TRON still ships a 2,000-a-second claim, and still renders it on its USDT page. Ten thousand consecutive blocks say 160.07, and nearly three quarters of that is dust, token spam and energy-rental round trips.
160.07 a second measured · 72.03% automatedIt needs power at 5.257p per kWh. The cheapest Octopus Agile half-hour in Eastern England today was 32.50p, and none of the 46 published rates came close.
5.257p breakeven · 0 of 46 Agile half-hours below itCloud revenue was reported up 42 per cent on the quarter. Strip out the $12.3m termination fee from a customer that left and it fell by a third.
$12.3m of $23.8m cloud revenue · $690m of convertsA capital loss is not allowable until you notify HMRC, and the window is four years. Losses from 2022/23 expire on 5 April 2027, 64 days after the filing deadline everyone has in their diary.
£18,500 forfeited · 64 days after 31 JanuaryHeadlines, prices, mining economics and British tax rules — calculated live from public data, in pounds. We take no referrals from exchanges or hardware sellers, so nothing here is written to move you toward a purchase.
Latest from Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Decrypt, The Block, Bitcoin Magazine and The Defiant. Refreshed every fifteen minutes.
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Chain deep dives, mining hardware reviews and listed-company profiles. All figures verified live on the day of writing. UK tax and regulation guides are on the UK Tax tab.
Measured over 10,000 consecutive blocks: 4,803,484 transactions at 160.07 a second against a claimed 2,000, with 27.78 per cent of the count genuine economic activity. Tether is 96.42 per cent of all contract calls and every other contract on the chain is 0.72 per cent of traffic.
Chain deep dive · 10 Nov 2026Breakeven electricity of 5.257p per kWh against an Ofgem cap of 26.32p, a loss of £17.29 a day per machine. Canaan no longer sells the air-cooled model and its 360-day warranty does not transfer on resale, so every unit a UK buyer can get carries a reseller promise instead.
Hardware review · 10 Nov 2026The quarter’s $23.806m of cloud revenue includes a $12.3m termination fee from a departing customer, so the underlying figure is $11.506m against $16.767m the quarter before. Mining runs at 14 per cent of nameplate capacity and $690m of convertible face carries no capped call.
TradFi deep dive · 10 Nov 2026Section 16(2A) makes a loss allowable only if notified, and section 43 gives four years from the end of the tax year. On a £18,500 loss from 2022/23 that is £1,116 of relief now and £12,300 of shelter later, all of it gone after 5 April 2027.
Tax mechanic · 10 Nov 2026Measured over 30,000 consecutive blocks from three independent nodes: 1.6895 transactions a second against an advertised 625M+, and 0.2898 per cent of block capacity used. 97.80 per cent of the traffic is genuine blob payments, which is the fair half of the story.
Chain deep dive · 2 Nov 2026104 TH/s at 3,068 W grosses £2.55 a day and needs 3.46p per kWh to cover its power, against a cheapest Agile half-hour of 34.99p and an Ofgem cap of 26.32p. Single-phase and air-cooled, but five years old, out of warranty since 2023 and with no UK repair centre.
Hardware review · 2 Nov 2026A furnished press release claims more than $24bn of potential contracted revenue; the lessor table filed the same day supports $9.19bn, and the leases are not filed as exhibits. Adjusted EBITDA of $41.1m does not cover $52.4m of interest incurred in the same quarter.
TradFi deep dive · 2 Nov 2026Stablecoins become exempt and liquidity pool deposits stop being disposals, both from 6 April 2027 — worth £2,280 on one worked deposit. The third measure extends the Financial Institution Notice to exchanges, which needs no consent, no tribunal and carries no appeal. None of it changes the return due 31 January 2027.
Rules and reporting · 2 Nov 2026Measured over 55,000 consecutive ledgers from two independent indexers: every interval exactly 5.000 seconds, against a 412-day mean of 5.65. The claim became literally true at ledger 64,458,446 on 16 September 2026.
