Cost basis for staking rewards transaction

When I claim RPL Rocketpool staking rewards, as part of the transaction I pay “gas” in ETH. However, Koinly separates this single txn hash into two transactions: RPL reward/income & ETH as cost (see pic). This means the ETH gas fee is not included in the cost basis for the RPL rewards.

For example, say I get $100 worth of RPL as reward, but pay $20 of ETH in gas to get the reward, this should count as only $80 of income. (Am I understanding this correctly?)

Koinly does not allow me to merge these back into the single transaction (that they actually are), because “a deposit in Koinly can not have any fee” according to this article: Transactions in Koinly Explained | Koinly Help Center

How do I correct this in Koinly? Thank you.

Hi Stuart, When you receive crypto as a Reward and incur a Cost (e.g. gas fee) to claim your reward, Koinly does not deduct the Cost from the Income because these items often have to be accounted for and reported separately for tax purposes on a tax return. In some cases, the Cost may not be deductible from Income under applucable tax rules. It may depend on whether the taxpayer is carrying on a business or not.

To facilitate compliance with tax rules, Koinly produces two separate transactions and adds the values in two separate accounts (or totals) in your Koinly tax report, one for Rewards and one for Costs. You can net the two totals in preparing your tax return if applicable tax rules permit.

I would note that you could merge the two transaction entries by removing the Reward and Cost labels from the transactions. This would leave you with a Deposit and a Send which could be merged to create a crypto for crypto trade (Exchange). Koinly would then calculate a capital gain or loss for tax purposes. However, treating the reward claim this way would not be approriate under the tax laws of most jurisdictions, which view staking rewards as Income for tax purposes rather than Capital Gains. (There is uncertainty on this issue in the USA as a result of a recent tax court case.)

Mark, thank you for the clarification. That makes a lot more sense now.

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