Do I have to pay taxes on crypto?

Sitting here staring at a CSV file loaded with 142 incredibly messy DEX swaps from last year, and my head is spinning. The absolute dread is setting in.

So, I have to ask the community the obvious question: Do I have to pay taxes on crypto? I mean everything. Every single micro-swap?

I started messing around on chain back in mid-2023. Nothing massive. Swapped a little Ethereum for some random altcoins, staked maybe fifty bucks worth of stablecoins—you know the drill. Now I'm trying to plug my wallet addresses into a tracking software, and it's throwing aggressive warning flags about capital gains over fractions of a cent. It's ridiculous. (And honestly, pretty terrifying.)

I stumbled across a tax thread mentioning the 2022 IRS updates to Form 1040, specifically targeting digital assets. Apparently, the government treats every single coin-to-coin trade as property disposal. That means trading ETH for a joke token triggers a taxable event, right?

Here is my current understanding of the rules. Please tell me if I am totally off base here:

My Messy Crypto Tax Checklist

• Buying with fiat: Safe. No tax owed yet.
• Trading crypto for crypto: Taxable event. (This is what is entirely destroying my spreadsheet.)
• Staking rewards: Treated as ordinary income the exact moment it hits the wallet.
• Transferring between my own wallets: Not taxable—thank god.

Are you guys actually reporting every $0.40 swap on your returns? Or is there some specific exemption for tiny amounts that I missed? I desperately need a sanity check before I hand this total nightmare of a spreadsheet over to an accountant. Any advice for a relatively new trader drowning in transaction hashes?