Hyperliquid gives UK users an unusual combination: an extensive public record of their trading, but almost none of the conventional support needed to turn that activity into a UK tax return. On 21 May 2026, the Financial Conduct Authority added Hyperliquid to its Warning List. The warning, updated on 7 June, states that the firm is not authorised and may be targeting people in the UK. UK users therefore have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service and no protection from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme when dealing with Hyperliquid.
The tax position is equally unconventional. HMRC’s Cryptoassets Manual is the standard starting point for understanding the UK treatment of directly held tokens, yet CRYPTO10150 expressly states that a derivative creates contractual rights and obligations rather than ownership of the underlying asset. As a result, the guidance in that manual will not generally apply where a cryptoasset derivative has been entered into.
That distinction reaches the heart of a Hyperliquid account. Perpetual futures account for most of the platform’s trading activity, but their treatment cannot simply be borrowed from HMRC’s guidance on buying, selling or exchanging cryptoassets. HMRC instead directs individuals towards guidance developed around conventional derivatives and counterparties, which does not neatly resolve the position of perpetual contracts executed through a decentralised protocol.
Hyperliquid provides neither a UK tax report nor a consolidated statement designed for Self Assessment, but that absence does not remove the obligations arising from the activity. This guide separates the rules that can be applied with confidence from the areas requiring a documented judgement, and explains how Finbooks can turn the underlying history into a complete, consistent and defensible UK tax position.
Why "no CARF report" is not the same as "no visibility"
The Cryptoasset Reporting Framework went live in the UK on 1 January 2026. Reporting cryptoasset service providers must carry out due diligence on their users, collect tax residence details, identify reportable persons and file annually. The first report, covering the 2026 calendar year, is due to HMRC by 31 May 2027, and the data can then be exchanged internationally.
Hyperliquid’s standard wallet connection does not require an email address, identity document or conventional account verification. You connect a wallet and interact directly with HyperCore. Whether any entity involved in the wider arrangement falls within CARF reporting depends on the role it performs and the degree of control it exercises; it should not be assumed either that Hyperliquid will report the user or that the arrangement necessarily sits outside CARF.
Three things follow, and only one of them is comfortable:
First, "fully decentralised" is a claim, not a conclusion. The OECD commentary on CARF turns on whether any person exercises sufficient control over the platform, and advisers are being told to treat decentralisation claims with professional scepticism. The FCA's own view, expressed through the Warning List, is that Hyperliquid's activities look like financial services or financial promotions directed at UK users rather than neutral software. A venue that a regulator characterises that way is not obviously a venue that sits outside the reporting perimeter forever.
Second, much of the trading record is already public. Hyperliquid states that every order, cancellation, trade and liquidation occurs transparently onchain with one-block finality. Once a wallet has been linked to its owner, a substantial part of the activity can therefore be reconstructed without waiting for a conventional exchange statement. That public record is not automatically a tax calculation, however, and it may still lack the external transfers, acquisition history and classifications needed to establish the user’s complete UK position.
Third, identity may be established at the edges even where the activity in the middle is pseudonymous. Funds can reach or leave Hyperliquid through a centralised exchange or another identifiable provider, and some of those providers may have reporting obligations under CARF. Where that happens, reported withdrawals and deposits could give HMRC a starting point from which to examine the activity associated with a wallet. The connection is not automatic in every case, but nor should a public wallet be treated as permanently disconnected from its owner.
The realistic position for the upcoming filing seasons is not that HMRC already holds a ready-made calculation of your Hyperliquid P&L. It is that information reported elsewhere may identify the relevant wallet, while Hyperliquid’s public record can reveal much of what happened once the funds arrived.
The question that decides everything else
Before you can calculate anything, you have to decide what your perpetual futures profits are for UK tax purposes. This is not a technicality. It changes the rate, the allowance, the form, and what you can do with losses.
There are three possible answers.
Route one: capital gains
Section 143 of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992 exists precisely to stop futures profits being taxed as miscellaneous income. Read alongside section 779 ITTOIA 2005, it routes gains from dealing in commodity or financial futures into the capital gains regime instead. CG56100 goes further and states that retail contracts for difference are financial futures, and that unless the profits are trading income, section 143 charges the outcome under capital gains in almost every case.
That guidance also carries a very useful consequence for perpetual traders: where capital gains treatment applies, all debits and credits to the account, including commission and sums equivalent to interest, are brought into the computation of the net gain or allowable loss when the contract is closed out. Funding payments, fees and rebates fold into a single figure per closed position rather than being tracked as separate income items.
