Do gas and exchange fees reduce the fair value of ETH?

No. IFRS 13 paragraph 25 states that the price shall not be adjusted for transaction costs, and ASC 820-10-35-9B says the same, adding that transaction costs are not a characteristic of an asset or a liability. Gas and exchange commissions therefore never reduce a fair-value measurement, although other standards may include them in cost or in the result of a disposal.

What happens when the chosen price source returns nothing?

The policy has to answer that before the outcome is known. Coinbase warns that historical rate data may be incomplete and that no data is published for intervals where there are no ticks, so a defensible ladder runs from the principal-market venue's candle for the event minute, to the nearest prior candle on the same venue within a stated maximum look-back, to the same minute from a second venue the entity can access, and, for a period-end measurement, to an independently administered benchmark. Record which rung produced the number, because no authority endorses any particular rung.

Ethereum Valuation for Accounting: Which ETH Price to Use

Q: Which ETH price should an entity actually use?

The one its own principal market supports, observed through a documented convention. IFRS 13 and ASC 820 both begin with the market with the greatest volume and level of activity for the asset, and both require the entity to have access to that market at the measurement date. So the entity documents its principal-market conclusion, its unit of account and its price hierarchy, and applies them consistently, rather than surveying venues after the period end and picking the most flattering quote.

Q: Does Ethereum have a closing price?

No. Equities have a close and ETH does not, so a convention has to be chosen and written down. AICPA guidance says only that any convention used should be reasonable and consistently applied, and suggests the measurement should generally be based on the last trading price prior to midnight of the appropriate time zone of the reporting entity. That sentence is expressly limited to digital assets subject to fair value measurement, so it settles the timing convention for a fair-value measurement and nothing else.

Q: Is there an IRS safe harbour for valuing a 2025 ETH receipt?

None was located. The explorer sentence usually quoted for this purpose comes from the pre-2025 FAQ set, which by its own terms generally applies to transactions completed before 1 January 2025. The word explorer does not appear anywhere in the set that covers 2025 onward, questions 47 to 111, added on 15 December 2025, and no successor to that safe harbour was found in it, which makes a written and consistently applied policy more important, not less.

Ethereum trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That makes an ETH price easy to find and surprisingly easy to define badly. It also means that Ethereum valuation for accounting has to begin by discarding the obvious question, the one everybody reaches for first, because the valuation question is not:

"What was ETH worth?"

It is:

Which market does the entity use, which observable price represents the measurement, at what timestamp and timezone, and what controlled fallback applies if that source fails?

Ethereum valuation for accounting is a policy question before it is a data question, and a strong policy fixes those choices before the period-end result is known. It also separates the recognition point from the price used at that point. For native staking, Ethereum Staking Rewards determines what reward event is recognized and how high-frequency rewards are aggregated. This article determines the price once a measurement point exists.

A defensible valuation policy in one table

Policy element	Decision that must be documented
Functional currency	Currency in which the books measure the event
Principal market	Market with the greatest volume and activity accessible to the entity, under the applicable fair-value framework
Venue/feed	Source used to observe that market
Observation	Last trade, one-minute close, benchmark fixing, or another justified convention
Timezone	UTC, local reporting timezone, or another documented convention
Event timestamp	Chain timestamp, execution timestamp, contract settlement time, or another factually relevant time
Reward aggregation	Owned by the staking-reward policy, not the price feed
Missing price	Predefined fallback hierarchy
Abnormal market	Criteria for rejecting or escalating an observation
Evidence retained	Raw response, request parameters, timestamp, source version, approvals

In Ethereum valuation for accounting the exact convention is less important than using one that is appropriate to the framework, tied to the entity's facts, and applied consistently.

Ethereum valuation for accounting: which ETH price should an accountant use?

ETH trades continuously on many venues and is normally straightforward to price. The difficulty is not finding a number. It is establishing which market the entity can access, what the number represents, and whether the same policy was applied at every measurement moment, including the moments (like a native staking reward accruing at 03:14 on a Sunday) that nobody chose.

Market first, feed second

IFRS 13 and ASC 820 both begin with the principal market (defined identically in each as "The market with the greatest volume and level of activity for the asset or liability") or, failing that, the most advantageous market. IFRS 13 presumes that "the market in which the entity would normally enter into a transaction to sell the asset … is presumed to be the principal market", and both frameworks require the entity to have access to that market at the measurement date. An entity does not survey venues after the period end and pick the most flattering quote. It documents its principal-market conclusion, its unit of account and its price hierarchy, and applies them consistently.

