood does not provide a 1099 for event contract trades; and taxes related to event contracts are the customer's sole responsibility.

What it does provide is an event contracts annual statement, issued after the end of each calendar year, "typically in late January or early February," reached through Account, then Reports and statements, then Annual reports. The article lists its contents: individual transactions, closing dates, costs, proceeds, fees and commissions, and net profit and loss. It calls that statement the authoritative record of all costs, proceeds and net profit and loss for the year — and then adds, in a note of its own, that the annual statement "is not a substitute tax reporting form."

So the same document is simultaneously the most complete record the venue will give you and explicitly not the thing a tax form is. Both halves are true and they are not in tension; they are the distinction this whole page turns on.

Two smaller details in the same article matter to anyone reconciling numbers. The in-app realized profit and loss view, reached through Investing and then Realized profit and loss with prediction markets selected from the dropdown, does not include fees — the article says so directly. And the period summaries in that view "may not exactly match your broker statement due to the timing of settlements." Three surfaces, three numbers, and the article names the statement as the one that governs.

Polymarket US: the clause exists, the documentation does not

Polymarket US has the consent clause quoted above, mandatory KYC, dollar settlement and an exchange-run account. What it does not appear to have, on 21 September 2026, is any published page describing what it issues at year end. Its documentation index lists 353 pages and the string "tax" does not occur in any title or description on it. The index does carry an extensive reporting surface — a trader guide covering trade, order and execution search, CSV downloads of trade, execution, position and fee reports, and two streaming ledger exports — but reporting there means reconciliation and compliance, not a form in the post.

We could not find a Polymarket US document stating which forms it issues or when. That is a finding rather than an omission: the operative promise is the participant agreement's paragraph 23, and it names a delivery method rather than a schedule. See Polymarket US for the rest of what the exchange does and does not publish.

PredictIt: one form, on a figure it publishes itself

PredictIt is the only venue here whose published material describes a form covering trading results rather than payments. Its public FAQ endpoint carries an article titled "How do you calculate a trader's net profit for tax reporting purposes?", which states that PredictIt is required to issue a Form 1099 to a US-resident trader whose net profit for a calendar year reaches a figure the FAQ names, and then gives the arithmetic it uses:

Net Profit = Gross Profits – Losses – Trading Fees – Withdrawal Fees.

The detail worth carrying away is in the next sentence. The 5 percent withdrawal fee is included in that calculation "whether or not the funds in question have actually been withdrawn from the account." So the figure the platform computes for reporting purposes is net of a fee you may not have paid, on money you may not have moved — which is a different number from the one a spreadsheet of your fills will produce, and the difference is structural rather than an error by either party.

The terms of use close the loop on identity from the other direction: they state that when you have made more profit than the US limit for reporting income you must provide a valid SSN or ITIN, and that failure can result in the account being frozen for both future positions and withdrawals. On PredictIt the identity requirement is triggered by the profit, rather than sitting at the door.

This page does not reproduce the figure. It is published, it is on the FAQ cited below, and what it means for any particular person is a question for their own adviser rather than for a catalogue.

Crypto.com Prediction: a general 1099 page that never mentions event contracts

This is the card whose flag is hardest to stand behind, and it is worth being exact about why.

Crypto.com publishes a 1099 article — dated 19 February 2026 — describing three forms it may issue to US persons: a 1099-MISC for rewards, a 1099-DA for digital-asset dispositions, and a 1099-B for a US person "who traded contracts during the tax year." The 1099-B section even walks the boxes: Box 1A described as "Regulated Futures/Options", Box 8 for profit or loss realized on closed contracts, Boxes 9 and 10 for unrealized profit or loss on open contracts at the end of the prior and current tax years, and Box 11 for the aggregate of the three. Forms are delivered by an emailed download link rather than by post.