There is a catch. Section 143 reaches futures that are dealt in on a recognised futures exchange, or over-the-counter futures where one of the parties is an authorised person as defined in section 143(3). No cryptoasset exchange appears on HMRC's list of recognised futures exchanges at CG56120. And CG56027, which explains what an authorised person means, was narrowed some years ago from "any reputable financial concern" to language about a reputable financial concern such as a high-street bank operating in the UK.
Hyperliquid is not on the recognised list. It is a protocol rather than a counterparty, it is not FCA authorised, and it is on the FCA Warning List. The route into capital gains treatment that HMRC assumed retail derivatives would take was built for a market that Hyperliquid does not resemble.
Route two: miscellaneous income
If section 143 does not reach the contract, the default ordering reasserts itself and miscellaneous income takes priority over capital gains. HMRC is explicit that swap contracts falling outside the definition of a financial future are likely to produce miscellaneous income, a position set out in Tax Bulletin 66 and reproduced at CFM50080.
The consequences are materially worse for most people:
Profits are taxed at your marginal Income Tax rate rather than 18 or 24 per cent.
The £3,000 annual exempt amount does not apply, because it is a capital gains allowance.
Losses are ring-fenced. Section 152 ITA 2007 allows relief only against "relevant miscellaneous income", meaning income charged under the same provision. Finance Act 2015 narrowed this deliberately. A bad year on perps cannot be set against a good year on spot crypto, on shares, or on anything else outside that same category.
That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the single most expensive difference between the two routes. Under capital gains treatment, a losing year creates a carried forward capital loss you can use against future crypto gains. Under miscellaneous income treatment, the same economic loss may be relievable only against future perpetual futures profits and nothing else.
Route three: trading
If your activity has the character of a financial trade, the profits are trading income, National Insurance can be in scope, and losses become considerably more flexible. BIM56880 confirms HMRC's approach: the question is answered the same way it would be for someone claiming to trade in shares, by finding the facts and taking an overall view of frequency, organisation, sophistication and commerciality.
HMRC has been consistent that this is a high bar for individuals and that calling yourself a trader does not make you one. It is also true that a full-time, systematic, highly organised perpetuals operation with size, infrastructure and a defined strategy looks more like a trade than a person buying Bitcoin once a quarter. This should be assessed on the facts rather than assumed either way.
What to actually do with this
HMRC has not published guidance that resolves how Section 143 should apply to perpetual contracts entered into through a venue structured like Hyperliquid. Capital gains treatment can be supported by analogy with HMRC’s treatment of retail contracts for difference, but the venue and contractual structure create a question that does not arise in HMRC’s conventional authorised-broker example.
What is not defensible is arriving at it by accident. If you take the capital gains route, know why: you are relying on section 143 and on HMRC's own statement that retail contracts for difference are financial futures in almost every case. Write down that reasoning while you still remember it, apply it consistently across years, and do not switch route opportunistically depending on whether the year was good or bad. Where the amounts are significant, professional advice can help establish and document the treatment before the return is filed.
How other Hyperliquid activity is taxed in the UK
Perpetuals dominate the volume, but they are not the whole account. The rest of the ecosystem sits back inside ordinary cryptoasset rules, and each piece behaves differently.
Bridging in and out
Moving USDC from Ethereum or Arbitrum onto Hyperliquid is generally not a disposal where you hold the same asset before and after and retain beneficial ownership throughout. The analysis is not automatic, though. Where a bridge is a swap into a differently issued wrapped asset rather than a canonical lock and mint of the same token, you may be receiving a different asset, and the answer changes.
Either way, a tax-neutral movement is never a record-neutral movement. If the withdrawal from your exchange and the arrival on Hyperliquid are not explicitly linked, software reads them as a sale and an acquisition from nowhere. The invented disposal almost always increases your bill.
Spot trading on HyperCore
Spot markets in HYPE and HIP-1 tokens are ordinary cryptoasset disposals on both legs. Section 104 pooling applies, the same-day rule applies, and the thirty-day bed and breakfasting rule applies across every venue and wallet you control, not just this one. Sell HYPE on Hyperliquid to crystallise a loss and buy it back within thirty days on a centralised exchange, and HMRC matches the two. The loss is not available, and nothing in your Hyperliquid history will tell you that.
The USDH wind-down
USDH launched in September 2025 as Hyperliquid's aligned quote asset and is now being sunset following the Coinbase and Circle arrangement, with fee-free conversions to USDC or fiat available through Native Markets during the transition.
Under the rules in force for 2025/26 and 2026/27, converting USDH into USDC is a disposal of one cryptoasset and an acquisition of another. Both sides need to be valued in sterling, with the disposal proceeds compared against the pooled allowable cost of the USDH disposed of. The resulting gain or loss may be small where both assets remain close to one US dollar, but it is not automatically nil: the pooled cost may reflect earlier acquisitions made at different exchange rates, as well as any depeg or transaction fees.
