Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager
Hi — we’re Chandan and Jon, co-founders of CoinTracker (https://www.cointracker.io). CoinTracker is a cryptocurrency portfolio manager that automatically pulls balances and transactions from top exchanges and wallets, and delivers tax information to users.
We built CoinTracker because, as cryptocurrency investors, we were let down by the existing tools for basic performance tracking of our investments. We started by simply creating a spreadsheet that enabled manual entry of transactions, and eventually hacked away with Google Apps scripts to import prices from various exchanges. This quickly got out of hand, so we built our own tool. We casually told a few friends who are into cryptocurrency about it. They found it as useful as we did, and to our surprise started telling their friends about it. We started receiving a steady stream of feature requests, and since then we have been steadily improving CoinTracker.
One of CoinTracker’s foundational aspects is that balances and transactions are automatically synced from exchanges and cryptocurrency wallets. Before CoinTracker, we hated the idea of manually entering every transaction into a tool. This approach also enables us to calculate cost basis, ROI, capital gains, and other tax-related information for you. There are technical challenges of ensuring that we correctly handle transfers between your wallets and transitively handle cost basis — something that a lot of other tools struggle to do correctly. We think this direction is enabling us to build the best cryptocurrency portfolio tracker with important services like taxes built on top.
We'd love to get feedback from the HN community on CoinTracker and how we can improve. Thank you!
1. Cryptocurrencies as an asset class has a broad spectrum of "investors" - tech-savvy millennials, high-net-worth individuals, family offices, financial advisors on behalf of clients, sophisticated hedge funds and a ton of "regular folks" (e.g. moms putting a bit of their savings). Any effort that builds tools to navigate this space is a good direction.
2. Crypto bubble is unique because institutions are the last ones to get in. Retail was first. Consumer tools are an absolute necessity. Although, I wish these apps (incl CoinTracker) came with more warning (about scams) and helped people exercise more discretion (including a warning about too much exposure etc).
3. Taxes are a nightmare. Having a great tool to help with taxes helps everyone sleep better
4. Still in an early, immature, evolving [1] area. CoinTracker can be much more ambitious than their current version. Would love to learn more about the future roadmap.
Congrats on the launch. May the force be with you.
[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series...
Great points & feedback — thank you!
#1 – agreed #2 – this is fair. We have some ideas on how we can help with these types of warnings appropriately and will work on integrating them #3 – agreed #4 – we are with you! Taxes are just the beginning :)
2 follow-up questions:
On #1 - Have you done any work on which segment needs this the most? (just curious, what "talking to users" revealed).
On #4 - What are the future possibilities of this product (future vision of CoinTracker)? (again, just curious to learn)
Thanks.
For #1 — there seems to be a strong need on both the retail side (folks who are day-trading or casually investing on the side) and on the institutional side (e.g. cryptocurrency hedge funds, etc.). So far we have focused on the retail use case
For #4 — there are a lot of possibilities here, and a lot of it will depend on where our users guide us. Some areas that we will start testing with soon though are around roboinvesting, trade aggregation, and auditing. Would really welcome your thoughts and ideas here as well!
>Would really welcome your thoughts and ideas here as well!
Will write to feedback@cointracker.io
I have no idea if we have a real 'bubble', but... basically no institutions have meaningful exposure.
For those on the opposite side of the privacy and tax spectrum, there is also a portfolio tracker (which I wrote) that is doing the opposite:
A static HTML Website where you save your portfolio via a bookmark.
- No tracking (no cookies, no emails, no JS* )
- Fast (~ 2 kB download)
- Cross-Platform ;-)
http://www.cryptoport.net
* There is JS on the landing page to generate the link for your portfolio. The portfolio page itself is free of JS.
Nice idea, but you should support HTTPS. People are entering their balances and I for one wouldn’t wanna be snooped!
I fully agree, will probably happen within the next few weeks.
It likely will only take you an hour at most with LetsEncrypt. Why wait that long?
It's done!
Awesome! I'd also recommend having all HTTP requests redirect to HTTPS, but I know that can be a little tricky if you're not too familiar with configuring your web server, and can be difficult to fix if something goes awry.
Haha, I didnt think you'd read it! Anyway, I want to wait a little to see if there are problems and if not, I'm gonna redirect. I use an nginx reverse proxy, everything seems pretty straightforward, so it's more a matter of taking things one step at a time.
Nice! A single server-generated multi-series chart would be nice but if it takes away from the simplicity then that's fine. If you haven't already seen it you can get volume/price/marketcap between a start/end date. https://graphs2.coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/1487234...
You mean an image that shows the top X price time series?
If so, I have a few questions:
- On a per-portfolio basis or just for the top 5 coins (+ maybe market cap)?
