Do I have to pay taxes on crypto?

Sitting here staring at a jumbled pile of CSV exports from three different exchanges, feeling a massive migraine coming on fast. Seriously—do I have to pay taxes on crypto for every single tiny, insignificant swap?

Last year, acting entirely on blind FOMO, I spun up a basic grid trading bot on Kraken using the standard FIFO accounting method. Bad idea. It executed exactly 412 micro-trades over four months. Most netted me less than forty cents. Now I'm sweating bullets trying to calculate my 2023 liabilities, realizing my casual experiment might be an absolute accounting nightmare.

I always assumed you only owed the government when you actually cashed out to your checking account, right? But looking at my logs, the bot was constantly swapping ETH for USDC. Since USDC is a stablecoin pegged to fiat, does that magically bypass the capital gains rules? (Probably not, knowing my luck).

To try and untangle this mess before admitting defeat and hiring an expensive CPA, I built a quick manual sorting framework. Has anyone else tried organizing their sheets this way?

• Phase 1: Isolate all fiat-to-crypto purchases and set them aside.
• Phase 2: Filter spreadsheets by TxHash to manually match my ETH sells to USDC buys.
• Phase 3: Calculate the exact spot price at the minute of execution to find the cost basis.

Here is a snapshot of my current situation so you guys can see exactly what I am dealing with:

Help a guy out

Before I drop hundreds of dollars on specialized tracking software, I really need a reality check from anyone who actually survived a tax season with heavy trading volume. Are crypto-to-crypto swaps automatically taxable events even if the profits never touched traditional banks? Any brutal honesty would save my sanity right now.