Augur REP Migration Tax: The Swap, Deadline And Dead REP

Augur's migration window closed on August 3, 2026, at 01:00 UTC, and the protocol's own post-fork numbers are the ones that matter now: of the 11,000,000 REP supply, 6,547,546.66 REP migrated, about 59.52%, with 6,545,760.43 of that landing in the Yes universe that won the fork. The widely syndicated July 28, 2026 coverage that put migration at only 33.6% has been superseded, but the arithmetic that survives is the tax story: 4,452,453.34 REP is permanently stranded in the old universe, and 1,786.23 REP migrated into universes that lost.

I'm Chris Herbst, Managing Director at CountDeFi, a global crypto tax reporting firm specializing in complex cryptocurrency and DeFi reconciliations. I hold the GTP (Global Tax Practitioner) designation and am a member of CIBA (Chartered Institute for Business Accountants). Since 2017 our team has rebuilt token-migration lot histories from raw contract calls, including the 2018 REP contract freeze and the 2020 REPv1 to REPv2 swap, for clients whose tax software imported both events as zero-basis mints.

This guide is for anyone who held Augur REP or REPv2 into 2026, whether you migrated yourself, had an exchange do it for you, or missed the window entirely.

Is The Augur REP Migration A Taxable Event?

There is no IRS ruling, revenue procedure, notice or court case addressing an intra-protocol universe migration, so the Augur REP migration sits in genuinely open territory, with a strong argument on the realization side under Cottage Savings and a serious counterargument that no exchange occurred at all.

The case that it is a taxable exchange

Under Treasury Regulation Section 1.1001-1(a), gain or loss is realized on an exchange of property for other property differing materially either in kind or in extent. Cottage Savings Ass'n v. Commissioner, 499 U.S. 554, 566 (1991), set the bar low: properties are materially different so long as they embody legally distinct entitlements, and the Court rejected an economic substance gloss in favor of what it called a much less demanding and less complex test.

Augur's own documentation is the most damaging fact for the non-taxable position. The help center states that REP tokens which migrate to different child universes "ought to be considered entirely separate tokens" and that wallets and exchanges ought to list them separately. Legacy REP can only report on markets in the old universe; REPv2_Yes_1 reports only in the Yes universe. Those are different legal entitlements by the protocol's own account. If that reading is right, you have a disposition to report on Form 8949 and Schedule D, exactly as you would for any crypto-to-crypto swap.

The case that nothing was realized

Treasury Regulation Section 1.1002-1(d) provides that ordinarily, to constitute an exchange, a transaction must be a reciprocal transfer of property. Here the holder burns into a protocol contract and receives an entitlement minted by the same protocol, at a fixed 1:1 ratio, with no counterparty and no consideration passing. Participation was mandatory if the asset was to keep functioning at all. On this view basis and holding period carry over untouched and nothing is reported until you sell.

Why the fork rulings do not resolve it

Revenue Ruling 2019-24, released October 9, 2019, addresses whether a hard fork produces income under Section 61 where the taxpayer does not receive new cryptocurrency, and whether a fork with an airdrop produces income where the taxpayer does. Both are additive fact patterns: you keep the old coin and get a new one. Augur is substitutive, because old REP is consumed. Reasoning from that ruling to an ordinary income result at migration would be aggressive, and our airdrop and fork guide explains why the additive framing does most of the work in that ruling.

The consistency trap

A 2015 crowdsale buyer at roughly 63 cents a REP crystallizes gain under the realization position. Someone who bought near REP's all-time high of $123.24 on January 11, 2018 crystallizes a large loss they may actively want. You cannot take the realization position on your loss lots and the continuation position on your gain lots within the same return. Pick one and document why.

What Does The Augur Migration Contract Actually Do On Chain?

Migration is a burn-and-mint executed by calling migrateOut or migrateOutByPayout, which moves your entire REP balance out of the parent universe and into a child universe of your choosing.