- update interval should be more like 2 minutes (like the site) or once per day is ok?
- start-time should be how many days back?
From a dev perspective, it would be nice if there were a solution to this that allowed for either A. time series caching (to avoid stressing CMC) or B. image caching (to avoid CPU load, this currently runs on a free gcp instance).
For me, personally:
- One aggregated portfolio position over time would be enough for me i think
- Once per day is fine
- Given crypto volatility, 1 year would work.
Maybe a combo of image caching and time series caching would make this economical. Image caching for aggregated portfolio position - and if you're generating the image everyday (or eventually more frequently) for many portfolios then you could calculate and cache the individual coin time series and use that cache to aggregate and generate many charts.
My use case is also tax reporting. Like others I’m getting numbers I suspect to be inaccurate.
I think the flaw may be this: I assume you’re calculating cost basis and gains on a broad set of the cryptocurrencies (including Neo, Ripple, etc) that are traded on these exchanges. But when the coins leave the exchange you count it as a sale unless you can see the receiving end of that same transaction in one of the user’s wallets. But you only support reading from wallets/blockchain for a subset of the coins (btc, eth, ltc). So you’re counting fake gains anytime a user sends any of the non-btc|eth|ltc coins for storage.
Like others have said, you probably don’t want to assume that any outbound transaction from an exchange is a sale that should be taxed.
Generally it may be difficult to get people to pay $150 with issues like this popping up.
You could consider some combination of:
-give a bit more info about the tax reporting before requesting payment, enough to convince users it’s calculated correctly
- clearly outline the scenarios where users will get flawed tax info in help docs
- flag uncertain items for individual clarification by the user in your UI a la Turbotax (“we couldn’t find a recipient for your Neo transaction on Aug 20– did you send this to another person or business?”)
-offer the first year free to get help from folks ironing out these kinks, but try to establish lock in to get return business next year
This is great feedback, and you're totally right about your understanding of the problem. We do rely on having a full picture of all your exchanges and wallets for all the calculations to work correctly. For crypto wallets that we don't support, we recommend for now manually entering the transactions from those wallets. We plan to support more wallets in the near future. We have some more info on this issue in our FAQ: https://www.cointracker.io/faq#cost-basis-wrong
We will also make it clearer to the user when we see there are outgoing transactions that may indicate a missing wallet / exchange.
I'm a blockchain investor at [redacted] if you want to talk more. Initial thoughts:
-A solution in your space is badly needed. Fund administrators really need an option that is better than cointracking.info and coinigy. A lot of these folks are looking at partnering with Libra here in the near future.
-your offering as is, is too limited. anyone investing seriously in the space owns a lot more than than the 4 coins available in your wallet option.
-Most could probably get by with the exchanges you have listed so that's a a good thing
I know you're just getting started, so I'm excited to see how your offering progresses. Good luck, and happy to talk more offline. Would also be interested in investing. Thanks.
Thanks for the kind words! We definitely have a long way to go and lots more features need to be added (and will be soon).
Re: wallets — for local wallets we currently support BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, and all ERC20 tokens. Additionally, from manual transactions and exchanges, we support over 2,000 coins and tokens. We'd love your feedback as to which additional features and coins you would find most useful to add to our platform.
Just of curiosity, why do specifically support and mention DOGE?
DOGE is a bitcoin derivative (fork of the software, not of the blockchain) that has a supportive community and is inexpensive for mainnet testing. Those are reasons I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in any crypto project.
Heard someone mentioning that as long as the price of DOGE is rising, the market is irrational. So it's a good indicator of current state.
cool. would love to see NEO (and related tokens), Stellar, ZEC,BCH, EOS (when they transition to their own chain), Dash, ADA, Monero, and Ripple for the XRP fan bois.
Please do keep me posted in regard to investment opps. Thanks.
Awesome, thanks for this list! We will add all of them.
In addition, what is the best way to get in touch with you (website?)
Also very much second the request for Stellar support. Stellar is fast becoming an ICO platform of its own, has a decentralized exchange built in. Most of my crypto activity is in stellar.
Disclaimer: I run a crypto business / compliant fundraising platform.
Interesting!. I have also developed a simpler and elegant cryptocurrency portfolio tracker app in last September 2017 with same name CoinTracker and available on Apple AppStore and Google Playstore (a version of the same app, which one of my friend did). You might also like to check it out and give a feedback [CoinTracker](https://cointracker.cash) But, the domain is .cash :-)
This is a totally different product. Your app looks very nice but it is similar to hodl, a mobile app where you have to manually input coins one by one.
The cointracker.io people import from exchanges, wallets via APIs and cab file import. Which allows you to track your positions without all the manual labor of inputting them one by one.
They are also selling a tax service for us customers.
Hopefully you guys can work something out about the whole naming thing.