That is a genuinely different shape of form from everything above — it reports a mark-to-market aggregate rather than a list of dispositions. But the article is a general Crypto.com article and it does not name event contracts, prediction contracts or the exchange that lists them. The help centre's own Prediction Trading article, updated 16 September 2026, covers fees, order types and scenarios and says nothing about tax documents at all. Crypto.com Prediction's contracts are listed by a separate designated contract market, reached through the app, with a separate account opened inside it — the structure set out on Crypto.com Prediction.

So: a 1099-B shape exists on this venue for contracts, and no published page says an event contract is one of them. We could not resolve that from the company's own material.

The on-chain case: public is not the same as reported

Polymarket is the clearest example, and the answer is short. There is no account in your name. Signup is a wallet, the ordinary flow carries no identity check, and the terms of use put the question on you and keep it there: using the site "may result in tax consequences," and it is "your sole responsibility to determine whether there are any tax consequences from any transactions you initiate," including compliance in your tax resident jurisdiction. Nothing in those terms undertakes to produce a document, because there is nobody holding an account to produce it for.

The same silence, more completely, on the smaller on-chain venues: Limitless and Myriad publish terms in which the word "tax" does not appear at all — the Limitless terms re-read on 21 September 2026, the Myriad terms in the copy read for this catalogue on 19 September 2026, which carries its own date of 13 January 2026. Both are cited below so the absence can be checked rather than taken on trust.

The tempting inference — that an on-chain position is better documented, because the chain is public — is the mistake this section exists for. Everything is on the chain: every fill, every transfer, every resolution payout, permanently and for anyone. What is not on the chain is any of the structure a record needs. There is no cost basis, no realisation event marked as such, no fee column separated from the trade, no currency conversion, no counterparty name and no year boundary. Producing those means indexing an address and computing them, which is a piece of software, not a download — and it is what the analytics cards in this catalogue actually do. What wallet tracking shows is the longer version of what that indexing can and cannot see.

Worth saying once, plainly: public also means public. An address with a position history is readable by anyone who has the address, which is a different privacy posture from a KYC account, not a stronger one. Where your key lives covers the custody side of the same fact.

Play money: there is no proceeds figure to report

The third case is not a weaker version of the first two, it is a different question.

Where the currency cannot leave, there is no transaction in money to describe. Manifold's terms of service, last updated 31 January 2026, state it as flatly as it can be stated: mana "has no cash or redeemable value," and while it can be purchased, it "cannot be cashed out, sold, traded, transferred, gifted, or exchanged — whether on the Site or elsewhere — for money, property, products, services, or any other consideration." A mana pack is a purchase, not a deposit. A mana balance is not an amount of money, so it is not an amount of money at year end either. Every card in play money shares that property.

The interesting edge is where money does reach a forecaster, and it always arrives from the other direction: a prize, from a named payer, for a result. Manifold's own terms put identity verification exactly there and nowhere else — section 12.1 requires it in connection with claiming prizes from Prize Drawings, promotions with monetary prizes, and high-value transactions. The platform asks who you are at the moment it might pay you, which is the same rule the regulated venues follow, applied to the only payment that exists here.

Hypermind splits a fixed euro or dollar reward among forecasters who finish a contest positive, paid as gift certificates; Prediki apportions a sponsor's prefunded Incentive at settlement; Metaculus divides a fixed tournament pool by Peer score. A payment from a named payer to a named person is a different object from a balance in a virtual currency, and it is the only object in this group that any document could describe.

What it costs

Not money, mostly. The cost here is reconstruction, and it is paid in three currencies: cadence, completeness and a subscription.

Cadence. Kalshi's profit-and-loss figures update on the first morning of each month, and the help centre warns that a mid-month check may not reflect the latest data. Robinhood's annual statement arrives after the end of the calendar year, typically in late January or early February. Neither is a live number, and a reconciliation attempted between the two dates is a reconciliation against a stale one.

