Your Guide to Uniswap Taxes in 2026

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange that runs as a set of smart contracts, originally on Ethereum and now across several networks including Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and Polygon. You trade from your own wallet. There's no account, no deposit, no counterparty holding your keys.

Prices come from liquidity pools rather than an order book. Liquidity providers deposit two tokens into a pool, traders swap against it, and a formula sets the exchange rate based on the pool's composition. Providers earn a share of the trading fees.

For tax purposes, the important part is what Uniswap is not. It is not a broker, it never takes custody, and it collects no identifying information about you. That means no 1099 of any kind, and it means the entire record of what you did lives on-chain rather than in an account statement.

The protocol has three live versions, and they matter for your basis. V2 gives you a UNI-V2 ERC-20 token for your liquidity position. V3 and V4 give you an NFT instead, one that stores your price range, fee tier, and amounts. Those are different assets, and they cannot be pooled together.

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No. Uniswap is a set of smart contracts. It does not take custody or collect a Social Security number, and it does not mail a Form 1099-DA, 1099-MISC, or 1099-B. A 2024 Treasury rule would have required DeFi front ends to report, but Congress disapproved it in April 2025, and it never took effect.

Custodial brokers still file. T.D. 10000 requires Coinbase, Kraken, hosted wallets, and certain payment processors to report gross proceeds on Form 1099-DA for sales on or after January 1, 2025. Swap on Uniswap, later sell the proceeds on Coinbase, and that exit prints on Coinbase's 1099-DA. The on-chain hop from your wallet to the exchange is public. Uniswap not reporting does not make the activity unreportable.

Every swap is a crypto-to-crypto exchange of property. You dispose of the token you send into the pool and acquire the token that comes out, at fair market value in dollars at the moment of the trade. Gain or loss is proceeds minus basis in the token you gave up. It goes on Form 8949 and Schedule D. Assets held more than a year are taxed at the 0%, 15%, or 20% long-term rates. Held a year or less, ordinary rates.

A 1 ETH for 3,000 USDC swap is a sale of the ETH, even though no dollars hit a bank. If that ETH cost you $1,800, and 1 ETH is worth $3,000 at the swap, the gain is $1,200 before gas. USDC is property too. A later USDC-for-ETH swap is a second disposal of the USDC.

Gas paid in ETH is a small disposal of that ETH. Token approvals, the "permit Uniswap to spend" signature, do not by themselves dispose of anything. A v2 flash swap that leaves you with extra tokens in the same block is a short-term gain, since you held the tokens for no measurable period.

From January 1, 2025, Treas. Reg. § 1.1012-1(j) governs which lot you sold. Assets in an unhosted wallet and assets in an exchange account follow different rules, so ETH in MetaMask never shares a lot pool with ETH sitting on Kraken. Within self-custody, you specifically identify the units by recording them before the swap, and that identification must point to units in the wallet the swap came from. Skip the identification and the default is first-in, first-out across everything you hold outside a broker, which is rarely the answer you want. The regulation also disregards the date units were transferred into a wallet. Moving ETH from Coinbase to MetaMask does not reset the acquisition date or start a new holding period. The original purchase date follows the coins.

Revenue Procedure 2024-28 is separate: it gave taxpayers a safe harbor for allocating unused basis across wallets as of January 1, 2025.

The IRS has not published a ruling that says "adding liquidity is a taxable swap." Notice 2014-21 still says exchanging one cryptocurrency for another is a taxable event. You cannot average a v3 NFT into a v2 LP token.

The conservative, and most commonly filed, position treats the deposit as a disposal of the two tokens you put in and an acquisition of the LP token or NFT, basis equal to the combined USD value at deposit. Example: you deposit 1 ETH you bought at $1,800, now worth $3,000, plus 3,000 USDC. You have a $1,200 gain on the ETH at deposit, even though you never cashed out. When you exit, you dispose of the LP interest and take back a different mix of ETH and USDC. That exit is a second capital calculation. Uniswap Labs notes that the interface does not burn the v3 or v4 NFT when you remove liquidity (a v3-to-v4 migration is the exception). An empty NFT left in the wallet does not show that nothing was disposed of.