Yes. It is slightly different in function, but basically the same main functionality in a different way probably. The name is fine anyway.
What are we supposed to do for tax purposes, if we've mined altcoins for years, traded them in exchanges like cryptsy with no records, and now have no idea about where we got our current stash of bitcoins from? Ie, we've now got all this wealth which we can't touch because we don't know how much tax we have to pay / should have paid while trading over the years, and are also afraid of withdrawing to the bank with no proof of where it came from?
This is not tax advice - but couldn't you just hold them in one place for a year, convert them to dollars, and report them as long-term capital gains with a cost basis of $0? That might be wrong, but I don't think you could be penalized for _under_estimating your cost basis.
Note: I don't know this for sure, so if someone knows the right answer, would be good to know.
Yeah thanks, that's sort of what I'm thinking of doing. I got most of then when bitcoin was $80 - $900, so I don't mind over pay tax. Just don't want my bank accounts frozen, assets seized, and to have to prove I'm not a drug dealer or something.
Listen to this podcast that Tyson and Jason (2 tax cpas who do a lot crypto) did:
https://www.breaker.audio/unchained-big-ideas-from-the-world...
It talks about this scenario. I’d also consider just hiring one of them.
This is awesome! We built a version of this and had a similar idea, but props to you guys for figuring this out!! We got stuck on how to handle sends and receives as we would need manual input to understand cost basis.
Something for my specific case:
- looks like you consider receives as a 1:1 cost basis. I haven’t taken a look at how your calculations work for taxes, but in my case, my cost basis is incorrect due to your assumption that it was a market-equilibrium cost.
Also, I recommend you guys consider creating feaux-wallets for payment methods (I.e bank accounts, credit cards etc). That gave me 100% accuracy for my net gain calculation.
Happy to chat if this doesn’t make sense or you’re curious!! Good luck on the project. Will be monitoring you guys.
You should treat transfers from one exchange to another as NOT a taxable event.
Also, you should give users the option to decide whether they want to consider crypto-to-crypto transactions as in-kind (and not a taxable event) for 2017 (US residents).
Finally - ask the user whether they are a US resident or not. A lot changes based on that.
Good job. Ping me if you want more detailed feedback (my HN username @ gmail).
"Also, you should give users the option to decide whether they want to consider crypto-to-crypto transactions as in-kind (and not a taxable event) for 2017 (US residents)."
Don't most official statements make it clear that crypto-to-crypto transactions are indeed taxable events in the United States?
If you're looking for investment advice, news updates, expert opinion tracking, etc.
(Essentially everything that doesn't touch money directly). I built a platform: https://projectpiglet.com/
Speaking of which, if anyone from the CoinTracker team is interested - I never want to touch money, so I don't feel we are competitors. I'd be happy to work with you to provide a "news feed" feature, and a lot of additional analytics (obviously, we'd work something out).
Also just signed up with the Lite plan to play around with it. I'm in that scary spot where I have about 1200 transactions in the last year (small value bot trading) where I would gladly pay $150 for the tax report but $1000 dollars is pushing it.
Also I'm sure this is just a function of high traffic from posting, but I am getting a significant amount of application errors for almost all actions taken on the site. Refreshing seems to work sporadically. I'll check back in a day or two.
Yeah the pricing is absurd. It should be related to capital gains and not simply the amount of transactions. I have a very large number of transactions (algorithmic trading) with a tiny profit.
At this point just going to write a simple script to generate the 8949 from the exchange myself.
Even the pricing for transactions is so much higher than other offerings. Why pay $1k per year when I could have bought a lifetime "guaranteed" unlimited subscription to Cointracking for $1700 a few days ago.
Thanks for flagging on both fronts. Shoot us an email at feedback@cointracker.io re: point #1.
We'll look into the instability for point #2
Just signed up and added an exchange. It looks like for balances, you are using just the "free" amount instead of "free" and "locked". The result is that any bids are not reflected in the balance on CoinTracker.
I have open orders out almost all the time. I'd recommend either using Free + Locked or at least making it an option.
Looks good though, I will definitely use it if it can keep track of all of my trades and accurately reflect my balance.
Great point! We need to add support for trades that are in stop/limit orders. We'll work on adding support for this.
Great, thanks!
The USA is taxing every trade. In Canada (according to my accountant, at least), cryptocurrency gains are only taxable when "realized" by selling into fiat (capital gains), or spending on goods and services (income). Until that point, they are considered intangible assets and not subject to tax. A USA/non-USA (or taxable trades vs only fiat trades) switch feature would be nice, to account for the different approach to taxation.
