u/Findep18

Helped someone close to me through this recently and didn't realize how messy the crypto piece is until we were in it. The basic question is what the BTC/ETH was worth on the wedding date, because that decides separate vs marital. On paper that's a number you can look up but in practice it's been a project.

Different exchanges have different prices at the same moment, and hardware wallets don't come with statements. And apparently screenshots get thrown out under federal evidence rules.. The lawyer's first move was suggesting a forensic accountant for $5k+, but the crypto in question wasn't worth that much more than the quote.

Two weeks of reading actual rulings later, I had a checklist of what courts accept. Pricing sources, methodology, the "this token didn't even exist on your wedding date" red flag that tanked credibility on the whole disclosure.

Curious what others here did. Hire the forensic accountant? Lawyer absorbed it? Went for a number and moved on?

If you're going through this and stuck on something specific, comment what's tripping you up and I'll send you the relevant section.

My friend is being transferred some BTC and ETH as part of a divorce settlement. The transfer itself isn't taxable between spouses, but when she eventually sells, she apparently has to use what he originally paid, not the current value.

Issue is he's been trading since 2016 across a bunch of exchanges and a couple of them aren't around anymore. Original records for some of it are basically gone.

What do people actually do when the original cost can't be figured out? Use zero? The value at the time of transfer? Some kind of best estimate with whatever you can document?

Reading through some divorce rulings and judges keep throwing out screenshots of wallets and exchange balances. So what does the court actually accept? An exchange-issued statement? An API export? The public wallet address itself so the other side can verify on-chain?

Curious how this plays out in practice.

This came up in something I was reading and I got curious. If someone owned BTC and ETH before getting married, and a court needs to determine the value on the exact date of the wedding, how does that even work? Crypto trades 24/7 across dozens of exchanges with different prices at any given moment. There's no closing bell like stocks.

So what price does the court use? The Coinbase price? Some kind of daily average? And is there an accepted standard for which pricing source to use or does each side's expert just pick their own?

I had to help someone value their crypto holdings for a divorce filing and learned a few things that I hadn't seen written up anywhere and wanted to share.

The core issue is there's no official daily close for crypto like stocks have. CoinGecko and CryptoCompare are the two most commonly used aggregators, but they pull from different exchange sets and don't agree.. differences of 1-3% on historical daily prices are normal and while courts don't care about a 2% gap, you need to pick one source and apply it consistently everywhere.

Using CoinGecko for BTC and CryptoCompare for ETH in the same filing is the kind of inconsistency that gets flagged.

Same goes for price type eg. daily open, daily close (midnight UTC), etc it doesn't matter which, but you have to pick one and use it everywhere.

One thing that came up was that they had USDC listed as a 2017 holding while USDC launched in 2018. Sounds obvious but forensic accountants apparently see impossible asset dates all the time and it tanks credibility on the whole disclosure.

Anyway, hope this saves someone a headache.

I was helping someone with their filing recently and they had USDC listed as a holding on their 2017 marriage date. USDC didn't launch until 2018... a mistake that made the judge question the entire disclosure.

A couple other things I didn't know before going through this: there's no official closing price for crypto like stocks have, so you need to pick one pricing source and use it consistently for everything. And screenshots of wallet balances are basically worthless as evidence in court.

Anyway, hope this saves someone a headache.