Why the universe model matters for tax

Forking creates a new child universe for each possible outcome of the forking market, including Invalid, and a forking period ends when either 60 days have passed or more than 50% of all genesis REP has migrated to some child universe. Migration is one-way and cannot be reversed, and tokens cannot be sent between sibling universes. The only automatic leg is REP staked by the initial reporter, which follows the initial reported outcome into the winning universe.

The 2026 timeline

The fork was triggered on April 8, 2026 by community member Micah Zoltu over a dispute on whether the Artemis II mission successfully lifted off, which it did. Phase 1 from April to June was the Escalation Game with optional participation. Phase 2 from June to August was the mandatory 1:1 migration window.

The 5% bonus question

In Augur version 1, holders who migrated within 60 days of a fork's start received 5% additional REP in the child universe they chose, funded by minting new tokens, and Augur's own test walkthrough confirms the bonus is not paid to late migrators. Whether any bonus was paid in the 2026 fork is unverified. If it was, newly minted tokens received for nothing look like Section 61 income at receipt, with no price feed and no wallet label separating them from migrated principal.

How Does Augur REP Migration Tax Basis Carry Into REPv2_Yes_1?

If the migration is a realization event, REPv2_Yes_1 takes a fresh basis equal to its fair market value at migration and a new holding period; if it is not, your original REP basis and holding period carry over unchanged.

There is no price to use

REPv2_Yes_1 had no listing on the day most holders migrated. Where it was listed it was under a different name: Kraken credited the surviving-universe token as AUGUR, 1:1 for both REP and REPV2. Practitioners are working from three approaches, none of them blessed by the IRS. The first uses the first reliable post-migration trade. The second uses the fair market value of old REP immediately before the call, on the theory that a mandatory 1:1 swap prices the new token at the old one. The third is substituted basis, in which the question never arises. Any number you put in the amount realized column is a constructed figure, not a feed, and it needs a written methodology behind it.

Holding period and the reset problem

Under the realization position, an eleven-year hold from the 2015 crowdsale resets to a 2026 acquisition date. That only bites if you sell inside twelve months. The trap is cumulative: if you already took the realization position in 2020 on the manual REPv1 to REPv2 swap, you have reset once, and the 2018 mint may have reset you again. Whether the IRS has ever addressed any of the three prior REP migrations is unverified.

The four cohorts and where they stand

The first row is the only one with a clean answer. The rest depend on a realization question no authority has answered and, for the stranded cohort, on an empirical fact about whether any venue still quotes legacy REP above zero.

Can You Claim A Loss On Stranded REP That Missed The Deadline?

Stranded REP is not automatically deductible, because Section 165 requires a closed and completed transaction fixed by an identifiable event, and the cleanest route to a capital loss is still an actual disposition rather than a worthlessness claim.

What the IRS has actually said

CCA 202302011, published January 13, 2023, denied a Section 165 deduction to a taxpayer whose crypto had fallen from $12 a unit to under a penny, on the basis that the taxpayer had not abandoned or otherwise disposed of it. The memo does concede that a loss may be sustained if a cryptocurrency becomes worthless, producing an identifiable event during the tax year for purposes of Section 165(a). But the reason it found no worthlessness was that the token continued to be traded on more than one exchange and still had value. Note also that the memo expressly states it should not be used or cited as precedent.

The identifiable event argument

The permanent closure of the migration window is a better candidate for an identifiable event than a price decline. Augur's post-fork announcement states migration is permanently closed and REP that did not migrate stays in the old universe, fixed to a precise moment. Pre-deadline coverage had already warned that unmigrated REP may become effectively worthless, and post-deadline reporting notes there is no official path back, so anyone offering to migrate your REP now is running a scam. Kraken has permanently delisted REP and REPV2 and stated funding and trading will not reopen. Whether any other venue still quotes legacy REP above zero as of your filing date is a question to answer with live venue data, because on the IRS's own stated reasoning a single live quote defeats worthlessness.