The proposed exemption for eligible stablecoins does not apply to earlier disposals. It remains draft legislation intended to take effect from 6 April 2027, so conversions completed before that date must be considered under the rules currently in force.
HYPE staking
Delegated staking on HyperCore does not transfer beneficial ownership of your HYPE. You move it from your spot balance to your staking balance and delegate to a validator. Moving it is not a disposal, the roughly one day delegation lockup is not a disposal, and the seven day unstaking queue is not a disposal.
The rewards are the taxable part. They accrue continuously, compound automatically into your position, and are paid in HYPE at a rate currently in the region of 2.2 to 2.4 per cent. Where the activity is not a trade, this is generally miscellaneous income, valued in sterling when the rewards are received or become unconditionally available to you, depending on how the staking mechanism operates.
When the reward tokens are later sold, exchanged or spent, a capital gain or loss is calculated using the sterling value previously recognised as income as their acquisition cost. This means that only the subsequent movement in value enters the capital gains calculation; the amount already taxed as income is not taxed twice.
The practical problem is that a reward stream which accrues by the minute cannot be valued by the minute in any meaningful sense. What you need is a consistent, documented convention applied across the whole year, not a number invented in January. At that volume, a consistent calculation method supported by transaction software is considerably more reliable than attempting to reconstruct the reward stream manually at the end of the year.
HLP and user vaults
This is the least understood item on the platform and the one most likely to be reported wrongly.
Depositing USDC into HLP or into a leader vault does not leave you holding USDC. You hold a proportional claim on vault equity, with P&L accruing to you as the vault market-makes and absorbs liquidations, subject to a four day lockup on HLP and a ten per cent performance fee on user vaults. Economically you have become a liquidity provider. Legally, you have exchanged a holding for a right.
Under the rules in force now, that transfer of beneficial ownership is what triggers the disposal analysis in HMRC's DeFi guidance. The safest working assumption for 2025/26 and 2026/27 is that vault entry and exit require analysis rather than being ignored, and that vault returns are not automatically capital in nature.
Draft legislation published on 13 July 2026 is relevant but should not be over-read. It proposes no gain/no loss treatment from 6 April 2027 for three specific categories: single-cryptoasset lending, single-cryptoasset borrowing and automated market-making arrangements. A vault running discretionary market-making strategies against an order book is not obviously an automated market maker within the proposed rules. The treatment must therefore be established from the facts and legal structure of the particular vault rather than inferred from the measure’s headline.
HIP-3 markets and HIP-4 outcome contracts
HIP-3, live since 13 October 2025, lets builders stake 500,000 HYPE and deploy their own perpetual markets. It has pushed the platform well beyond crypto: tokenised equities, commodities and indices, including a licensed S&P 500 perpetual launched by Trade[XYZ] in March 2026. HIP-4, live on mainnet since 2 May 2026, added fully collateralised outcome contracts settling at zero or one.
For HIP-3 markets, the derivative analysis in part two applies unchanged. The underlying being gold or Nvidia rather than Bitcoin does not move the contract back into the Cryptoassets Manual, and it does not make Hyperliquid a recognised futures exchange.
HIP-4 is a harder question and worth flagging rather than answering. Fully collateralised binary event contracts sit near a boundary in UK tax law between derivatives and wagers, and betting winnings are not chargeable gains. Do not build a filing position on that observation. HMRC is unlikely to accept a gambling characterisation for standardised, exchange-traded, collateralised contracts held as part of a systematic trading strategy, and the FCA plainly regards this class of product as a regulated financial instrument. If you have material HIP-4 activity, get advice on it specifically.
Points, airdrops and referral economics
The HYPE genesis distribution in November 2024 was allocated by reference to points earned through trading activity. Whether tokens received in that way are income on receipt, or an unsolicited airdrop taxed only on later disposal from a nil or minimal cost basis, depends on whether you did something to receive them. Points earned for trading is a much stronger argument for income than a random distribution to a snapshot of wallets, and the amounts involved were, for many recipients, very large.
That distribution fell in the 2024/25 tax year. The window to amend a 2024/25 return runs to 31 January 2027. If it was never reported, or reported on an analysis you would not now defend, the time to look at it is now rather than after the first CARF exchange.
The same analysis applies to other amounts paid by the platform. Builder-code revenue, referral rebates and rewards received in return for providing a service or completing required activities are likely to fall within Income Tax, valued in sterling when received or made available. Where tokens are taxed as income, that sterling value normally becomes their acquisition cost for a later capital gains calculation.