Completeness, and the floors underneath it. Polymarket US's two streaming ledger exports — the position ledger and the cash balance ledger — carry a documented historical floor of 1 May 2026, and the documentation states that pre-floor data is not retrievable. They are also rate-limited to roughly five downloads per minute per firm. Robinhood publishes no export for event contracts at all: the card records no data export, and the app's three views plus one PDF are the whole surface. Crypto.com Prediction's card records no export either.

Disagreement between a venue's own surfaces, in units. Robinhood's in-app realized profit-and-loss view excludes fees, and its own fee stack is a commission plus an exchange fee on both the opening and the closing trade — $0.01 per contract per side in the KalshiEX case, on each of two trades. A view that omits that is not off by a rounding error, and What a trade actually costs is the arithmetic in full.

A subscription, on the on-chain side. The indexing that turns an address into rows is the product, and the row export is usually the paid feature. PolyWallet shows CSV export on the free plan and disables it, unlocking it on the paid tier; Convexly exports a watched wallet's read as CSV on its paid tiers only; Dune is free to view and fork any dashboard, with CSV data export a paid-plan feature. Reading the chart costs nothing. Getting the rows out costs something on all three.

And one cost with no price on it: the characterisation itself is unsettled. Robinhood's article says the IRS has not issued specific guidance on the tax implications of trading event contracts and that Robinhood will respond if guidance is issued. A venue that tells you it is waiting is telling you the shape of the documents may change.

What you can do about it

Ask who clears before you ask what arrives. On Kalshi it is Kalshi Klear, and the tax clause is in that agreement rather than the exchange's. On ForecastEx it is your FCM, under Rules 304 and 305, and the exchange will send you nothing because it has no account of yours to send it about. On Polymarket US it is the exchange itself. On an on-chain venue there is no clearer, which is the answer.

Separate the two objects, every time. A form is filed with a tax authority as well as sent to you. A statement is a record the venue produces for you and files with nobody. Robinhood's article is the model of saying which is which; most venues are less explicit, and the test is whether the document names a form number and whether the page says it is reported.

Ask the four questions before funding an account, because three of them have published answers and the fourth tells you how much work you are taking on. Which entity holds the account? Does the venue publish a page describing what it issues at year end — and if not, is there a clause in the agreement you are signing? Is there an export, and what is its earliest date? And does the in-app profit figure include fees?

Start the export at the start, not in January. The one hard limit found on this page is a retrieval floor: Polymarket US's ledger exports do not reach before 1 May 2026, and its documentation says pre-floor data is not retrievable. A floor is not a rate limit you can wait out. Anywhere an export exists, pulling it periodically costs a few minutes and removes a dependency on the venue's retention policy — and that is as true of Kalshi, whose API serves fills and historical data through Kalshi API, as it is of an exchange with a documented floor.

On-chain, record the address, and record it at the moment you start using it. The chain keeps the transactions; nothing keeps the fact that a particular address was yours, which is the one piece of information no indexer can recover for you. The wallet trackers in this catalogue take an address and produce positions, history and a daily profit-and-loss — PolyWallet, Convexly, OrcaLayer — and Dune will let you write the query yourself against the raw on-chain record.

Do not treat a flag on a card as an answer. capabilities.tax_reporting is true on exactly four cards in this catalogue and it means only that the venue publishes something at year end. The four somethings are a set of 1099 forms about interest, credits and crypto plus a monthly P&L statement; an annual statement with an explicit statement that no 1099 is issued; a single form above a published net-profit figure; and a general 1099 page that never mentions event contracts. Read the venue's own page, and read what the form is about, not just that one exists.

Take the characterisation question somewhere else. This page deliberately names no rates, no thresholds and no obligations, and it is not tax advice. The venues say the same thing about their own material: Kalshi states it cannot advise members on their taxes, Robinhood states it does not provide tax advice and that the IRS has not issued specific guidance for this product type, and Crypto.com prints the same notice at the foot of its 1099 page. Three venues, no lawyers, one unsettled question — the document is a fact, and what it means for you is a conversation with a qualified adviser in your own jurisdiction.