Why the abandonment route produces nothing

The IRS applied a three-part abandonment test: the loss must arise in a trade or business or a transaction entered into for profit, must arise from the sudden termination of usefulness, and the property must be permanently discarded. A holder who still has legacy REP sitting in a wallet is exerting dominion and control, which is precisely why the memo found no abandonment. Even if you clear the test, an individual investor's abandonment loss is a miscellaneous itemized deduction, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, amended Section 67(g) so that miscellaneous itemized deductions will never be allowed. Under prior law they would have returned for tax years beginning after December 31, 2025. They did not. Abandonment characterization for 2026 stranded REP yields a zero deduction.

Why Section 165(g) does not rescue it either

Section 165(g)(1) converts a worthless security that is a capital asset into a deemed sale on the last day of the tax year, which would give you clean capital loss character. But both 2023 memos conclude that cryptocurrency is not a security under Section 165(g)(2), whose definition reaches stock, rights to stock, and corporate or government debt instruments. REP fits none of those. The deemed-sale mechanism is unavailable, so there is no automatic sale or exchange character. Practitioners split here: one camp says only a real sale to an unrelated buyer, at any price, gets you a reliable Section 1001 disposition; the other says loss of irreversible protocol function is materially different from the memo's merely-declined-in-value facts. Our guide to claiming crypto losses walks through the same tension in theft and fraud cases.

Did Kraken, OKX Or Coinbase Change Your Augur REP Migration Tax Outcome?

Two holders with identical economics ended up with completely different paper trails, because some exchanges executed the migration and others refused to touch it.

The exchanges that migrated for you

Kraken ran a migration window from July 27 to July 31, 2026, crediting AUGUR by end of day July 31 with no client action required. OKX and Bitpanda also handled it automatically. If the realization position is right, that is a disposition the customer never authorized transaction by transaction. Whether any of these exchanges treated the conversion as a broker-reportable sale, and whether affected customers receive a Form 1099-DA showing proceeds, is unverified; I found no exchange statement addressing the tax reporting of the conversion. Our Kraken reporting guide covers what that platform does send.

The exchange that did not

Coinbase told holders the deadline was August 1, 2026, that conversion to REPv2_Yes_1 required a compatible self-custodial wallet at the official portal 6.augurfork.eth.limo, and that it would not execute the migration on behalf of customers. Anyone who followed that instruction generated a withdrawal followed by an on-chain call with no third-party reporting at all. That is not a lower-risk position; it is an unreported one, which our guide on Coinbase IRS reporting puts in context.

Regional restrictions that leave you holding an untradeable asset

For Kraken clients in the European Economic Area and Canada, AUGUR was credited 1:1 but only withdrawals were enabled, because AUGUR does not currently have a MiCA whitepaper on file. If you are in one of those jurisdictions and the realization position applies, you have a taxable receipt with no venue price on the platform that gave it to you. That is a textbook phantom income setup.

What Happened To REP That Migrated Into A Losing Universe?

The 1,786.23 REP that went to non-winning universes is in a worse position than stranded REP, because sibling tokens cannot be moved between universes and no exchange listed them.

Structurally these are the cleanest worthlessness candidates in the whole fork, since the memo's still-traded objection has nothing to grab onto if no market exists at all. But no source found addresses losing-universe token pricing, so that is unverified, and the same Section 165(g) problem applies: no security status, no deemed sale, no automatic capital loss character.

How Do You Reconstruct REP Basis Back To The 2015 Crowdsale?

REP basis has three breaks in it and starts with a crowdsale that nobody paid dollars into, which is why no tax tool reconstructs it correctly on import.

The crowdsale itself

The token generation event created 11,000,000 REP, with 8.8 million sold through the crowdsale and 2.3 million to founders and advisors, and the raise collected 19,053 BTC and 1,176,816 ETH. Your basis is the USD fair market value of the coin you tendered on the contribution date, and tendering it was itself a disposition of BTC or ETH with its own gain, which almost nobody reported in 2015. Pricing is not uniform either: the sale ran tiered discounts of 15% from August 17 to 22, 10% from August 22 to 27, 5% from August 27 to September 5, and none from September 5 to October 1. Public sources also disagree on the reference price, variously stating roughly 63 cents, 57.95 cents, 60.3 cents and 60.2 cents. Do not treat any single figure as settled.