>In Canada (according to my accountant, at least), cryptocurrency gains are only taxable when "realized"
I'm not 100% sure about this point. The issue was raised to me before when I was looking into it— crypto-currencies may fall under barter tax law.
https://www.taxtips.ca/personaltax/barter.htm
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/news/newsroom/fact-s...
https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
I will trust my accountant; he is after all, on the hook for how it is reported.
Thanks for posting the links! Taxtips.ca is not an official source, and note they use a ton of "may" be this and "might" be that. I will ignore that page, since they clearly do not know and are not the CRA.
The Canada.ca link is consistent with what my accountant said -- when you use crypto to purchase goods or services, it is treated as income (just like bartering), taxable in equivalent CAD value at the time of the transaction. Trading crypto for other crypto is _not_ a goods or service, since crypto is treated as an intangible asset or commodity.
The third link is also consistent with this view:
"Buying and selling digital currency like a commodity
When you file your taxes you must report any gains or losses from selling or buying digital currencies.
Digital currencies are considered a commodity and are subject to the barter rules of the Income Tax Act. Not reporting income from such transactions is illegal."
In order to be considered a "gain" or a "loss", according to my accountant, the commodity must be realized into fiat money. "Selling or buying" means selling into fiat or buying with fiat. "Bartering" means trading for goods or services -- crypto is not considered to be goods or services.
>In order to be considered a "gain" or a "loss", according to my accountant, the commodity must be realized into fiat money. "Selling or buying" means selling into fiat or buying with fiat. "Bartering" means trading for goods or services -- crypto is not considered to be goods or services.
Thanks for the extended update!
That's very interesting! I have been hesitant to take advantage of some potential gains because of the burden of maintaining a record of every inter-coin transaction.
If your accountant is correct, then that's a load off—and a major advantage.
It really is a brand new asset class, then.
I definitely wouldn't advise you do otherwise.
I just thought I'd pop that information out there because it's not clear to me whether or not the coin-to-coin trade falls under barter like making goods&services purchases does. Really, in case there are other Canadians like me who are doing their own taxes this year and have to include these kinds of items for the first time.
How does coin to coin fall under barter? What are you bartering? Coin to coin trades can't be taxed, since value is impossible to realize until after those coins are sold for a tangible asset.
Good product, but still can't beat Cointracking in my opinion by number of features, supported APIs and looks less polished. The pricing ($1k? seriously?) is non competitive, either. Cointracking prices are quite ridiculous as well. It's good to see a competition, but overall I feel like the early adopters community so far is being screwed by startups like this. $1k for a glorified excel spreadsheet is a joke
I plugged in Coinbase out of curiosity as I do need to figure out some taxes here. I don't understand how these calculations are being done however. Seems to be taking cryptocurrency transfers as "selling" events, even though I was just moving to a non-coinbase account. This basically makes this useless for me to track my capital gains. Am I missing something?
You're right — if you move coins to a non-tracked wallet we treat this as if you used those coins to buy something because we really don't know. If you connect the wallet/exchange that the outgoing transfer went to, we will automatically pair them up and the gains will be calculated correctly. Does that make sense?
Given how many people use offline wallets (in my case a paper wallet as well as a Trezor) seems like you need some way to let me mark transactions as "non sell" and "non buy" otherwise this really doesn't provide me much value.
You're right — we need to improve this. In the mean time, we allow users to track their offline/paper/hardware wallet addresses: www.cointracker.io/add_wallet so that those transfers are accounted for (currently have to add one address at a time)
Since best practices these days is to generate new receive addresses and never reuse them this feels pretty painful to me. But I appreciate it is a hard problem and the desire to really track absolutely everything.
But those BTC have gone through so many wallets since I first got them that I really don't have a full record, so please add a way for me to say "no, this isn't a sell and no this isn't a buy" instead of requiring a full trace of every address I've ever touched.
If you count transfers out as sells unless you see the transfer received in a wallet, and if you don’t support wallets for most of the coins, how should I avoid these (ex. sending Neo from an exchange to my wallet) getting counted as fake gains in my tax report?
Is there a section within the transaction list that makes this explicit? I'm confused..
I'm seeing "Sent to bitcoin address" for some external transactions to private wallet, but don't see a realized gain.
Just want to be clear: is my final tax amount tainted by not including any external wallets that I've transferred ALL of my purchased bitcoin to? I only added coinbase and bittrex.. I need to add my wallets also?
Yes, you'll need to add your full crypto trading history (e.g. fiat ---> crypto ---> crypto ---> fiat) across all wallets and exchanges in order to get accurate tax information. We have more information about how and why here:
www.cointracker.io/faq#section-cost-basis www.cointracker.io/faq#section-tax
It's important to realize that with crypto to crypto trades nothing of value is actually being exchanged yet, since that value can only be determined AFTER it's been sold for a tangible asset. So don't get scammed into thinking that you owe fiat money for crypto to crypto trades, its a ridiculous notion.
