LP Token Values: How to Find the $$ Value

If you’re involved in Yield Farming, you undoubtedly have asked yourself how to find the value of an LP token. And, if you’re working on your taxes, you definitely need that information, as the US Government considers any transfer of coins or tokens in and out of your wallet as a taxable event. Thus, you need to know the value of an LP token.

This article uses BscScan.com to find LP tokens on the Binance Smart Chain. If you’re looking for LPs on the Ethereum network, substitute Etherscan.io

If you are in need of some background on LP tokens and yield farming in general, please read this article: YIELD FARMING 101

From here on out, I’m assuming you know about LP tokens, and how they are created and used for yield farming.

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Here’s what you will need:

• Your wallet address. You can find this easily in MetaMask. If you’ve made it this far, you have sent yourself some crypto to your MetaMask address.
• Go to BscScan.com, and enter your wallet address in the search field.

If you click on the red circle above, you will get a drop-menu that looks like this:

• Scroll down until you see the LPs section. Most LPs on BSC are “Pancake LPs”. Some are “APE-LPS”, and some obscure ones are different LPs. If you’re looking for a specific LP token, you probably know what you’re looking for. However, they are all called “Pancake LPs” in BscScan. If you know the AMOUNT of the LP Token that you’re searching, look for that number here. For example, if you have DOGS/BUSD, and you know you have 1.4 LP tokens of that, you can look in your list and find 1.4 Cake-LP. Once you’ve found the right token, click on it. Now, you’ll see this screen:

• On the right side, you’ll see the “Profile Summary”, and the contract address directly underneath that. When you hover the cursor on the contract address a “copy” icon will appear. Click that to copy the contract address to the clipboard.

• Alternatively, if you’re using the super-helpful Koinly to do your taxes (team link-embedded), you can find the contract address of the LP token in the wallet transaction.

When you have the contract address of the LP token, you’ll take that to CoinMarketCap.com.

• Use CoinMarketCap.com to search the LP token. You can search by LP token name “i.e. ETH/BTCB”, but it’s better to use the LP token address (which you should have now!). For ETH/BTCB, the token address is 0xd171b26e4484402de70e3ea256be5a2630d7e88d, which can be searched in CoinMarketCap search field. You’ll see these results:

The first result is ETH/BTCB. If you select that, it will actually show you the value of Ethereum in USD. The second option CAKE-LP/BUSD will show you the USD value of the LP token, which is what you actually want to see.

LP tokens are an asset, just like single coins. When they enter your wallet and leave your wallet, they are a taxable event. So, you have to keep track of the value.

When you create the LP token by pairing two tokens, it’s fairly easy to find the value of the two tokens on the day/time of the creation of the LP token. And, when you break an LP token back into its 2 coin pairs, you can also see how much of each coin you get, and find out their values.

The hard part comes when you move LP tokens around without breaking them. For example, when you have LP tokens in a yield farm on Pancakeswap, and then on a certain date later, you withdraw them from that farm and stake them on The Animal Farm to get a better APR. You have transactions of the LP tokens in your bscscan, but you don’t have a clear value. That’s where the CoinMarketCap search can be helpful. In the bscscan of the transaction, you will see the contract address of the LP token (in this case, it will be a “CAKE-LP” token), and you can search it on CoinMarketCap, then look at the chart for the day/time.

A challenge comes when the LP tokens don’t appear in CoinMarketCap. The most common LP tokens will, like ETH/BNB, ETH/BTCB, etc. But, the more obscure ones are much harder to find the price. Here are some tricks you can use:

• Community Telegrams. The DRIP/Animal Farm ecosystem has a Telegram for the prices of all the tokens and LP tokens. You can scroll back to the date/time of the transaction and find the LP value.
• Risky: Best guess. If you hold create an LP token on March 1, 2022, and you know its value is $100, and you break it on May 1, 2022, and its value is $200, you can make a guess that on April 1, 2022, its value was $150. It’s not exact, but if you unstaked it on April 1 and re-staked it somewhere else on April 1, you can be fairly certain that the value didn’t change between unstaking and restaking. Therefore, you don’t have a taxable consequence. Whether the value was $150 or $160, your tax shouldn’t change.

Finding the price of LP tokens will be a challenge. Personally, after last year, I began recording the value of every LP token that passed through my wallet without creating (like the above example of unstaking and restaking). But, that doesn’t help someone who didn’t do that.

To summarize:

1. Find the contract address (either through BscScan.com or through Koinly.
2. Enter that contract address in CoinMarketCap.
3. Select the Cake-LP/BUSD option.
4. Find the time/date you’re looking for (unless you’re looking for the value right now).

Good luck!

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