Two points recur in practice and both are sourced:

Transaction costs are not deducted from fair value. IFRS 13 paragraph 25 states the price "shall not be adjusted for transaction costs", and ASC 820-10-35-9B says the same, adding that "Transaction costs are not a characteristic of an asset or a liability". Gas and exchange commissions therefore never reduce a fair-value measurement, although other standards may include them in cost or in the result of a disposal.
The measurement is price × quantity. AICPA non-authoritative guidance is explicit that, "except in certain circumstances identified in FASB ASC 820-10-35-41C, there should be no adjustment to Level 1 inputs", that the measurement is "price times quantity (commonly referred to as 'P × Q')", and that "It is not appropriate to use a volume-weighted average price (VWAP) or other types of aggregated pricing when measuring the fair value of digital assets traded in active markets".

A 24-hour market has no closing bell

Equities have a close. ETH does not. Some convention has to be chosen and written down. AICPA guidance says only that "Any convention used should be reasonable and consistently applied", suggesting the measurement "should generally be based on the last trading price prior to midnight of the appropriate time zone of the reporting entity". That qualifier matters, since the convention used below is UTC for a US-dollar entity. Real filers do exactly this and disclose it: one SEC registrant states that it prices ETH using "quoted (unadjusted) prices on the Coinbase exchange as of midnight UTC on the measurement date". Both of those AICPA sentences are newer than the framing suggests: neither appears in the January 2022 edition of the practice aid, whose Response 20 offered three different options instead, and the "What's new" log dates the amendment to Q&A 20 to June 2024. The VWAP sentence quoted earlier is a third sentence with its own history: it is present by February 2025. Note the scope of the midnight sentence too. It is expressly limited to "digital assets subject to fair value measurement", so it settles the timing convention for a fair-value measurement and nothing else.

The convention has to cover more than the reporting date. It has to answer, in advance: which venue, which timezone, whether a transaction is measured at the block timestamp or at the entity's own event time, which minute, open or close, and what happens when the preferred source returns nothing.

A worked one-minute pricing convention

The worked example uses the Coinbase Exchange ETH-USD one-minute candle close for the UTC minute in which the event occurred, and for the year end the close of the minute beginning 31 December 2025 at 23:59:00 UTC. Consensus-layer rewards are measured monthly under a stated policy, at the close of the minute beginning at 23:59:00 UTC on the last day of each month. That bucket spans [23:59:00, 24:00:00), so its close is the last matched trade before midnight UTC - the AICPA formulation above, applied literally. The trap is the other candle: the one stamped 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z, which belongs to the following year.

UTC minute begins	Use in the example	ETH-USD close
18 Mar 2025 13:58	Rate the client's processor used to compute the ETH amount	$1,879.36
18 Mar 2025 14:07	ETH received in settlement	$1,882.57
27 May 2025 10:41	Purchase and exchange withdrawal fee	$2,636.07
4 Jun 2025 09:18	Gas on the deposit transaction	$2,636.05
9 Jul 2025 13:26	Gas on the failed transaction	$2,660.68
4 Sep 2025 15:52	Execution-layer block reward	$4,311.58
21 Oct 2025 11:33	Sale, and gas on the transfer	$3,884.45
19 Nov 2025 16:44	Gas and fee on the withdrawal request	$2,951.41
22 Nov 2025 23:59	The illustrative 0.30 ETH withdrawal in the complete Ethereum journal-entry example, not a booked amount	$2,768.50
30 Jun 2025 23:59	June reward accrual	$2,486.15
31 Jul 2025 23:59	July reward accrual	$3,698.07
31 Aug 2025 23:59	August reward accrual	$4,391.91
30 Sep 2025 23:59	September reward accrual	$4,145.99
31 Oct 2025 23:59	October reward accrual	$3,845.79
30 Nov 2025 23:59	November reward accrual	$2,991.90
31 Dec 2025 23:59	December accrual and closing measurement	$2,966.84

Each observation was retrieved directly from the Coinbase Exchange REST API on 24 August 2026. The source notes at the end of this article give the endpoint and the exact query intervals, and every candle timestamp was converted back to UTC and matched to the intended minute. That matching step is method, not decoration: Coinbase treats end as inclusive, so each of these intervals returns two candles, sorted newest first. The intended minute is the second candle in the response, not the first. Match on the timestamp; do not take the first row. (The 27 May and 4 June closes really do sit two cents apart eight days apart. Each was verified on its own - different timestamps, different volumes, different surrounding candles - so the near-repetition is a coincidence, not a copied figure.)

Three cautions about that table, all of which belong in a real valuation policy.

The field order is a trap. The documented candle schema is "[timestamp, price_low, price_high, price_open, price_close]". Low and high come before open and close, the reverse of conventional OHLC notation. Reading element [1] as the open returns the low. The order was checked against the data rather than taken on trust: across the 121 consecutive one-minute candles ending 31 December 2025 23:59 UTC, element [4] is the close in all 121, and a continuity test on that same window - each candle's close against the next candle's open - gives a mean absolute difference of a few cents under the documented order and a far larger one if element [1] is read as the open in the conventional OHLC way. Run it on whichever window you like: what the test settles is the size of the gap between the two readings, not the cent figure. The live API returns a sixth element, volume. The page's one-line schema summary lists only five fields, but the Response Items table below it does document the sixth, "volume of trading activity during the bucket interval". Read the table, not the summary.

