This is for Finland. I receive small daily staking rewards from one of the coins in the Cosmos ecosystem, and I manually add them to Koinly and tag them as “Rewards”. At this point I understand it is not yet a taxable event. But when I sell or trade the rewards (which is a taxable event in Finland), my cost basis is shown as market value when I received the reward, and not zero. I would have thought rewards would be treated as buying crypto with missing cost basis (i.e. zero cost basis). Is this wrong?
Because with the current situation, it would mean that there would be no tax burden with selling your rewards, as long as you sell the rewards before their prices go up, compared to when you received them. It just doesn’t sound right for something you receive out of thin air, but I’m new to capital gains. You can hypothetically gain millions of dollars in staking rewards and pay zero taxes. Also I did find this information (specific to Finland) that seems to imply that it may just be normal:
Staking, an alternative to mining, contributes to your capital income and is seen as a capital gain. This classification is different from mining because staking is a reward for owning crypto assets. You must report the value of your staking income in euros at the time you receive the tokens. This value is also considered the acquisition cost.
Furthermore, I have yet to find the tag where I can force Koinly to show the cost basis of rewards as zero. I have tried airdrop, mining etc., and nothing does the job. I am not trying to tag rewards incorrectly to get it to show zero cost basis. I am just trying to understand, which tag would would show as zero cost basis on Koinly for a hypothetical scenario. The fact that no tag shows zero cost basis is making me think I’m missing something, as surely it must be needed in some situations, if not my situation.
Apologies if all of this is rudimentary, appreciate all the guidance.