Chain deep dive · 26 Oct 2026600 TH/s at 5,340 W grosses £15.97 a day on today’s difficulty and needs 12.46p per kWh to cover its power, against an Ofgem cap of 26.32p. It also needs 380–415 V three-phase and a 550 kg cooler outdoors.
Hardware review · 26 Oct 2026The company reports $36.2bn of contracted revenue across 1,410 MW, but only the $11.0bn of CoreWeave leases are filed as SEC exhibits and about 250 MW is live. Adjusted EBITDA of $64.4m rests on $137.0m of add-backs, $59.4m of it stock compensation.
TradFi deep dive · 26 Oct 2026HMRC states the rule in one manual page and omits it from the guidance written for taxpayers. The section 104 pool belongs to the person, not the wallet: compute per wallet and a £5,340 gain becomes a £3,000 loss. CARF reports the transfer out with no cost basis attached.
Situation · 26 Oct 2026Measured over 250,000 rounds from two independent nodes: 9,725,071 transactions in 691,269 seconds, or 14.07 a second, against an advertised 10,000. Block times held between 2.723 and 2.813 seconds throughout.
Chain deep dive · 19 Oct 2026260 TH/s at 3,874 W earns £7.12 a day on today’s difficulty, needing 7.66p per kWh to cover its power. The cheapest Agile half-hour in Eastern England was 28.69p and it draws 16.84 A, more than a UK plug allows.
Hardware review · 19 Oct 2026Revenue halved to $30.4m while cost of revenues reached $117.2m, a gross margin of minus 285 per cent. Debt carried is $1,025.8m against $328.7m of equity, and the company reports no signed HPC lease of any kind.
TradFi deep dive · 19 Oct 2026HMRC requires the claim over the whole section 104 pool, not individual tokens. On a £22,500 pool against £26,000 of gains the claim saves £4,848, and a claim made this tax year can be backdated no further than 6 April 2024.
Tax mechanic · 19 Oct 2026Two independent nodes agreed across 50,000 blocks each, and the best window gave 8.33 transactions a second against a claimed 400,000. Twenty-nine per cent of transactions reverted, and the chain used 0.049 per cent of its block gas limit.
Chain deep dive · 12 Oct 2026Break-even electricity is 6.70p per kWh; the cheapest Agile half-hour anywhere in Britain today was 21.15p. It earns 4,238 satoshis, or £2.69 a day, against £10.69 of power, but it does run on an ordinary 13A socket.
Hardware review · 12 Oct 2026About $11.4bn of contracted lease value, and no lease revenue recognised in any period presented. The year to 30 June 2026 lost $702.6m, including a $638.8m writedown of mining hardware.
TradFi deep dive · 12 Oct 2026No UK exchange reports you automatically today. Schedule 23 bulk notices and Schedule 36 financial institution notices are how HMRC asks, and one needs neither a tribunal nor your consent. The first CARF report lands 31 May 2027.
Rules and reporting · 12 Oct 2026Forty-five thousand blocks over 27.1 hours returned 4.0196 transactions a second against an advertised 10,000-plus. Hedera's own 24-hour counter agrees. About half the traffic is its mirror-node monitor.
Chain deep dive · 5 Oct 2026216 terahashes for 3,564 watts, derived from live network data. Break-even is 7.766p per kilowatt hour; it loses £15.87 a day at the Ofgem cap, and zero of today's 44 published Agile half-hours were below the line.
Hardware review · 5 Oct 2026American Bitcoin's $67.0m is 89.4 per cent of the parent's $74.9m quarter, and a new adjusted EBITDA definition turns a $94.6m loss into a $10.4m profit. Of the cash, $6.787bn is restricted project money.
TradFi deep dive · 5 Oct 2026HMRC distinguishes estimated from provisional figures and the box you tick decides which you claimed. Strike £9,720 of unevidenced cost from a six-unit pool and the tax on a two-unit disposal rises just £777.60 — 3.11 per cent.
Situation · 5 Oct 2026Ten thousand consecutive blocks on two independent nodes returned 136,799 transactions in 6,091 seconds, a factor of 1,113 below the documented figure. Oracle relays were 26.5 per cent of messages and ordinary transfers did not appear at all.
