How Hyperliquid perps are taxed: the 2026 guide

Updated July 2026 · Settled · Not tax advice. Confirm treatment with your tax professional.

If you trade perpetual futures on Hyperliquid and imported your account into Koinly, CoinTracker, or CoinLedger, there is a good chance your tax report is missing most of your trading. This guide covers why, what the IRS actually expects, and how to fix it.

Why your tax software missed your perps

Mainstream crypto tax platforms integrate Hyperliquid through its transfer and spot records. Perpetual futures live in a different part of the exchange's data: thousands of fills, funding payments every hour you hold a position, and liquidations. Most integrations skip them. Koinly's own feature-request board documents users discovering that its Hyperliquid import covers spot transactions and transfers only, with staking rewards mislabeled and no perps at all.

For an active perps trader that means a report missing 90%+ of taxable activity. That is not a rounding error. It is a different tax return.

How perp PnL is reported

Crypto perpetual futures don't have explicit IRS guidance, so the practical convention most preparers use is: each closed position (or closing fill) is a realized gain or loss, reported as a short-term capital gain on Form 8949 / Schedule D. Hyperliquid itself reports the realized PnL on every closing fill, which makes exchange records the authoritative source. Proceeds are the close notional, cost basis is proceeds minus that PnL plus allocated fees, and every row reconciles.

Crypto perps generally do not qualify for Section 1256 (60/40) treatment, because they aren't exchange-traded contracts on a CFTC-regulated exchange. Some preparers argue otherwise. That is a conversation for your CPA, and you'll want clean per-fill data either way.

Funding payments are not trades

Funding is a periodic cash flow between longs and shorts. It is not a disposal of property. The common treatment: funding received is ordinary income; funding paid is an investment expense. Tools that force funding into fake "trades" corrupt both your income and your capital gains. It belongs on its own schedule.

Two deadlines matter in 2026. Extension filers must submit 2025 returns by October 15, 2026, and the IRS wallet-by-wallet accounting rules (Rev. Proc. 2024-28) already apply to that return. Starting with tax year 2026, brokers begin cost-basis reporting on Form 1099-DA. DeFi trading like Hyperliquid won't be on it, so the reporting burden stays on you.

What about spot trades on Hyperliquid?

Spot works like any other exchange: sells are matched against buys (FIFO by default) for capital gains. The catch is coins you deposited from elsewhere. Your Hyperliquid history has no basis for them, and any honest tool should flag those instead of guessing.

Fixing your report

You need your complete fill history, every fill and every funding payment, turned into (1) a Form 8949 CSV, (2) an import file for whatever platform assembles your full return, and (3) a funding income/expense schedule. Hyperliquid's public API exposes all of it by wallet address; the work is pagination, reconciliation, and correct categorization.

Settled does this in your browser.

Paste your address, preview your real numbers free, download Form 8949, Koinly, and CoinTracker files that reconcile to the cent. Nothing is uploaded. Your data never leaves your machine.

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