Cryptocurrency Tax. Done right.

It depends on the activity. Buying, selling, and swapping tokens is CGT — every disposal (including crypto-to-crypto) is a taxable event. Staking rewards, mining, airdrops, and DeFi yield are usually income tax at the point of receipt, then CGT on later disposal. Trading at the volume and organisation of a business pushes the whole lot into trading income, but very few individuals actually meet that threshold.

HMRC uses share pooling: all your holdings of the same token form a single 'section 104 pool' with a running average cost. Special matching rules apply for same-day and 30-day (bed-and-breakfast) disposals. Spreadsheets break quickly once you have multiple exchanges and on-chain wallets. We reconcile via Koinly or Recap, then review the output for the misclassifications those tools routinely produce on DeFi.

HMRC's current view is that depositing tokens into many DeFi protocols is a disposal at market value, even though you haven't 'sold' anything — because beneficial ownership transfers. Rewards are income. This produces tax bills with no cash to pay them, which catches people out. We map each protocol you've used against current HMRC guidance and identify the disposals correctly rather than ignoring them and hoping.

Yes, via a negligible value claim under TCGA 1992 s.24, which treats the asset as disposed of at no value and crystallises the loss. You'll need evidence the token has genuinely become worthless, not just illiquid. Lost private keys can also qualify as a disposal if the loss is irrecoverable. Claimed losses offset other gains in the same year or carry forward indefinitely.

Use HMRC's Cryptoasset Disclosure Facility before they come to you — unprompted disclosures attract penalties of 0–20% versus up to 100% if HMRC finds it first. CARF (the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework) means exchanges will automatically report UK users' activity to HMRC from 2026, so the window is closing. We prepare the historic computation and the disclosure narrative end-to-end.