A quiet minute returns nothing. Coinbase's own documentation warns that "Historical rate data may be incomplete. No data is published for intervals where there are no ticks." A policy pinned to "the one-minute close" is incomplete until it says what happens when that minute is empty. The fallback must be written before the outcome is known. For ETH-USD the caution is close to theoretical: a sample of roughly 700 quiet ETH-USD minutes - Christmas morning and two Sunday early-morning windows, the 03:14-on-a-Sunday case among them - contained no missing minutes at all. That is the reason to write the fallback rather than a reason to skip it. A policy drafted and tested only against the deepest pair on the venue is untested the first time it meets a thinner one.

A candle close is an executed trade, not an appraisal. It is the last matched trade in that interval on one venue. It is a reasonable execution proxy where the entity's principal-market conclusion supports it. It is not a guarantee that the entity could have executed its whole position at that price, and it is not a benchmark.

An independently administered alternative

Where an entity wants a source with a published methodology and a formal restatement regime, the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate (ticker ETHUSD_RR) is administered by CF Benchmarks Ltd and expresses "U.S. Dollar price of one Ether as of 4:00 p.m. London time". It is computed from a 60-minute observation window running from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. London time, divided into twelve five-minute partitions. Each partition produces a volume-weighted median and the rate is "given by the equally-weighted average of the volume-weighted medians of all partitions", drawn from a defined list of constituent exchanges. The administrator is "authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority" and the benchmark is described as "a Registered Benchmark under UK BMR". A New York variant, ETHUSD_NY, fixes at 4:00 p.m. New York time.

Two warnings. First, no accounting or tax authority endorses any named price source, this one included. Regulation of the administrator is not approval by a standard-setter, and the researched sources contain no such endorsement. Second, the constituent panel changes: two venues were added during 2025 and one was suspended on 27 July 2026, so an entity comparing 2025 and 2026 figures is comparing measurements taken against different panels.

Who produces the number, and what if it fails?

Coinbase produces candles from trades on its own venue. CF Benchmarks produces a benchmark from several venues under a versioned methodology with a restatement process. Neither is obliged to keep publishing, and neither takes responsibility for an entity's accounting.

That is why the ladder has to be written before it is needed. For the convention above, a defensible order runs: the principal-market venue's candle for the event minute; failing that, the nearest prior candle on the same venue, within a stated maximum look-back; failing that, the same minute from a second venue the entity has identified and can access; and, for a period-end measurement, an independently administered benchmark such as ETHUSD_RR. Record which rung produced the number alongside the observation, because a figure taken from the third rung is not the same evidence as one taken from the first. No authority endorses any particular rung. What every authority does require is a documented method, applied consistently.

Retain the raw API response and the exact request URL, not a spreadsheet cell. Coinbase's own incompleteness warning means a later re-query can return something different, with no restatement log to explain it. Where a tax authority has spoken, it asks for the same discipline in plainer language: CRA accepts "an exchange rate taken from the same exchange broker you are using or an average of high/low/open/close values across a number of high-volume exchange brokers", provided that "whichever method you choose, use it consistently from year to year and keep a record of how it was used to calculate a value". HMRC requires that "Reasonable care should be taken to arrive at an appropriate valuation for the transaction using a consistent methodology" and that "Details of the valuation methodology should be kept." Both sentences are from CRYPTO23000, "Cryptoassets for individuals: valuation", where they govern a narrower question than the use made of them here: establishing an exchange rate where a transaction has no direct pound sterling value. It is a page in the individuals series, and a company reader needs the business one. The business series says the same thing in its own words, and a company should cite that instead: CRYPTO40100, "Cryptoassets for businesses: conversion to Sterling and accountancy", opens "The calculation of an individual's or a company's taxable profits will be undertaken in pounds sterling", requires that "Reasonable care needs to be taken to arrive at an appropriate valuation for the transaction using a consistent methodology", and puts the record-keeping duty in mandatory terms: "Individuals and companies must also keep records of the valuation methodology." The same page notes that "A company may make an election to designate a non-sterling currency as its functional currency", which is the UK analogue of the Canadian election in Ethereum Tax in Canada.

