wealthschema/archetypes/cr-01-crypto-heavy-defi-investor
CR-01Niche ExpandedAccumulationmoderate tax complexity

Crypto-Heavy / DeFi Investor

Investor with 20%+ of net worth in digital assets including BTC, ETH, DeFi protocols, staking rewards, and NFTs. Complex crypto tax reporting, self-custody.

CR-01 is the deep-DeFi, self-custody testing surface where Form 8949 lots run into the thousands, staking and liquidity-pool rewards are ordinary income at receipt, and the cost-basis universe spans on-chain wallets the broker-dealer reporting rails never see.

Age Range
25–42
Net Worth
$100k–$1M
Cohort
Niche Expanded

About this archetype

CR-01 represents the investor whose crypto exposure is not a side allocation held on a centralized exchange — it is the operational center of the household's investing life, with self-custody (hardware wallet, multisig, or smart-contract-managed) accounting for the majority of digital-asset holdings and active DeFi engagement (lending protocols, liquidity pools, staking, restaking, governance participation) producing recurring on-chain income. The tax surface is what makes this archetype unique. Every protocol interaction is potentially a taxable event: liquidity-pool deposits and withdrawals, swap routing through DEX aggregators, claiming staking rewards (ordinary income at fair market value at receipt), receiving airdrops (ordinary income), bridging assets across L1/L2, wrapping and unwrapping tokens. Form 8949 line counts in the thousands per tax year are routine, the IRS Rev. Rul. 2019-24 hard-fork guidance and the 2023 staking-rewards rulings apply, and the new Form 1099-DA reporting regime for digital-asset brokers in 2026 catches centralized exchanges but explicitly does not cover self-custodied DeFi activity — that gap is the testing surface.

Cash flow blends a strong wage income (median $147k, tech-heavy) with crypto-denominated returns that are non-correlated with W-2 timing. Net worth concentrates in digital assets — median net worth of $691k against median investable assets of $257k implies the balance is digital-asset-denominated holdings reported as part of net worth but not flowing through traditional brokerage. 55% are homeowners (many having converted prior-cycle crypto gains into down payments — a specific 2021-2023 cohort behavior), median age is 34, and 45% carry dependents.

What distinguishes CR-01 from N-01 (the C12 Niche crypto archetype) is the depth of DeFi engagement and the self-custody share. N-01 is calibrated to households with significant crypto exposure (>20% of net worth) but typically held on centralized exchanges with standard Form 1099-B or 1099-MISC reporting flowing through. CR-01 households have moved beyond CEX-only — they hold the keys, they interact with smart contracts directly, and they generate income that no broker reports. Software built only for the CEX-reported case will silently fail on CR-01.

Defining characteristics

  • DeFi staking and LP income
    Staking rewards, liquidity-pool fees, lending-protocol interest, and restaking yields all enter as ordinary income at fair-market value on receipt — per the 2023 Treasury guidance and Rev. Rul. 2023-14 — not capital gains.
  • Form 8949 at scale
    Per-transaction reporting on Form 8949 with thousands of line items is common; software must handle aggregation, wash-sale-rule inapplicability (digital assets aren't securities under §1091), and lot-level cost-basis tracking.
  • Self-custody wallet
    Holdings sit in hardware wallets, multisigs, or smart-contract wallets — outside the 1099 reporting perimeter of any centralized exchange.
  • NFT and airdrop income
    Airdrops are ordinary income at receipt; NFT mints and sales follow collectible-or-not classification with ambiguous treatment that may invoke the 28% collectibles rate under §408(m).
  • Crypto-to-fiat conversion events
    Off-ramp transactions trigger capital-gain recognition; the chain-of-custody from on-chain wallet to fiat bank account is the audit trail buyers need to validate.
  • Concentrated digital-asset net worth
    Median net worth $691k against median investable assets of $257k — the balance sits in digital assets reported as wealth but not flowing through traditional brokerage statements.

