How to do crypto taxes on Coinbase Prime
What is Coinbase Prime?
Coinbase Prime is Coinbase’s professional trading and custody platform, built for institutions and advanced crypto investors. It provides access to deep liquidity, advanced trading tools, and secure custody solutions. If you’re a hedge fund, family office, or high-net-worth individual trading at scale, you may already be using Coinbase Prime.
But here’s the catch: all transactions on Coinbase Prime are reported to the IRS. That means if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, you are responsible for accurately filing crypto gains, losses, deposits, and withdrawals from Prime alongside your other wallets and exchanges.
How to do taxes on your Coinbase Prime account
Even though Coinbase reports activity to the IRS, that report only covers what happens inside the platform. If you move crypto out of Coinbase Prime—to another exchange, a DeFi wallet, or cold storage—those transactions will not be fully tracked on tax forms. This creates gaps that can lead to:
Overpaying on taxes (if cost basis is lost)
Underreporting (if outbound transfers aren’t reconciled)
IRS scrutiny for missing or mismatched records
That’s why professional crypto traders and institutions use Awaken Tax. Awaken automatically reconciles transfers between wallets, exchanges, and DeFi protocols—giving you a complete, accurate picture of your taxable gains and losses.
And Awaken also has support for your Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Base. So no matter what products you are using in the Coinbase ecosystem, we have you covered.
Step-by-Step: Connecting Coinbase Prime to Awaken for Crypto Taxes
Follow these steps to generate your Coinbase Prime API keys and upload them into Awaken:
1. Log Into Coinbase Prime
Go to prime.coinbase.com and sign in with your account.
Navigate to Settings by clicking on the "Gear" icon in the lower left corner of the page.
Click on the APIs tab within the Settings
2. Create a New API Key
Next to Activated Keys, click on Create API Key
Give it a name like “Awaken Tax.”
Enable read-only access (never grant trading or withdrawal permissions).
Save the key, secret, and passphrase securely. You'll need all three of these to connect Coinbase Prime to Awaken.
3. Add Your API to Awaken
Sign into your Awaken Tax account.
In the Accounts tab, click Add Account in the top right corner.
Search for Coinbase Prime in our integrations list, and click Connect.
Paste your API key, secret, and passphrase into Awaken.
Click Add Account
Awaken will then automatically import your trades, deposits, and withdrawals. Once the import is done, you can go through and reconcile any transactions not labeled. Out of the box though, Awaken will label staking, unstaking, trading, and most other activity on your Coinbase Prime account (saving you time).
Once all that is done, you can go to the Taxes tab and pull a variety of IRS forms like 8949, Schedule D, etc. If you want to learn more, you can read our full guide on US crypto taxes here.
Conclusion
If you’re a Coinbase Prime user, don’t assume your tax obligations are already covered. While Coinbase reports activity to the IRS, you still need software like Awaken to track transfers and ensure you’re not missing cost basis data. By connecting your Coinbase Prime account via API to Awaken, you’ll be able to reconcile all your activity across wallets and exchanges, minimize your tax bill, and stay fully compliant.
👉 Ready to simplify your crypto taxes? Start with Awaken today.
