What token pay would really have sold for

Projects pay contributors, contractors and early staff in their own token because it is what they have. The amount is usually set by dividing a dollar figure by the token’s price on some day. That arithmetic assumes the tokens can be turned back into dollars at the same price.

For a widely traded coin they nearly can. For a project’s own token, especially a young one, the market is often small compared with what the project pays out. The people being paid are, between them, among the largest sellers the token has.

The gap matters in two directions. It affects what the work actually paid. And in many places income received in tokens has to be reported at some figure, which makes the question of what the tokens could have been sold for one an adviser may ask.

These are the tokens we measure every day, which lean towards the larger and better known. A project’s own token, a few months old, is more likely to sit at the far end of this range than in the middle of it.

Name the token and the number of tokens in the payment. The statement records what selling that amount in one sale would have returned on the markets we can read, at the minute it was taken, beside what the amount was quoted at.

It can be ordered ahead. If a grant vests or an invoice is settled on a known date, choose that date and the measurement is taken at 23:59 UTC that day. We cannot measure a day that has passed, so a statement for last quarter’s payment is not something we can make.

For regular payments, each one is its own statement with its own date. Two a year are included with the Wallet Exit Pass.

Before they arrive, or while they are locked, there is nothing at an address to read. The Position Statement works from the amount alone, for $12.

Once they are at an address of yours, the Realizable Value Statement reads that address and measures everything in it, for $12. It shows the balance the chain reported, which a stated amount cannot.

How income paid in tokens is treated, and at what figure, depends on where you live and on your circumstances. The statement does not decide that and does not claim that any authority accepts it. It gives your adviser a dated, checkable measurement to work from, and tells them how it was made.

It also does not show that you were paid. It measures an amount you state. Evidence of the payment itself is the contract, the invoice and the transaction.

And it does not know about locks. If the tokens are vesting or cannot yet be moved, the statement still measures a sale of the whole amount at that moment, as if it were free to sell. Whether a lock changes the figure for your purpose is a question for whoever advises you, and nothing on the statement speaks to it.