How are Uniswap swaps taxed in Germany?

What is Uniswap?

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange on Ethereum and many other chains, including Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon and BNB Chain. Instead of an order book it has pools: each one holds two tokens that other people put in, and the price follows from the ratio between them. To swap, you put one token into the pool and take the other out, and you pay a small fee to the people whose liquidity is in the pool.

Three versions run side by side. In v2 you get an LP token for your liquidity. In v3 you place it in a price range and get an NFT for your position. In v4 all the pools sit in a single contract, the PoolManager, and a position is an NFT again.

1. The app app.uniswap.org You pick what you want to swap or add as liquidity, and confirm in your wallet.
2. The router 0x66a9…a8af Uniswap's Universal Router carries out your swap, through one pool or several.
3. The pools v2, v3 and v4 This is where the other people's tokens sit, the ones you swap against.

For tax, only the swap counts: one token leaves your wallet and another arrives. It makes no difference whether you swap on app.uniswap.org, in a wallet app or through an aggregator that uses Uniswap's pools.

A Uniswap swap on the blockchain

A real swap through Uniswap from a public wallet, as TaxMaxi reads it. Next to each item the wallet gives up or receives is what it means for tax.

Just over 13.8 million KERMIT, a memecoin, went for just over 0.044 ETH. The router sent the swap through a Uniswap v4 pool, and the ETH came back from the PoolManager. The wallet paid the gas in ETH: that's a small swap too, and on a taxable swap it reduces the gain.

An example in euros

You buy ETH in February and in August you swap part of it for USDC on Uniswap, so within a year. You pay the gas in ETH. This is how TaxMaxi works out the swap:

The fee in ETH is itself a small swap, so the year 2025 comes to +€568.96. That is under the exemption limit of €1,000: if it's your only gain from private sales in the year, you pay no tax on it.

If you had bought the ETH before 20 August 2024, more than a year before the swap, the same gain would be tax-free.

Worked out by TaxMaxi's tax engine, on the same principles as for your wallet.

The legal basis

Whether a swap costs tax is set by the Income Tax Act (EStG), above all § 23 EStG on private sales. How tax offices apply this to crypto is set out in the finance ministry's letter of 6 March 2025, which binds them.

The letter is divided into numbered paragraphs (Randnummern). Each principle below says where to find it; a click opens the letter at that spot.

1. 1

   A swap is a disposal

   A swap disposes of the token you give up and acquires the one you receive. A gain is taxable if there's no more than one year between the acquisition and the swap.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 53 and 54

2. 2

   One-year holding period

   The year runs from the day of acquisition to the swap, and each swap starts it again for the token you receive. There's no extension to ten years. For tokens you acquire from 2027, a finance ministry draft would drop the holding period: What is set to change from 2027.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 55 and 63

3. 3

   The proceeds

   The proceeds are the market value in euros of what you received, at the time of the swap.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 58 and 60

4. 4

   The cost basis

   What you receive costs you the market value of what you gave for it. That's your cost basis when you swap the new token later.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 43 and 59

5. 5

   Fees

   A swap's network fee counts as deductible expenses (Werbungskosten) and reduces the gain, but only on a taxable swap.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 57 and 59

6. 6

   First bought, first swapped

   If you bought the same token at different times, the one you bought first counts as swapped first, calculated per wallet.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 61 and 62

7. 7

   The exemption limit (Freigrenze)

   If the sum of all your gains from private sales in the year stays under €1,000 (up to 2023: €600), it's tax-free. Above that, all of it is taxable, not only the part over the limit.

   See the BMF letter, paragraph 53

8. 8

   Liquidity in a pool

   When you put tokens into a liquidity pool, we treat that as a swap for your position: they count as disposed of at their market value, and that value is the position's cost basis. When you withdraw liquidity, we treat that as a swap back: the position's share, what was paid in first going first, counts as disposed of at the market value of the tokens that come back, and you acquire those tokens anew, with a new holding period. That's also where impermanent loss shows up. The finance ministry's letter says nothing about liquidity pools. Even whether paying in is a disposal at all is disputed, and with it the new holding period: the other reading sees the position as a mere receipt and the deposit as a loan. We take the cautious reading.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 53, 54, 58, 59 and 61

9. 9

   Fees from a pool

   Fees and rewards that a position in a liquidity pool pays you are income under § 22 Nr. 3 EStG when you collect them, at their market value on that day, and each one gets its own acquisition date. What the position had earned by the end of the year but not yet paid out can't be looked up for past years, so it counts when you collect it.

   See the BMF letter, paragraphs 43, 45, 48 and 65

Common questions