Liquidations
A forced liquidation closes the position and crystallises its result under whichever tax treatment applies to the contract. The realisation is involuntary, but it must still be captured at the time it occurs, together with the associated fees, funding and liquidation movements. On a venue offering this degree of leverage, liquidations should form part of the normal reconciliation process rather than being treated as exceptional activity.
You invest. We handle the tax.
There is no report to reconcile against
With Coinbase, the problem is that the tax report is built on the wrong methodology. With Hyperliquid, the problem is more basic. There is no tax report at all.
What you can extract is trade fills, funding history, ledger updates and transfers, through the interface or the API. That is raw material, not a calculation, and it is missing five things a UK return needs.
Sterling values at the relevant time. Much of Hyperliquid’s trading and funding activity is quoted or settled using US-dollar stablecoins, while UK tax calculations must be prepared in pounds. Fills, rewards, fees and other relevant movements therefore need consistent historical exchange rates. Converting a single year-end dollar total into sterling would produce a different calculation, not a reliable approximation.
A characterisation for each event. A perp close, a spot swap, a staking reward, a vault deposit and a referral rebate are five different tax outcomes, on different forms, at different rates, against different allowances. Nothing in a fills export performs that classification. It is the actual work.
Your complete spot position, not only this venue. For directly held fungible cryptoassets, the Section 104 pool for each token covers the beneficial owner’s complete holding, including units held through other exchanges and wallets. A HYPE disposal on Hyperliquid may therefore need to be matched against HYPE acquired elsewhere, including acquisitions made under the same-day and 30-day rules. Perpetual contracts require a separate calculation and do not enter the spot token pool.
Transfers matched leg to leg - where they are genuinely transfers. Bridge movements and transfers between balances or wallets under the same beneficial ownership should be linked so that they are not mistaken for disposals. Vault deposits should be identified separately, because entering a vault may involve acquiring a new right rather than making a tax-neutral internal transfer.
Fees and rebates attributed correctly. Taker fees, maker rebates, funding, HyperEVM gas and vault performance fees can all affect the calculation, but not always in the same way. Costs may reduce a gain where they are allowable, while rebates or funding received may increase a taxable result. They should therefore be linked to the relevant activity rather than simply netted off at account level.
How Finbooks turns onchain activity into a tax return you can defend
The standard HMRC applies is not really a number. It is a number you can explain.
For Hyperliquid that means every closed position reconciled to its fills, every funding entry captured, every reward valued in sterling at the moment it arrived, every bridge and internal transfer linked leg to leg, every fee attributed to the transaction that produced it, and, above all, a written characterisation of your perpetuals activity that you applied consistently and can still justify throughout the applicable record-keeping period and in the event of an HMRC enquiry.
Nobody rebuilds an hourly funding history by hand. On a venue that settles funding every hour and prices everything in dollars, manual reconstruction is not a plan. It is a plan to spend a weekend in January producing a number nobody can defend.
Finbooks was built to turn raw onchain and platform activity into figures that match HMRC's framework rather than a generic one.
Connect the whole picture, not one venue. Link your Hyperliquid activity along with every exchange, wallet and chain you use, including HyperEVM. Consolidation is the only basis on which UK pooling can be applied correctly, because your section 104 pool does not stop at the edge of one platform.
Section 104 for spot cryptoassets, not FIFO. For directly held fungible tokens, gains are calculated using HMRC’s matching hierarchy; the rules are applied per token across the complete portfolio, while perpetual contracts remain outside the spot pool and are calculated separately.
Sterling values at the relevant time. Fills, rewards, fees and account movements are converted into pounds using consistent historical rates. Where funding and other movements form part of a closed derivative calculation, their sterling values are retained and incorporated into the result under the selected tax treatment.
Income separated from capital, visibly. Each event is classified as a disposal, taxable income or a non-taxable movement, and every classification is shown and editable. That matters more here than anywhere else, because the characterisation of derivative activity is a decision you have to make and be able to evidence, not one a black box should make silently on your behalf.
Transfers matched and costs attributed. Bridge legs and movements between balances or wallets under the same beneficial ownership are linked so that cost history carries across without creating phantom disposals. Transactions such as vault deposits are kept separate where their legal and tax treatment requires further analysis.
Self Assessment-ready output. The resulting gains, losses and income are mapped to the relevant Self Assessment sections, which may include the capital gains, miscellaneous income or self-employment pages depending on how the activity has been classified. Each figure remains supported by the underlying transactions and calculation history.
You can create a free account, connect your activity and review your full transaction history and classifications before paying anything.
Hyperliquid records an unusually detailed account of your activity onchain, but it does not turn that history into a UK tax calculation. Much of the evidence HMRC could use to reconstruct your year may already exist; your own calculation should be more complete, properly classified and supported by records you can explain.
