At our Pro plan level and above, clients' crypto margin trade tax liability is calculated by our team of experts. This process can take a week or more, particularly during tax season, so we wanted to provide some transparency about how these figures are reached and why it is a time-consuming process.
First and foremost, margin calculations take time because it is largely a manual process; there's no pure software solution for translating margin trading data into transactions understood by the IRS. Behind the scenes, a team of real people is working through your data to get it tax-return-ready.
A large part of margin trade tax is collecting and triangulating data so that unrealized positions can be excluded from tax liability calculations. For example, if you had a $10,000 margin loss across 500 margin trades, but some of them were perpetuals, you can't simply report each as a $20 loss, because many of the positions may not actually be closed despite being reported in your PnL numbers.
Many tax reports provided by margin platforms don't actually provide data that is immediately useful. Rather than reporting individual taxable events in a machine-readable way, they report cumulative totals and raw transaction data. What's more, frequently these reports are not in the kind of standardized CSV formats that work with crypto tax software.
Our margin team will let you know what reports you'll need from the margin platforms you used. In addition to transaction histories and PnLs, this may include private APIs, "off menu" reports, or backend data feeds.
Once the required information is received, our experts will reformat and layer data in order to isolate taxable events that were realized from those that were included in cumulative PnLs but not actually realized (perpetuals).
Because crypto margin trading tax calculations are labor intensive and demand significant attention to detail, the process is time consuming. We ask you for your patience and understanding.
Files we need for your margin calculations, by exchange
PnL treatment
FTX software: API or CSVs, trades and PnL CSVs
LedgerX: trades_export and Derivatives-Balance-Statement CSVs
Kraken: API or CSVs, ledgers CSV
dYdX*: funding history, transfer history, and trade history
Kucoin futures: CSVs, futures PnL report, funding payments
Okex futures/options: futures account history, options account history, funding account history
Binance futures: API or CSVs, Binance futures PnL report or full Binance history files
Bitmex: API or CSV, wallet CSV
Bybit: API or CSV, 2 assets history outcome sheet inverse contract files (one USDT, the other with rest of tokens)
Phemex futures: CSV, CONTRACT_PNL file
* Requires VIP plan
Margin logic treatment (leveraged spot margin)
Poloniex: API or CSV, trade history
Binance cross/isolated spot margin: API, isolated margin and isolated margin trade history
Kucoin spot margin: CSV, margin trade history
Okex spot margin: CSV, margin account history
Huobi: CSVs, margin trade history, loan history
Both treatments
Binance: API, isolated margin trade history or full Binance history CSV
Bitfinex: API
Okex: CSVs, margin account history, futures account history, options account history, funding account history
Don’t see your margin exchange listed? Just send us all CSV data and a read-only API key, if available.