Chain deep dive · 28 Sep 2026190 terahashes for 3,610 watts, derived from live network data rather than a calculator. It loses £17.02 a day at the Ofgem cap, and it needs 380–415 volt three-phase power that a UK home does not have.
Hardware review · 28 Sep 2026Data centre rent is already 71 per cent of revenue while the mining segment lost $78,000 before depreciation. The Anthropic lease is disclosed in a filed exhibit, but only $1.46bn of forward lease revenue reaches the accounts.
TradFi deep dive · 28 Sep 2026Measured against two public nodes over 25 minutes: 164.98 ledger versions a second, 111.9 of them user transactions, 93.7 per cent sent to the Decibel perpetuals exchange. The chain’s own archive shows a halt of five hours in October 2023.
Chain deep dive · 21 Sep 2026270 terahashes for 3,645 watts, derived from live bitcoin network data rather than a calculator. It loses £15.28 a day at the October Ofgem cap, and no Agile half-hour today came within three times of break-even.
Hardware review · 21 Sep 2026All $24.8m of second-quarter revenue was bitcoin mining, at $36,746 a coin in cash and $92,553 fully loaded. Three leases are signed with Fluidstack and AWS; Google’s warrants tip into a top-up below $17.99 a share.
TradFi deep dive · 21 Sep 2026Measured directly against public nodes, not read off a dashboard: 2.2199 transactions per second over 24 hours, 93.8 per cent of them validator oracle votes. DeFi value locked is down 94.3 per cent in a year.
Chain deep dive · 14 Sep 2026Eight terahashes for 3,200 watts, derived from live Kaspa network data rather than a calculator. It loses £18.90 a day at the Ofgem cap, and Kaspa cuts emission another 5.6 per cent on 5 October.
Hardware review · 14 Sep 2026Fully-loaded cost is 134 per cent of revenue, though the mining is profitable on energy alone. Three quarters of the $996.9m nine-month loss is bitcoin marks, not operations.
TradFi deep dive · 14 Sep 2026Repurchase within 30 days of a disposal and the sale is matched to that purchase, not to your section 104 pool. Worked both ways: a £28,000 loss deferred, and a gain raised by £3,000.
Tax mechanic · 14 Sep 2026Never registering for Self Assessment turns a four-year problem into a twenty-year one. On £10,000 of 2022/23 tax, interest is £2,036.99 and waiting for a nudge letter costs another £1,000.
Situation · 14 Sep 2026HMRC lists seven items at CRYPTO10400 and asks you to keep them 22 months. It can assess up to 20 years later. Lose a 2017 receipt and one disposal costs £4,160 more.
Rules and reporting · 14 Sep 2026Almost never at domestic prices. Five coins against live tariff data, and the three narrow cases where it still works.
Forty-eight prices a day, occasionally negative. Why a single average rate hides the answer entirely.
You pay it whether the rig runs or not, so it has no business in the switch-on decision.
Disposals, the £3,000 allowance, 18% and 24% rates, why mining is taxed twice, and what CARF changed in January.
Registration is anti-money-laundering, not consumer protection — and your holdings sit outside the FSCS entirely.
Prices your rig against live half-hourly electricity rates by region. GPUs and ASICs, ten proof-of-work chains.
Most-searched coins on CoinGecko in the last 24 hours. Attention, not endorsement — trending often means volatile.
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Your rig doesn't cost one electricity price. On a wholesale-linked tariff it costs forty-eight a day. This prices it against tonight's actual rates.
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Pulling live tariff and network data.
Method, ASIC caveats and the embeddable version are on the full calculator page.
Live network hashrate for the ten largest proof-of-work chains, and what a reference rig earns on each.
| Coin | Network hashrate | Price |
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| Coin | Revenue / day | Break-even power |
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Revenue is gross of electricity. Break-even is the unit price at which the rig covers its own power — compare it against your tariff, or use the full calculator for half-hourly pricing. Chains with no consumer-hardware row are ASIC-only.