The IRS position needs a date attached to it. The two sentences usually quoted for this purpose are from the pre-2025 FAQ set, which by its own terms "generally appl[ies] to transactions involving digital assets completed before Jan. 1, 2025". For receipts not facilitated by an exchange, that set says the IRS "will accept as evidence of fair market value the value as determined by a cryptocurrency or blockchain explorer that analyzes worldwide indices of a cryptocurrency and calculates the value of the cryptocurrency at an exact date and time", and puts the extra burden the other way round: "[i]f you do not use an explorer value, you must establish that the value you used is an accurate representation of the cryptocurrency's fair market value". Every event in the worked example falls in 2025, which that set excludes. The word "explorer" does not appear anywhere in the set that covers 2025 onward, questions 47 to 111, added on 15 December 2025, and no successor to the explorer safe harbour was located in it. For a 2025 receipt there is no published IRS valuation safe harbour - which makes a written and consistently applied policy more important, not less. Ethereum Tax in the United States states the rule this article follows: the two sets are not interchangeable, and each must be cited for its own period.

Note the asymmetry, because it explains why two defensible numbers can differ for the same instant: the accounting frameworks point at the entity's own principal market, while the tax authorities accept a reasonable and consistent method. Those are different tests, and neither is a substitute for the other.

Valuing staking rewards without confusing recognition and pricing

A monthly reward-aggregation policy does not mean the protocol pays monthly. It means the accounting system has chosen a documented aggregation unit for recognition.

Once the quantity for the aggregation period is established, valuation still needs a reproducible price rule. For example:

quantify the month's recognized consensus reward from retained validator data;
identify the measurement timestamp required by the accounting policy;
apply the documented principal-market price source;
retain the raw market-data evidence;
create the book lot at that measured amount.

Execution-layer validator rewards can have a different recognition time because they can arrive as priority-fee credits or builder payments. The price policy should handle both streams without pretending they arise in the same record.

Audit evidence checklist

For each recurring price source, retain:

the principal-market memo and evidence that the entity can access that market;
the exact feed or benchmark definition;
timezone and timestamp convention;
raw source output for material measurements;
any transformation code or spreadsheet logic;
fallback and exception policy;
evidence of any source outage or abnormal quote;
periodic review that the venue or benchmark remains appropriate.

A screenshot is weaker than raw data with the exact query or methodology version. A copied USD figure with no timestamp is weaker still.

Ethereum valuation policy

Recognition tells you what must be measured. Valuation tells you which price to use.

Measurement pointWhat must be valued?
Principal marketWhich market governs?
Timestamp and timezoneExact policy time.
Reliable priceObservable market data.
Documented fallbackWhat if the source fails?

There is no universal Ethereum closing price. Consistency and evidence matter more than a familiar ticker.

For the reporting-framework consequences of that measurement, see Ethereum Accounting Under US GAAP.

How Tokenbooks helps with valuing ETH

Fair market value resolves through a fixed, ordered chain and the first match wins: a redemption rate for vault and share tokens, then the underlying of a token that only represents another, then a native fiat rate, then a stablecoin peg where the portfolio treats stablecoins as base currency, then a market day close, then a pool-derived day close for long-tail tokens, and last the value implied by the other legs of the same transaction. That last step is deliberately asymmetric: a value is inferred for an acquisition, never for a disposal. When nothing returns a price the engine does not invent one, it opens the lot at zero and flags the transaction. Every quote records its source and its valuation instant, and a fair value can be pinned per transfer for a ticket that had no public market.

See the Ethereum integration page.

Sources and authority map

IAS 38, IAS 36, IAS 2, IFRS 13, IFRS 15, IAS 8, IAS 21, IAS 7, IAS 12, IAS 1, IAS 10, IFRIC 23. IAS 38
FASB ASU 2023-08 (ASC 350-60 and ASC 230-10-45-27A). storage.fasb.org
FASB ASU 2011-04 (ASC 820), ASU 2016-12 (ASC 606 non-cash consideration), ASU 2009-01 (ASC 105). 820
AICPA, "Accounting for and auditing of digital assets" practice aid. aicpa-cima.com
Sharplink, Inc., Form 10-K for FY2025. sec.gov
BTCS Inc., Form 10-K for FY2025. sec.gov
Coinbase Exchange candles endpoint documentation. docs.cdp.coinbase.com
Coinbase Exchange ETH-USD one-minute candles, the exact observations used in the worked pricing example above. 18 Mar 13:58
CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate methodology and index page. methodology
CRA, "Keeping books and records of crypto-assets for tax filing", and "Determining the value of crypto-assets for tax filing". books and records
IRS frequently asked questions on digital-asset transactions (questions 47 to 111, added 15 December 2025), and the pre-2025 set. 2025 onward
HMRC Cryptoassets Manual, valuation and location. CRYPTO23000

Research status. Protocol mechanics and published guidance were refreshed through 31 August 2026. Where a source is interpretive rather than authoritative, the text says so. This article is educational research, not accounting, tax, legal, valuation, or investment advice.