Break one: July 2018

New production REP was minted to 56,338 unique accounts and the old contract was frozen indefinitely at 11:01 AM PT on July 9, 2018. That migration was automatic and required no holder action. In a wallet it looks like a mint from a null address with no cost, and every tax tool imports it as a zero-basis acquisition unless you override it manually. Fixing that is the same exercise as any other missing cost basis rebuild.

Break two: July 2020

Augur v2 required users to manually migrate REP at contract 0x1985 to REPv2, with no route back once migrated, and v1 continues to exist independently on Ethereum with no upgradeability or escape hatch. The naming is the trap: the team renamed the old token REPv1 and called the new one REP. Wallets, explorers and tax tools disagree about which contract is REP, so lots get double-counted or vanish.

Break three: 2026

The migration itself, plus a wave of exchange-to-self-custody withdrawals triggered by Coinbase's refusal to migrate. Those withdrawals are transfers, not sales, but under per-wallet accounting they move basis between ledgers.

Where Does The Reporting Actually Break Down?

The reporting breaks in four places: per-wallet basis allocation, Form 1099-DA cost basis, the missing price feed on both legs, and ticker collisions running back a decade.

Per-wallet accounting collided with the deadline scramble

Revenue Procedure 2024-28 let taxpayers allocate unused basis across wallets and accounts held before January 1, 2025, with each wallet or account then treated as an independent ledger. If you allocated in early 2025 assuming REP would sit at Coinbase, then moved it to MetaMask in July 2026 to beat the deadline, that allocation has to carry across the transfer correctly. The reallocation window itself closed at the earlier of your first 2025 disposal or the 2025 return due date, so it cannot be redone now.

Form 1099-DA will not help and may mislead

Brokers were not required to report cost basis on Forms 1099-DA for 2025 transactions and begin reporting basis only for 2026 transactions. A covered digital asset is one acquired on or after January 1, 2026 in a custodial broker account, so REP held since 2015, 2018 or 2020 is noncovered by definition. Expect Box 9, the noncovered checkbox, to be checked and Box 1g to be blank. If a broker reports proceeds on the migration with no basis, IRS matching sees a near-total gain. Our breakdown of Form 1099-DA and missing basis covers the fix. Note also that you might not receive a form at all for sales on non-US exchanges, pending coordination with the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework.

Both price feeds are broken

The received token had no listing at the moment most holders migrated and trades under a different ticker where it is listed. The disposed token is delisted at Kraken with no reopening, so historical price sources for legacy REP will thin out. That matters twice: once for pricing the disposition, and again for proving worthlessness or non-worthlessness later. If your records are gone along with the venue, start with our guide on recovering data from a dead exchange.

What has to come from chain data

The migrateOut call trace, the burn leg and mint leg with block timestamp, the child universe address you selected, the gas paid on the call as its own ETH disposition, and any bonus mint if one occurred. None of that is exported by an exchange, and no tax software has a mapping table that knows REP means three different contracts across three different years while REPv2 means two more.

How Is Augur REP Treated Outside The US?

The UK and Australia both have on-point guidance that is materially better for holders than the US position, Canada has none specific to migrations, and Germany is unresolved in our research.

United Kingdom

HMRC's fork guidance at CRYPTO22300 is not a disposal model. New tokens go into their own Section 104 pool, and allowable costs in the original pool are split between the two on a just and reasonable basis under Section 52(4) TCGA 1992, with no prescribed method but with HMRC able to enquire into one it considers unreasonable. Where an exchange chooses not to recognise the new tokens, the individual may seek to apportion all allowable costs to the original tokens. A competing analysis sits at CRYPTO22110, which addresses sending tokens by smart contract to an address you do not control in return for a different asset, says whether that is a CGT disposal will depend on the facts, and notes that some transfers can only go in one direction. That describes Augur exactly. For dead REP, Section 24(2)(a) TCGA 1992 allows a negligible value claim treating the asset as sold and immediately reacquired for the specified value, usually nil, where HMRC reads negligible value as worth next to nothing. If you have never reported any of this, our HMRC voluntary disclosure guide is the starting point.