2026/27 tax year. General information, not tax advice — your circumstances decide the treatment.
Section 16(2A) makes a loss allowable only if notified, and section 43 gives four years from the end of the tax year. On a £18,500 loss from 2022/23 that is £1,116 of relief now and £12,300 of shelter later, all of it gone after 5 April 2027.
Tax mechanic · 10 Nov 2026Stablecoins become exempt and liquidity pool deposits stop being disposals, both from 6 April 2027 — worth £2,280 on one worked deposit. The third measure extends the Financial Institution Notice to exchanges, which needs no consent, no tribunal and carries no appeal. None of it changes the return due 31 January 2027.
Rules and reporting · 2 Nov 2026HMRC states the rule in one manual page and omits it from the guidance written for taxpayers. The section 104 pool belongs to the person, not the wallet: compute per wallet and a £5,340 gain becomes a £3,000 loss. CARF reports the transfer out with no cost basis attached.
Situation · 26 Oct 2026HMRC requires the claim over the whole section 104 pool, not individual tokens. On a £22,500 pool against £26,000 of gains the claim saves £4,848, and a claim made this tax year can be backdated no further than 6 April 2024.
Tax mechanic · 19 Oct 2026No UK exchange reports you automatically today — Schedule 23 bulk notices and Schedule 36 financial institution notices are how HMRC asks, and one of them needs neither a tribunal nor your consent. The first report under the reporting framework lands on 31 May 2027, for a year that began on 1 January 2026.
Rules and reporting · 12 Oct 2026HMRC distinguishes estimated from provisional figures and the box you tick decides which you claimed. Strike £9,720 of unevidenced cost from a six-unit pool and the tax on a two-unit disposal rises just £777.60 — 3.11 per cent.
Situation · 5 Oct 2026Sell 10,000 units for £50,000 and buy back on day ten and the allowable loss is £2,000, not £30,000 — £28,000 deferred into the pool. It catches gains too, raising one worked example by £3,000.
Tax mechanic · 14 Sep 2026Never registering for Self Assessment makes it a failure to notify, and the window is 20 years whatever your state of mind. On £10,000 of 2022/23 tax, interest alone is £2,036.99.
Situation · 14 Sep 2026HMRC lists seven items at CRYPTO10400 and asks you to keep them for 22 months, against an assessing window of up to 20 years. One lost 2017 receipt is £4,160 of extra tax on a single disposal.
Rules and reporting · 14 Sep 2026A pool of six units at £15,200 averages £2,533.33 each. Selling 2.5 units for £9,500 takes out £6,333.33 of cost and leaves a £3,166.67 gain — £166.67 of it taxable after the £3,000 allowance.
Tax mechanic · 31 Aug 2026HMRC sent 64,982 crypto nudge letters in 2024/25 and about 81,000 in 2025/26. On £4,000 of tax filed and paid a year late, penalties and interest add £3,310 to £3,710.
Situation · 31 Aug 2026Twelve round trips on £2,000 produce £27,361 of gross disposals reported to HMRC against a real gain of £536 — 51 times over, and entirely inside the £3,000 allowance.
Rules and reporting · 31 Aug 2026| Annual exempt amount | £3,000 |
| Basic rate taxpayers | 18% |
| Higher & additional rate | 24% |
| Report even if under the allowance | if proceeds exceed £50,000 |
More than most people expect. Selling for pounds is obvious, but swapping one coin for another is a disposal of the first, spending crypto on goods is a disposal, and so is gifting to anyone other than a spouse or civil partner. Moving coins between your own wallets is not.
The allowance fell from £12,300 in 2022/23 to £6,000, then to £3,000 — so gains that were comfortably covered three years ago now generate a bill.
Coins you mine are income at the moment you receive them, valued in pounds on that day, taxed at 20%, 40% or 45% depending on your band. That value then becomes your cost basis. When you later sell, any further gain is a separate capital gains event.
Whether HMRC treats mining as trading income or miscellaneous income depends on scale, organisation and commerciality — a rig in the spare room is usually the latter. It matters, because trading treatment allows expenses like electricity to be deducted more generously.