Tax in the US works very different from most other places as far as I know. In my country (NL) you only report how much assets you have at the end of the year (wealth tax) as investing in crypto with a profit is not considered income.
My advice would be to separate the US tax stuff from the rest, so that the rest of the world can also use it.
Congrats on getting into YC Chandan!
Love the logic built around pairing transactions to external wallets and tracking the cost basis, how has your experience been working with the various exchange APIs and getting those integrated?
Thanks! Lots of variance. Some are really simple and easy to use, and others are a nightmare. At first it was really challenging for us to add each new exchange because there would be unique problems, custom formatting, different syntax, etc. for each one, however things have gotten a little easier at this point once we have done it a few times.
Do you support bulk imports from csv or some other format? I currently use cointracking, and would love to try this out, but I have a decent number of transactions stored in Cointracking that I'd like to bring over.
Also, I'm curious how you handle internal transactions for Ethereum contracts. Specifically I have a large number of transactions with Ethereum contracts that I had to write several hundred lines of code to correctly export to csv because none of the existing solutions support this properly.
RE: CSV — we don't (yet) support general CSV upload though we are working on this feature and will add it soon
Re: SmartContracts — thanks for bringing this to our attention. Is there a public smart contract that you have done this for that you'd be willing to share so we can figure out how to incorporate these types of transactions?
ReRe SmartContracts: Feel free to shoot me an email (in profile) and I can provide more detail, an address with a ton of example transactions and some of the additional nuances I ran across when trying to solve this problem.
I signed up and the site looks really interesting - you are by far the cleanest solution I have seen. Not sure it is the most robust yet, but I'm sure you'll get there. Best of luck!
Overall, timely and looks like solid product.
Requests --
* Stellar accounts
* Nano public accounts
Issues --
* Doesn't appear to be importing in all the data from Binance thought it says it is complete.
* It appears your business model is based on getting people to pay for tax reports (smart). That said, your cost basis is about 10% off compared to my records and snapshots of all relevant currencies at the moment of trade. Why is this? I'm sure this would dramatically impact the tax over time.
Sorry about that! Drop us a line at feedback@cointracker.io and we'll figure out what we did wrong here.
Just as an FYI - exporting from Binance doesn't always include everything (even though you're hitting export all). There's an obvious bug somewhere in their code that sometimes forgets pairs.
I found this after pulling my hair out for 4 hours a month ago.
Why are you hiding the prices page for after sign up AND for after importing everything, and then why the HELL are you hiding the credit card purchases behind a "Getting Started" button?
Possibly illegal in some countries (Germany comes to mind), the only thing "saving" you is that Stripe's purchase dialog says "Pay 29,00$".
UX looks amazing guys, great job. Some feedback about the performance page:
1) It would be nice to see some information about what exchanges/wallets my coins are sitting on. i.e I use Binance/Bitterex, I could have purchased XMR on both.
2) I was prompted to import my trade history from Bitterex (I have worked with their API, it sucks so I feel for you having to work with it). I did that but I still get hit with this dialog on the performance page:
"We currently do not have the full deposit, withdrawal or trade history for some of your exchange accounts."
All of my coins are imported.
3) On mobile the Tax page has a bunch of CSS/layout errors on iOS (iPhone 6+). Lots of widgets are outside the margins.
I wrote my own tool to basically do the same, but it can't handle certain advanced optimisations. Curious if you support the following:
Can you optimise the cost basis under the constraint of coins being in different wallets at different times? (e.g. I have an expensive tranche of coins that would minimise my tax when matched with a certain sell, but those coins were not in the exchange at the time, hence I can't argue that these were the coins I sold) Further, when moving funds between exchanges, can you pick the tranches so that the cost basis gets optimised from sales on that exchange on later trades?
This looks good, I haven't yet selected a service for doing my crypto taxes this year, maybe I'll give it a try.
A couple of questions on top of your FAQ:
Also, it's great that you provide a lightweight tracker with no ads (https://www.cointracker.io/prices).The list of exchanges we currently support (we will work on making this clearer): Binance, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Bittrex, Coinbase, Cryptopia, GDAX, Gemini, HitBTC, Kraken, KuCoin, Liqui, Poloniex
Tax free tier & pricing: www.cointracker.io/tax/package
Let me know if anything else is unclear
Thanks for the reply. I suggest changing the "paid services" link under the "How do you make money?" to point to /tax/package. Currently it points to /tax which redirects to a sign-in page.
I made something similar ( in about a week ) where all data you input is stored locally in your browser via localstorage. There's a websocket connection pushing down real-time market data every second.
https://localcoinportfolio.com
It's free, open source and is about 12kb total. https://https://github.com/59023g/local-crypto-wallet
I'd love to see more support for different wallets, It's generally bad practice to keep things on the exchanges as they aren't the most trustworthy bunch.