Canada

The CRA maintains its crypto-asset guidance hub and states it updates its pages as developments emerge, but I found no CRA guidance addressing token migrations or forks specifically. Canadian tax-lawyer commentary argues the result turns on facts, with passive receipt possibly a windfall and active involvement pointing toward income inclusion, which is awkward for Augur because migration was an affirmative act. Secondary commentary also states that under the adjusted cost base method a forked coin's basis would be zero, but that is commentary, not CRA. One hard fact: Canadian Kraken clients got AUGUR credited 1:1 with withdrawals only. Our CRA audit guide explains how the agency reconstructs these histories.

Australia

The ATO's chain split guidance states that a new crypto asset received from a chain split is neither ordinary income nor a capital gain at the time of the split, and that its cost base is zero, with gain or loss worked out on disposal. More relevant to Augur, ATO guidance material says that where a chain split occurs because of a protocol change which makes the holding rights invalid, a C2 CGT event happens to the original asset and each asset held is new, acquired on the date of the split. A C2 event on old REP would let an Australian holder crystallise the loss. Academic pushback exists: a Tax Institute paper questions whether the zero cost base approach, which treats the new coin as found property, is consistent with settled law. See also our Australian trader rules.

Germany

German treatment is unverified in our research. We did not reach primary German material on this fact pattern, meaning the BMF circular on Kryptowerte and its hard-fork and acquisition-cost allocation paragraphs, together with Section 23 EStG. I am not going to state a German position from memory. If you are filing in Germany, get the circular read against your actual migration transaction before you file.

What Are The Most Common Augur REP Migration Tax Mistakes?

The recurring errors are all reconciliation errors rather than judgment calls, and each one shows up as either overstated gain or a lost deduction.

Treating the 2018 mint as zero-basis income

It was an automatic 1:1 replacement, not a receipt. Left uncorrected, it wipes out your 2015 basis entirely.

Assuming you owe nothing because you never sold

If the realization position applies, the migration was the disposition. Never touching an exchange does not change that.

Claiming an abandonment loss on stranded REP

Even a successful abandonment characterisation gives an individual investor a miscellaneous itemized deduction, which Section 67(g) permanently disallows after OBBBA. The AICPA has noted that the memo does not address what events indicate abandonment of a digital asset in the first place.

Asserting worthlessness without checking venues

The memo's stated reason for denying worthlessness was that the token still traded. Check first, document the check, and keep the screenshots.

Mixing positions across lots

Realization on losses and continuation on gains is not a strategy; it is an audit finding.

Ignoring the gas leg

ETH spent on the migrateOut call is its own disposition with its own basis and holding period.

Forgetting that wash sale rules are not the issue here

Investors often assume a rule blocks the loss. As our wash sale guide explains, the statutory rule still does not reach digital assets, so the obstacle for stranded REP is Section 165, not Section 1091.

Do You Need Help With Augur REP Migration Tax?

If you held REP through any of 2015, 2018, 2020 or 2026, your basis chain has at least one break in it and probably three, and the position you take on the 2026 migration has to be consistent across every lot you own.

CountDeFi Is Your Augur REP Migration Tax Solution

We are not just accountants at CountDeFi, we are data scientists who work exclusively on crypto. Headquartered in Oregon, we have worked with more than 1,000 clients globally since 2017, rebuilding lot histories from contract call traces when exchange exports and tax software cannot see what happened. We read the migration transaction, reconstruct basis back to the crowdsale contribution, document the realization position you are taking and why, and prepare the Form 8949 lines with a methodology that survives questions. If your REP is stranded, we test the worthlessness facts against the actual venue data before anyone claims a loss. Book a free call with one of CountDeFi's crypto tax specialists.