HMRC applies three rules in strict order. Same-day: disposals match acquisitions on the same day first. Then the 30-day “bed and breakfast” rule, matching against anything bought in the following 30 days. Anything left falls into the Section 104 pool, an average cost across all remaining holdings of that asset.
This is what makes manual crypto accounting painful, and why most people with more than a handful of transactions end up using dedicated software.
The Cryptoasset Reporting Framework took effect on 1 January 2026. UK platforms must collect and report user identity and transaction data to HMRC automatically, with international exchange of the same data between jurisdictions. Previously HMRC had to request information case by case.
You are also now required to give accurate personal details to platforms you use. Getting that wrong can attract a penalty of up to £300, and more from non-UK providers.
Gains go on the SA108 capital gains pages alongside your SA100; crypto income goes in the income section of the return. Online filing deadline is 31 January following the end of the tax year; paper returns are due 31 October.
Losses are worth recording even in years you owe nothing — once reported they carry forward indefinitely against future gains.
2026/27 rates. Everything stays in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere.
Capital gains do not have their own separate rate. They stack on top of your taxable income, and only the room left inside the basic rate band is charged at 18% — everything above it at 24%. A £20,000 gain costs £3,060 on a £30,000 salary and £4,080 on a £70,000 one. Same gain, a third more tax.
This is also why the £100,000 income mark hurts so much. The personal allowance tapers away above it, so mining income landing in that zone can be taxed at an effective 60%.
It will not work out your gain for you. That needs HMRC's matching rules applied in order — same-day first, then the 30-day rule, then Section 104 pooling — across every disposal you made. With more than a handful of transactions that is a job for dedicated software or an accountant, and the number it produces is what you type into the box above.
It also assumes English, Welsh or Northern Irish income tax bands. Scotland sets its own rates on earned income, which changes the income tax figure but not the CGT rates — those are UK-wide.
Sources: HMRC Cryptoassets Manual and current published rates. Figures change at each Budget. This is general information and not a substitute for an accountant.
A UK easy-access savings account currently pays somewhere around the base rate, with the first £85,000 protected by the FSCS if the bank fails. That is your baseline. Any DeFi strategy has to beat it by enough to compensate for smart contract risk, stablecoin depeg risk, and the complete absence of any compensation scheme.
Once you hold the two numbers side by side, most of DeFi stops looking like an opportunity and starts looking like a question: is the extra worth what you are underwriting?
| Strategy | Median APY | TVL | From emissions | Volatility |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Sorting fifteen thousand pools by APY surfaces whatever is inflating its own token hardest. That number is not income — it is a protocol printing units and calling the dilution a yield. When emissions stop, so does the return, and the token you were paid in has usually fallen.
From emissions is the share of the headline rate coming from token rewards rather than genuine borrower interest or trading fees. High figures mean the yield is being subsidised and will not last. Volatility is how much the advertised rate has actually moved — a high reading means the number you saw is not the number you will get.
Ranked by size, not by yield — where the serious money actually sits. Each row splits the real return from the subsidised part.
| Pool | TVL | APY | Composition |
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You lend USDC or USDT to borrowers through a lending market and take the interest. No exposure to a volatile asset — the risk is the protocol code and the stablecoin issuer. Both have failed before, and when a stablecoin depegs it usually does so faster than anyone can exit.
Stake ETH or SOL through a provider and receive a token representing the position, so the capital stays usable while it earns validator rewards. The risks are slashing if the validator misbehaves, and the receipt token trading below the underlying asset when everyone tries to leave at once.
Pledge an already-staked position again to secure additional services, earning a second layer of rewards on the same capital. The appeal is obvious; the problem is that slashing compounds. One failure can hit the underlying stake and the restaked layer simultaneously.
Deposit two assets so others can trade against them, and take a share of the fees. The hidden cost is impermanent loss: if the two assets move apart in price, you can end up worse off than if you had simply held them. Fee income has to exceed that divergence, and often does not.