Can you share any information about how people are using your product? I'd be curious to know the following:
1) Are most off your users from the USA or international?
2) What are the most popular exchanges people link with you? i.e is Coinbase number 1?
3) Do you disclose any data about your users to third parties?
4) What's the most surprising thing you have learnt so far building this?
5) Are their any laws around investing advise that you have to be wary of?
1/ Over 50% of our users are international for our free tracking service, though our tax product is US only right now 2/ Coinbase is #1 in terms of exchanges, however local wallets (e.g. ETH wallets) are the largest overall 3/ We do not sell user data to any third parties. We do use some analytics products such as mixpanel, Heap, Google Analytics, etc. but we are not giving user/trade information to any third parties (see our privacy policy at www.cointracker.io/privacy) 4/ Many things, but one that stands out is that most people in the crypto space (even huge funds/companies with hundreds of millions of assets under management) use a spreadsheet to keep track of their crypto (!!) 5/ Yes! We are not (yet) a registered investment advisor and therefore do not provide investment advice (see www.cointracker.io/disclosure for more details)
Great answer! This site is a real step function over hodl or any of the other manual trackers I have been using.
How are people buying alt coins? Specifically what is the top Alt exchanges on your platform? I.e is it binance, bitterex or another?
I think this is the best tracker I've seen. Congratulations on the launch!
Will the tax manager be the main part of your business or are you planning to monetize on different set of features? Will cryptocurrency tracking always be free?
How do you aggregate the cryptocurrency prices across exchanges? Do you only calculate it based on the exchanges you support?
The tracker is awesome, however it's missing the real-time price updates.
Site like Cryptowatch or CryptoPrice (https://cryptoprice.io/) are nice for the real-time aggregate price updates across exchanges, however they are missing the portfolio tracking feature.
Thank you! Cryptocurrency tracking will always be free, though we may add more power features like real-time syncing in a paid subscription.
Currently, the pricing is sourced through aggregation across many exchanges (even ones we don't yet support syncing for). Lots of room for improvement here though as you and others suggest.
As a long term crypto miner, I hope to enjoy using this. Are you thinking of having an API that will let users add a few hundred wallets at once? That would be rather useful feature for a fair number of us I think. Also, loving the fact that you chose to launch this as a PWA. Congrats on getting things going!
Thanks! I'd love to better understand the bulk wallet use case. Do you have them stored in a database or CSV file somewhere?
Yes, a MySQL database.
Understood; if we offered a CSV upload option for your wallets would that solve the issue or do you need something that dynamically updates and syncs regularly?
That would do it. Basically, for anyone with a largish holding, this is a way to manage operational risk. In my particular use case, wallets are numerous, but not constantly changing.
Obviously, you guys are all super talented! But just be careful with the crypto space and any place you allow anything to be uploaded from anyone (even if your customers) ...
Hi Chandan, great to see you put the domain to a good use and making it to YC W18 :). Congrats on the launch.
This is truly great! I was trying to do something similar with the Portfolio feature of livecoinwatch.com, but they don't let you enter crypto/crypto trades and are much harder to use. Good luck with the development of it, but as a user, I'm absolutely happy!
What I would expect from a tool like this is data encryption using a client side generated private key. I understand this would complicate things like calculations/visualizations, but since you're dealing with pretty sensitive data I think it would be worthwhile.
That’s a fair point. We are starting off with the centralized model, but in the longer run we are definitely thinking about if we can take a more decentralized approach to this problem too.
Great tool!! Good UX and this integrated view across exchanges is what I was looking for. Thanks guys!!
Dang, those are some steep prices. I can't say I am surprised in the frothy crypto space. Your closest competitor cointracking.info has a similar structure.
If you are going to offer managed accounts as well then why not offer a free tier for taxes to draw users?
How much of the motivation behind this service is to aggregate private crypto market data, and how much of it is to provide a great user experience? Please offer a response to this in a percentage format with supporting justification. Thank you.
It's a fair question! It may sound ridiculous, but we are 100% motivated by improving UX in the crypto space, and not interested in building a business around aggregating and selling/trading on private crypto market data. This is core to our mission and built into our policies (https://www.cointracker.io/security) and commitments that we will never sell user data.
In fact both Jon and I have backgrounds working on consumer-facing products at Google, and the huge pain point around UX in the cryptocurrency space is largely what drew us away from Google and into CoinTracker.
If we were interesting in monetizing user trade data, we would either build a cryptocurrency hedge fund or partner with those types of investing institutions. We explicitly haven't done that and are committed to not doing so.
Instead we have taken the route of building user-friendly consumer tools (starting with tax), with the hope that making the space slightly more accessible will help push the whole space forward.
