Is my FTX repayment taxable in the UK?

In most cases yes, as a capital receipt. HMRC does not treat distributions from a collapsed exchange as a tax-free refund. What you owe depends on whether you already claimed a loss on the trapped assets, and on your original cost.

I claimed a loss when FTX collapsed. What now?

That loss consumed your base cost. A distribution arriving now is then chargeable in full, there is nothing left to deduct against it. The loss was not wrong to claim, but the repayment squares the ledger.

I never claimed anything. How is the repayment taxed?

Measure it against what the trapped crypto originally cost you. Receive less than your cost and the difference is a capital loss you can claim, receive more and the excess is a gain.

Celsius paid me partly in bitcoin and stock, not cash. Same rules?

Same framework. A distribution in kind is still a capital sum derived from your claim, valued in pounds at receipt, and the crypto or shares you received start their own tax life at that value.

The repayment used November 2022 prices and crypto has risen since. Can I deduct my lost upside?

No. Tax works on what happened, not what would have. The claim was valued at the petition date, the distribution is measured as received, and the appreciation you missed was never yours for tax purposes.

FTX and Celsius repayments, the UK tax nobody warned you about

The strangest letters of 2024 to 2026 have been the good ones, collapsed exchanges paying money back. FTX distributions started in 2025, Celsius in 2024, and every one of them lands with a question nobody warned recipients about, what does HMRC think this is?

Not a refund. That is the instinct, my own money coming home, and UK practitioners who have examined it are blunt that HMRC does not share it. When your exchange collapsed, your crypto became a claim against the estate, and a claim is itself an asset. Money arriving from it is a capital sum derived from an asset, the territory of section 22 TCGA 1992, and capital sums are chargeable events.

Scenario one, you claimed the loss back in 2022 or 2023. Many people did, through a negligible value claim or a disposal-based loss when the exchange froze. That claim used up your base cost, it is what produced the loss. So a distribution arriving now has nothing left to shelter it, it is chargeable essentially in full. The original claim was still usually the right move, the loss offset gains years ago and money now is better than money never, but the repayment squares the ledger and it belongs on this year’s return.

Scenario two, you never claimed anything. Your base cost is intact, so the distribution is measured against what the trapped assets originally cost you. Most FTX creditors were repaid by reference to November 2022 petition-date values, so plenty of recipients got back less in real terms than they paid in, and where the total received is below original cost the difference is a claimable capital loss. Where it lands above cost, the excess is a gain. Either way the arithmetic needs your original acquisition history, which is exactly the record an imported full history reconstructs.

Scenario three, distributions in kind. Celsius paid partly in bitcoin and ether, and partly in shares of the successor company. The framework does not change, the in-kind assets are the capital sum, valued in pounds on the day they arrived, and they simultaneously start their own tax life at that value, a fresh acquisition in your section 104 pool from day one. Sell them later and the gain runs from the distribution-day value, not from anything in your FTX or Celsius past.

The grievance that is not a deduction. The repayments were computed at petition-date prices, bitcoin at roughly $16,000, and crypto has multiplied since, so recipients feel underpaid even at “100%” recovery rates. That feeling is legitimate and fiscally irrelevant, tax is computed on what happened, and the appreciation you missed never entered your ownership.

What to actually do. Reconstruct the original cost of what was trapped, decide which scenario you are in, and put the numbers on the right year’s return, distributions are taxed in the year received. Multiple distribution rounds mean the exercise repeats per round. And a caution stated plainly, insolvency-related receipts sit at the edge of settled law, the framework above is the accepted analysis, not personal advice, and a large or unusual recovery is a genuinely good reason to put a specialist on it for an hour.

The app’s part is the memory, your original history imported and reconciled gives every scenario its starting number, computed on your machine, with the working shown.