Some protocols pay materially more if you lock tokens for a fixed term — often up to four years. You are being paid for illiquidity, and the rate should be read as compensation for being unable to leave during a drawdown. Judge these by asking what happens if you need the money in month six.
HMRC treats DeFi returns as either income or capital depending on how the arrangement is structured, and the distinction turns on details most users never examine — whether beneficial ownership of the deposited token actually passes to the protocol. Lending and staking rewards are typically income at the point of receipt, valued in pounds on that day. Moving tokens into a pool can itself be a disposal for capital gains purposes, meaning you can owe tax before earning anything. See the UK tax page.
Yield data from DefiLlama, filtered to pools above $10m TVL with outliers excluded. Nothing here is a recommendation or an offer, and we take no referrals from any protocol listed. DeFi is unregulated in the UK: there is no FSCS protection, no ombudsman, and no recourse if a protocol fails or is exploited. You can lose everything.
Twenty chains, compared on the things that actually differ. Block time and consensus are protocol constants; everything else is live.
| Chain | Block | TVL | FDV | TVL/FDV | Fees 24h | 24h |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Block time is how long until your transaction is in a block — not the same as finality, which is longer on most chains. TVL is capital sitting in contracts on the chain. FDV is what the market values the whole token supply at, including tokens not yet circulating.
TVL/FDV is the useful one. It asks how much real capital the chain has attracted relative to its valuation. A low number means the market is paying for expectation rather than deposits. It is a ratio, not a verdict — Bitcoin scores near zero because almost nobody locks BTC in contracts, which says nothing bad about Bitcoin.
Fees is the honest activity measure. A chain can rent TVL with incentive programmes, but nobody pays transaction fees for fun. When TVL is high and fees are near zero, the capital is visiting rather than living there.
TVL and fees from DefiLlama, valuations from CoinGecko, both in USD so the ratio compares like with like. Fees load in a moment after the table — twenty separate requests. Rollup TVL is counted on the rollup, not on Ethereum.
The forty most recent incidents. Amounts are disclosed losses — many are never confirmed, so the real totals are higher.
| Date | Target | Loss | Method |
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Not doom-scrolling. The patterns repeat, and reading a few months of them teaches you more about where money is actually lost than any security guide. Bridges and cross-chain messaging appear far out of proportion to the capital they hold. Access control failures — a leaked key, a permission never revoked — account for a large share of the biggest losses, and they are failures of operational process rather than clever cryptography.
If you hold crypto: the practical lesson is that protocol risk is real and uninsured. There is no FSCS here, no chargeback, and recovery is rare enough that the "returned funds" column is usually empty.
Data from DefiLlama's hacks database. Classification and technique are theirs.
Listed companies holding crypto on the balance sheet, ranked by size. This is where traditional finance and crypto actually meet — and where the leverage sits.
| Company | Holdings | Value | Price | Last session |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A treasury company is a leveraged bet on the asset plus a capital structure you have to underwrite separately. Most funded their buying with debt or preferred stock carrying fixed obligations — those payments do not shrink when the price falls. That is why the shares routinely move two or three times as far as the coin on the same day, in both directions.
The mechanism that drove the whole trade was the premium to net asset value. While a company trades above the value of its holdings it can issue shares, buy more, and increase holdings per share without the price moving. Below that premium the flywheel runs backwards. Strategy crossed that line in June, and it is the single most important number to watch across the sector.
Nothing here is a recommendation. Under UK rules we take no referrals and name no brokers — these are listed equities you can research through any regulated platform.
Holdings data from CoinGecko's public treasury dataset, updated as companies file. Share prices, where shown, from the API Worker.
Accounts worth following, and the commentary those circles are reacting to.
Long-form analysis from The Block, Decrypt, The Defiant and Bankless — the writing crypto Twitter argues about.
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Hand-checked entries only. Edit airdrops.json to add them.
There is no free airdrop API worth trusting — the aggregators are largely unvetted, and fake claim pages are the most common way UK retail holders lose funds. Entries appear here only once checked by hand.
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