How do you plan on monetizing? Even if you're not looking for a profit, how do you plan to offset development and infrastructure costs?
I've setup an account already, and this looks absolutely useful and helpful, but I'm somewhat wary of anything that's free if I don't know how you're planning on keeping the lights on?
We have a paid tax service: www.cointracker.io/tax/package
Tax form generation isn't working, which sucks. But the UI and everything else is nice. Would be good to view gains by date ranges (Eg. month, prior year, etc.)
Would also be good to login in via method other than Coinbase after the fact.
Why should I trust you with my data from Coinbase and or my google account and why?
Fair question —
For signup, we have three options: get your email from Google, from Coinbase, or use whatever email you want manually. It's up to you whether to use Google/Coinbase or use your own bogus email. The point here is not to gather data about your accounts, but rather just have a way to communicate with you.
For tracking & tax, the hope is that we are providing you as a user with enough value (in the form of portfolio management and tax information) that it is worthwhile for you to track your exchanges/wallets/cryptocurrency on CoinTracker.
We take measures to protect your security: www.cointracker.io/security
If you don't see value in the service, that is useful feedback for us and we'd love to know
So you have a paid service to calculate a persons taxes. This is offered on https://www.bitcoin.tax . They have a free version that someone can submit their taxes on and also they have a paid version. Also, they can refer you to tax professionals (they deal with happy tax). What advantage do you have over this?
I just used bitcoin.tax to calculate my 2017 returns, it has a terrible UX and also does not offer a real time portfolio monitoring service. They also have grander ambitions to offer a portfolio investment service.
The main difference comes down to user experience — it is much easier & simpler to use CoinTracker. Additionally, we offer free portfolio tracking so you can verify for yourself that we are actually doing everything accurately & try before you buy.
I've been using cointracking.info up until now, but this is just amazing. Great work! Will you be supporting Huobi in the near future? And can you add a "When Lambo" indicator next to each crypto asset?
This is exactly what is was trying to build for myself. I saw that no tracker was simple and still full of functions. Except for the tax part. I'm still building my own but you gave me allot of great ideas
Looks absolutely amazing. Eagerly awaiting wallet monitoring for more currencies
Great idea. Highly automatized work that is very hard to do by hand and provides a concrete service.
I admit I find it interesting that Sam Altman is outspoken against crypto yet YC funds these endeavors.
Should always hedge the bets. Just because someone doesn't think somethings a good idea wont keep people from making money.
For instance, I'm still trying to figure out how Docker is better than a full VM. And I personally question cryptocurrencies myself, but I still built a system to track them.
How are "air drops" like BCH handled in CoinTracker for tax management purposes, given the IRS has yet to issue any guidance on how they should be taxed?
Love the concept. Do you guys have any plans for a mobile app?
Update: Oh I just read through your FAQ and you plan on launching one soon. Any ETA on that?
This looks super useful, when are you planning on releasing a mobile app?
Need to be able to obsessively check the price when I’m out and about
Cool. How does the read-only access work?
For Coinbase we request the Read Permission from Coinbase Connect (OAuth2 flow). For the rest of the exchanges we request the user to add their API keys with restrictions for view only access (enforced by the exchanges). The instructions are listed for each exchange when you add them from the wallets page: www.cointracker.io/wallets
Mmmm, I've a similar product to yours (and the myriad of other products like this).
One thing pretty much everyone gets wrong is that many of these exchanges don't actually offer read-only keys, and saying so is wildly inaccurate. Case-in-point is Gemini, which anyone asking for the keys requests Trader level privileges. This simply blocks withdrawing; a malicious actor could still execute a trade if they got ahold of your keys, and due to the nature of it all that's very no bueno for you.
Each and every single one of these products should be badgering exchanges to support true read-only keys (or OAuth, as much as I hate the spec). I've personally emailed each one, and I dunno who else is doing so, but I'd encourage you to alter your documentation slightly and to badger the exchanges as well.
Otherwise, neat product. Congrats on launching. :)
how do you differentiate from Libra tax that provides this service for free and others like bitcoin.tax ?
Well if you link via the API, they give you an overview of your portfolio.
Lack of support for XRP wallet address (like xrp on Ledger hardware wallet) is a big problem for me.
Why does noone support BitMEX? Derivatives are expicially interesting when it comes to taxation.
I could have really used this a few months ago. Definitely a market for this. Best of luck to you.
Dumb question but is there a way to import the tax information this generates into TurboTax?
We plan to add an export option for TurboTax as soon as possible - we should have it in the next 1-2 weeks.
This literally makes my day! Thank you guys so much!
Congrats on shipping.
Total footnote, but having built a product on a .io domain, I wouldn't do it again.
