What am I really making on crypto after fees?

Cost basis is the amount bought times the buy price, times one plus the buy fee — acquisition fees capitalise into the basis under IRS Publication 544. Net proceeds are the sale value times one minus the sell fee. Profit is net proceeds minus cost basis. The headline price move always overstates it.

Higher than what you paid, always. Break-even is the cost basis divided by the amount held and by one minus the sell fee. With 0.5% fees on both sides, an asset bought at $60,000 needs about $60,600 just to get you back to flat.

The line is 365 days. Held for one year or less, the gain is short-term and taxed at your ordinary income rate. Held longer, it gets long-term capital gains rates, which are substantially lower for most filers. The clock runs from the acquisition date, not from the start of the tax year.

Yes, in the US. Every disposal is a taxable event — swapping BTC for ETH, converting one stablecoin to another, or paying for something in crypto all realise a gain or loss even though no dollars moved. This surprises people every filing season.

It is the gap between holding two assets and putting them in a constant-product pool when their relative price moves. The formula is 2√r/(1+r) − 1 for a price ratio r. A 1.25× divergence costs about 0.6%, 2× costs about 5.7%, and 4× costs about 20%. It becomes permanent the moment you withdraw.

Enough to beat the impermanent loss for the price move that actually happens, which you do not know in advance. As a sanity check: if the assets diverge 2× over a year, fee income needs to clear about 5.7% just to draw level with having held them. Advertised APRs on new pools are usually decaying token emissions, not durable fee income.

Longs pay shorts when funding is positive and the reverse when it is negative, settled three times a day on most venues. The headline number is per settlement, not per year: 0.01% per settlement is about 0.03% a day and roughly 11% a year. Always annualise before comparing it with anything.

It changes what it costs relative to your money. Funding is charged on notional, so a 5× position pays five times the funding per dollar of your own capital. A rate that looks trivial on notional can be a double-digit annual drag on your margin.

The advertised fee is usually the smaller half. Spread against the mid price commonly adds 0.2 to 0.5%, and a bridge adds gas on both chains. Judge any route on the output amount you are quoted, not on the fee — that figure already contains everything.

The schedule is fixed by the protocol: block rewards halve every 210,000 blocks, which at a ten-minute target block time works out at roughly four years. The last one was in 2024 and the next falls in 2028. The exact date drifts with actual block times, so any specific day is an estimate.

It moves your risk from exchange failure and account compromise to your own handling of a seed phrase. Historically, exchange and bridge failures have destroyed far more value than individual self-custody mistakes — but self-custody has no recovery path at all. The usual answer is cold storage for what you would not want to lose and an exchange balance only for what you are actively trading.

Sometimes closely, sometimes not at all. The correlation with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 has swung between roughly zero and strongly positive over different periods, rising sharply during liquidity-driven selloffs. Treating it as a reliable diversifier has repeatedly failed at exactly the moments diversification was needed.