Cost basis and P&L
How the platform works out what you paid, and why receiving tokens is not treated as buying them.
Every profit figure needs a purchase price. On an exchange that is simple: there is an order, with a price and a timestamp.
A self-custody wallet has no orders. It has transfers in and transfers out. Working out what you paid means reconstructing it from the chain, and some of it cannot be reconstructed at all.
This page explains what the platform does about that.
Average cost and FIFO
Two ways of working out the cost of what you sell are available.
Average cost — every unit of a coin carries the same cost: the average of everything you paid for it. This is what the Overview, the Assets table and the P&L cards use.
Buy 1 ETH at $2,000 and later 1 ETH at $4,000, and the average cost is $3,000 across 2 ETH. Sell 1 ETH at $5,000 and the realized gain is $2,000, with 1 ETH left at an unchanged average of $3,000.
FIFO — first in, first out: the first units you bought are the first ones considered sold, each with its own price and date.
Same example: selling 1 ETH at $5,000 sells the one bought at $2,000, so the realized gain is $3,000, and the ETH you still hold keeps its $4,000 cost.
The two give different realized figures for the same trades. Spain and many other countries require FIFO for crypto taxes. In Transactions & P&L you can switch between them, and the CSV export includes both.
How transfers are classified
A transfer arriving in your wallet is not automatically a purchase.
Coins arrive for many reasons: moving between your own wallets, being paid for work, airdrops, a refund, a withdrawal from an exchange. Recording all of those as purchases at market price would invent a cost you never paid, and every later profit figure would be wrong.
The platform records a purchase when it can establish that value was exchanged. When it cannot, the coins are held without a cost basis: they count toward your balance and your portfolio value, but they are excluded from P&L.
That is why the Invested card says "what you paid for 4 of 12 assets". Four have a traceable cost. The other eight are held, valued and shown — but not used to claim a profit that cannot be evidenced.
Transfers between networks
Moving an asset from one network to another looks like a disposal on one side and an acquisition on the other. It is neither: it is the same holding in a different place.
Transfers that match as two sides of a bridge are paired and excluded from buys and sells. Without this, anyone using more than one network would accumulate fictional gains and losses every time they moved funds.
See Networks for which chains are covered.
Transfers between your own wallets
Same principle. If both addresses are yours and tracked, the transfer is internal and does not create a purchase or a sale.
If you move coins from an address the platform does not know about, it has no way to see the other side. Those coins arrive without a cost basis. Adding the source address as a tracked wallet before moving funds avoids this.
Realized and unrealised figures
Unrealised P&L applies to coins you still hold: current value minus average cost. It changes every time the price moves and is not money until you sell.
Realized P&L applies to coins you have sold: sale proceeds minus the average cost of the amount sold. This is settled and does not change afterwards.
Both are shown separately on the overview, and Transactions lists the individual trades behind them.
When history is too long to price
Pricing a trade means knowing the market price of that asset at that moment. For a wallet with a very long or very dense history, that is a large amount of historical data.
Where the record cannot be completed, the platform does not publish a partial profit figure as if it were whole. The affected columns are hidden and a note explains why. An incomplete P&L presented as complete is worse than no P&L.