Corpus signature

n = 22 households

Aggregated across the 22 CR-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.

Median income
$147k
p25–p75 $118k–$159k
Median net worth
$691k
mean $665k
Liquid net worth
$156k
median
Investable assets
$257k
median
Income distribution
$100k–120k
6
$120k–140k
4
$140k–160k
6
$160k–180k
6
Net-worth distribution
$250k–500k
7
$500k–750k
7
$750k–1m
6
$1m–1.3m
2
Goals across the corpus
Retirement22 / 22
Home purchase10 / 22
Education funding10 / 22
Debt payoff8 / 22
Emergency fund6 / 22
Liability composition
Credit cards22 / 22
Mortgages12 / 22
Auto loans10 / 22
Student loans8 / 22
  • 12 of 22 (55%) are homeowners; the remainder rent.
  • MA, CA, FL account for 9 of 22 households — 41% of the corpus.
  • Median adult-member age is 34 (range 22–41 across primaries and spouses).
  • 10 of 22 (45%) carry one or more dependents.

Representative household

CR-01-seed-2
Victoria S.Married filing jointly·SC Metro Area, SC

Victoria and Brandon are a young dual-tech household at the lower end of the CR-01 net-worth distribution ($344k vs corpus median $691k) — the early-accumulation case rather than the post-cycle wealth-concentration case. Their $56,257 cryptocurrency position (cost basis $36,567) is held on a centralized exchange, not in self-custody — so this rep exercises the CEX-reported branch of the archetype rather than the deep-DeFi / hardware-wallet branch described in the long-form. The diagnostic feature for software is the income/balance-sheet mismatch: a $148k dual-tech wage household whose crypto holding is roughly 16% of net worth and whose cost-basis ledger (1099-B-reported here) still needs lot-level tracking that conventional brokerage flows don't always handle. On track for retirement and debt payoff, behind on a $116k home-purchase target — the planner-UX edge case is whether crypto-as-qualifying-asset gets the volatility-discount treatment lenders apply even when the holding is exchange-custodied rather than self-custodied.

Combined income
$147,878
Net worth
$343,830
Liquid NW
$156,538
Ages
29 / 32
Top goals on this household
Home purchase
$116,052
Education funding
$601,655
Retirement
$2,867,100

Schema fields covered

Every CR-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.

members[].age
income.combined_gross
net_worth.total
filing_status
accounts.taxable.lots[].acquisition_date
accounts.taxable.lots[].cost_basis
accounts.taxable.lots[].unrealized_pnl
taxes.wash_sale_flags

Who builds against this archetype

Crypto-tax software uses CR-01 to validate cost-basis methods across self-custody wallets and DEX activity that no broker reports — particularly the FIFO vs spec-ID lot-selection branch and the staking-income recognition timing under Rev. Rul. 2023-14. Wealth platforms building digital-asset reporting use it to test net-worth aggregation when 60-70% of household wealth sits outside the platform's custody. Mortgage lenders building crypto-aware underwriting use CR-01 to validate qualifying-asset documentation when proof-of-funds is a hardware-wallet attestation rather than a brokerage statement.

Testing scenarios this corpus is calibrated for

  • 01Form 8949 generation at scale (1,000+ rows) from self-custody wallet activity, with lot-level cost-basis tracking across L1/L2 bridges and DEX swaps.
  • 02Staking and LP reward recognition as ordinary income at fair-market value at receipt, per Rev. Rul. 2023-14, with separate capital-gain recognition on the subsequent disposal of the same tokens.
  • 03Wash-sale rule branching — digital assets are not securities under §1091, so loss-harvesting strategies blocked for equities remain available for crypto in v3 synthesis (pending legislative change).
  • 04Net-worth aggregation across CEX accounts (1099-B reported), self-custody wallets (on-chain valuation only), and DeFi position values (LP tokens, lending-protocol receipts) — the cross-domain wealth-aggregation testing case.
  • 05NFT sale classification — collectible-rate treatment under §408(m) vs ordinary capital-gain treatment — and the related cost-basis tracking when the NFT was acquired by mint, airdrop, or secondary purchase.
  • 06Crypto-as-qualifying-asset documentation for mortgage underwriting, including the volatility-discount logic some lenders apply (often 30-50% haircut) to self-custodied holdings used for proof of funds.

