Every staking record — every dashboard, every export, every year-end statement — rests on something. The question that separates a defensible record from a decorative one isn't "is the number right?" It's "what would I point to if someone challenged it?"

US recordkeeping law frames it exactly that way: IRC §6001 requires records sufficient to establish your income — establish, not assert. So it's worth naming, precisely, what each kind of staking record asks you to trust.

Chain Trust: the record points at the blockchain

In a Chain Trust record, every amount traces to an on-chain settlement event the staker originated — a sweep withdrawal, a triggered withdrawal, a fee-recipient payment — verified against chain data and preserved with its evidence. The party you're trusting is the Ethereum blockchain: globally replicated, independently checkable by anyone.

This is the trust model available to solo and provider-hosted validators, because their income actually settles on-chain at addresses they control. In TrueStake's vocabulary, records with this provenance carry the Chain Derived audit grade — the label is the trust model made visible per line.

The property that matters: the record's author drops out of the trust equation. If TrueStake disappeared tomorrow, every Chain Derived line could still be verified against the chain by whoever's holding the record.

Oracle Trust: the record points at a protocol's accounting

Liquid staking breaks the direct line. Hold a liquid staking token and your yield accrues inside a protocol's accounting — there is no per-holder settlement event on-chain to point at. The best available anchor is the protocol's own Oracle: the on-chain reports it publishes about validator balances and yields, which the token's value mechanics depend on.

A record verified against those published reports is an Oracle Trust record — TrueStake's Oracle Derived grade, arriving with liquid staking support. You're trusting the protocol's Oracle process rather than raw chain settlement. That is a genuinely weaker anchor — the audit trail terminates at the protocol's published accounting rather than at your own events — and the honest thing a record can do is say so on the line, rather than dress both provenances in the same font.

(What liquid-staking yield means for taxes — how and when it's recognized — involves open questions we don't take positions on here; this article is about record provenance, not LST tax treatment.)

Source Trust: the record points at disclosed sources

The residual category: no node data, no protocol Oracle — just public data sources, assembled with care and labeled with per-source confidence. Better than nothing, honestly labeled as what it is. TrueStake calls this Best-Effort and doesn't currently offer it; it exists in the vocabulary so that if it ever ships, it can't masquerade as something stronger.

Why the model matters more than the vendor

Most staking-record products are, in this taxonomy, undisclosed Source Trust: derived numbers from APIs, no reconciliation against settlement, no per-line provenance. The numbers may well be accurate. But accurate and establishable are different properties, and §6001 cares about the second.

A record that names its trust model per line gives you — and your CPA, and an examiner — the exact chain of custody for every number: this line rests on the chain; that line rests on an Oracle; here is where each trail ends. Your staking income is recognized under the dominion-and-control standard of Rev. Rul. 2023-14 either way; what varies is how firmly the numbers underneath can be established when it counts.

Ask your staking-record vendor one question: what am I trusting? If the answer isn't printed on the record itself, you have your answer.