Ripple (XRPUSD)

[MindlessSelf]

The IRS has not provided guidance on hard fork transactions, and tax experts and coin traders are still debating its tax treatment. Common questions include: Is a hard fork the same as a stock split? If so, does the value of the coins have to be divided between the original coin and the fork, or is it a taxable dividend?

Compounding this issue is the fact that coin holders might not be able to sell the new fork currency immediately. The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, for example, did not support Bitcoin Cash when it originally forked in August 2017, but did add it to accounts for rightful holders later that year. Is it therefore acceptable to defer income on the fork transaction until the coin holder obtains such access, or later sells the new, forked coins? It seems reasonable to assume that coin traders should not have to report taxable income on a hard fork until the new coin is time-stamped as a ledger entry in the blockchain.

Donatin