Impermanent loss is not a separate line you deduct while you sit in the pool. It shows up as a worse mix on the way out.

Notice 2024-57 tells brokers they need not file a 1099-DA for "liquidity provider transactions" until Treasury issues further guidance, including depositing into an AMM contract, receiving a pool token, and redeeming that token for a share of the pool. Section 3.01 of the notice says that list is not a tax analysis, and "no inference is intended" as to how those steps are treated for income-tax purposes. Section 3.03(2) even flags that compensation for the use of the deposited units may still constitute income under other Code sections. Fees on v2 generally accrue inside the LP token and show up at exit. Fees on v3 are often claimed in a separate transaction, which is the cleaner income moment: ordinary income at FMV when you collect, and that FMV becomes the basis in the claimed tokens.

Some practitioners argue a deposit is not a disposition because you still bear the economic risk. There is no IRS blessing for that view. If you take it, document it, apply it consistently, and expect an exam to start from the swap analysis.

If you claimed UNI, you had ordinary income on the day you claimed it, not the day of the snapshot. Rev. Rul. 2019-24 sets the trigger at dominion and control, meaning the moment you could transfer, sell, or spend the tokens. For most people, that was the claim transaction on or after September 16, 2020, since UNI sat unclaimed until you went and got it.

The income is what 400 UNI was worth in dollars at that moment. That figure is also your cost basis, so any later sale is a capital gain or loss measured from that basis. Two things follow. UNI you were eligible for but never claimed is not income, because you never controlled it. And if UNI fell after your claim, that does not reduce the income you already recognized. It gives you a capital loss when you sell.

Pricing the claim is the hard part now. Look up the block timestamp on the claim transaction, then price UNI at that time using an exchange with that day's trading volume. Do not use the September 1, 2020 snapshot date, and do not use today's price.

Wrapping ETH into WETH is different and unsettled. Notice 2024-57 tells brokers they need not report wrapping transactions, but the notice says nothing about whether wrapping is taxable, and Section 3.01 states no inference should be drawn. Most tax engines treat ETH-for-WETH as a swap by default. If you take the position that a wrap is not a disposition, apply it consistently across every wrap and unwrap in the year, and keep the transaction hashes and a written note of your reasoning.

Copy the public address of the wallet that signed the swaps, paste it into Etherscan (or the explorer for the L2 you used: Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon). Download the CSV under transactions and token transfers. Approvals will be in there. Do not skip them when you label, or software will invent sales. Keep the txid, timestamp in UTC, tokens in and out, USD value at the block, and gas paid in ETH.

A Coinbase or Kraken 1099-DA will not include the Uniswap swap that created the lot you later sold there. Import the wallet and the exchange into the same file, or the basis chain breaks at the deposit. After January 1, 2025, you cannot patch that hole by pooling everything you own into one average. The rules turn on where the coins were held.

Swaps and LP exits go on Form 8949 and Schedule D. UNI claims and collected LP fees go on Schedule 1 as other income, or Schedule C if you are in a trade or business of liquidity provision. The digital-asset question on Form 1040 still has to match the year you had receipts or disposals. There is no Uniswap PDF to attach.

TokenTax connects to Uniswap, Ethereum, MetaMask, and the L2s alongside Coinbase and Kraken, which is what a Uniswap year actually requires: the wallet holds your basis, and the exchange holds your sale, and neither one knows about the other. Import them into the same file so approvals are not counted as sales, and a 2021 swap still carries its cost when you sell that token in 2026. Where the year involves a stack of v3 NFTs and a UNI claim you never priced, TokenTax VIP adds accountants who reconcile it and can review IRS correspondence.