Edge cases and what's not in this corpus

CR-01 is the deep-DeFi, self-custody case. Households with significant but exchange-held crypto, 1099-B-reported, and no DeFi protocol interaction belong in N-01 — that's the cleaner-tax-surface neighbor. Crypto-business operators (validator-as-a-service, NFT-marketplace operators with Schedule C revenue) belong in SB-01 or SB-02 with crypto layered on top. Households whose crypto holdings exceed 50% of net worth and whose primary income source is on-chain (full-time DeFi yield farmer) are not represented — that profile is rare enough that v3 deliberately did not synthesize it, since the survey-data anchors thin out. Crypto inherited through E-01 (Millennial Inheritor) with a stepped-up basis is a different planning surface; the inheritor case has none of the active-trader Form 8949 line-count problem.

Calibration notes

Wage income bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to BLS Tech Sector Occupational Employment Statistics (the CR-01 corpus is materially tech-employment-concentrated), with the digital-asset allocation share informed by the Pew Research and Fed SHED survey questions on crypto ownership. The corpus models a static snapshot of digital-asset value rather than a price path, and does not encode specific protocol versions, chain forks, or post-2024 regulatory events such as the Form 1099-DA broker-reporting rollout. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code; buyers should treat the crypto allocation as illustrative and layer their own price scenarios.

How this differs from related archetypes

Frequently asked questions

What does the CR-01 archetype represent?+

CR-01 — Crypto-Heavy / DeFi Investor represents the household where digital assets are the operational center of investing activity, held primarily in self-custody (hardware wallets, multisigs, smart-contract wallets) with active DeFi engagement: staking, liquidity provision, lending, restaking, and governance participation generating recurring on-chain income.

How does CR-01 differ from N-01 (Crypto-Heavy Portfolio)?+

N-01 is calibrated for households with material crypto exposure typically held on centralized exchanges with 1099-B or 1099-MISC reporting flowing through to the household's tax software. CR-01 is the deeper case: self-custody is the majority of holdings, DeFi protocol interactions generate income no broker reports, and the Form 8949 line-count problem is structural. Software validated only on N-01 will likely under-report income for CR-01.

Does the corpus model staking rewards as ordinary income?+

Yes. Synthesis treated staking rewards, liquidity-pool fees, and similar protocol-generated income as ordinary income at fair-market value at receipt, consistent with Rev. Rul. 2023-14. The subsequent sale or swap of the reward tokens triggers a separate capital-gain event with cost basis set at the original receipt-time fair-market value.

Is the wash-sale rule applied to crypto losses in the corpus?+

No. Digital assets are not securities under IRC §1091, so the wash-sale disallowance does not currently apply in v3 synthesis. Buyers should monitor legislative proposals that would extend §1091 to digital assets; the corpus reflects the law as of synthesis only.

Does the corpus include Form 1099-DA broker reporting?+

No. The 2026 Form 1099-DA digital-asset broker reporting rollout is not modeled in v3 synthesis. The corpus reflects the pre-1099-DA reporting environment where self-custody DeFi activity has no third-party reporting trail. This is itself useful as a baseline against which buyers can layer the new reporting regime.

Which synthetic wealth data sets include CR-01 households?+

CR-01 is tagged for B02, B05, B14, B17, B21, and B22 — covering tax planning, equity/concentrated-asset testing (digital-asset analog), retirement, cash-flow / self-employment-adjacent, niche/specialty, and behavioral overlays. See the right-hand sidebar for the bundles that ship CR-01 households.

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