Interesting; how come? We aren't necessarily tied to our domain name, just curious.
A history of poor ops practices and unreliability. In the last year there was one incident where somebody was able to register their root name servers as their own, and another where they stopped resolving requests for a large portion of the internet (mid-October sometime).
From a marketing point of view, I didn't appreciate it before talking to "regular sales prospects" but in our space at least there is a connotation to it. One quote I remember was that we were "a little expensive for a .io".
Ultimately we have stuck with it due to sunk cost.
Finally I know if I'm making money or not. You guys will do great!
Hello, congratulations on exposure. I would like to express a concern.
Being a cryptocurrency user is all about NOT paying taxes. As more people understand the systems of cryptoanarchy, more will the gateway business models fade-away(basically exchanges and add-ons like OP).
I actually think conflating cryptocurrency with not paying taxes may does not help anyone in the discussion.
Banking fees, sure. But taxes? That's a whole ideological discussion not even closely related to crypto.
The least we can say is satoshi's whitepaper lists eliminating financial intermediaries as the prime motive, in the first paragraph itself.
Well, my point still stands.
Taxes are not a financial intermediary. Taxes are something a government charges to fund a country, even though some of them may be charged when you move money around.
I understand that we can somewhat envision a self-governing crypto-nation, but even that doesn't imply lack of taxation.
Oh boy, you are not helping the cryptocurrency community with that extremist line of thinking...
Great tool!
It'd be very helpful to have Uphold available as an exchange.
Feature Request: Tracking extended public keys.
Yes please. Cryptoport does that.
Great UI! Finally a competitor to altpocket :)
Hey guys, is this open source? any chance I can send a PR to add another exchange you don't currently support (like CEX)?
Nice!
DM possible ?
Feel free to reach out to us at feedback@cointracker.io
Hi everyone, my name is David and I'm the founder of YaxReturns.com. Great job so far, CoinTracker team!
Yax also provides a tax solution for cryptocurrencies.
We launched yesterday on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/yaxreturns.
And our video walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vViXhiMNufo
Website: https://yaxreturns.com/
We offer:
• Importing of transactions from major exchanges and wallets
• CSV uploads
• FIFO, LIFO, LIFO Perpetual, and Average Cost accounting methods
• PDF tax form downloads
• Editable transactions
• A unique interactive “Ledger Tool” for visualizing and editing your transaction data
• An emphasis on security, encryption, and user anonymity
So far the biggest challenge in building a comprehensive tax solution is that exchanges, wallets, and blockchains do not all provide API's into their data, and their data formatting is different across each one. I can tell that CoinTracker has experienced this issue as well from the comments on this thread. Integrating with all major exchanges is definitely going to be a possibility in the future, but for the foreseeable future, the priority will likely be making it as easy as possible for users to upload, edit, and review their transaction data as easily as possible before submitting to the IRS. After all, it's real money that you're reporting on.
That said, please do check out YaxReturns.com as you consider a crypto tax calculator this year. We have new tools being built as we speak that will help you manage your taxes easily on a daily basis instead of scrambling to gather data and file them every April =).
Once again, congrats to the CoinTracker team on their launch!
I 100% agree. I’ve been playing around with the APIs these exchanges offer. All of them have incredibly annoying issues and limitations.
I just did my tax with bitcoin.tax but I will have to check out yax and see how it compares. Bitcoin.tax has a very basic ux some I am looking forward to seeing some innovation in this space.
Absolutely. Agree with your agree! There's lots of UI improvements that can and should be made in the crypto space.
As one friend put it, 2017 was about crypto traders and developers being too busy making money to turn around and help newbs learn or onboard them with nice UI's. That's got to change. Too many people, including myself, have lost money screwing up wallet addresses or not knowing how an exchange works. In addition to improving exchange API's, simplifying user interfaces, and making it safer and error-forgiving to exchange currencies, I think infrastructure and regulatory clarification will go a long way in legitimizing and stabilizing the crypto world. I also think providing people with a tax-compliant way to trade is a great place to start creating that user-friendly version of crypto. More features coming from Yax soon! Be on the look out.
https://yaxreturns.com
This looks nice. We are developing another alternative focused on nice ui and starting with a free premium package for all beta users...
https://www.coinapse.io
I was just thinking about this idea today! its nice that someone has finally made it easier for people to start following their money! i am lost :D will try this out!
There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation.
You have started a company to help people lose money.
In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.
This breaks several of the site guidelines: obviously the ones about remaining civil, but also this: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart. It should work like this: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
This is a shockingly dismissive comment for the space.
I understand that cryptocurrencies are a divisive topic, particularly on HN. Dismissing the hard work of a startup showing off what i believe to be a well-executed marketing page and tool is not only shortsighted, but goes against the very philosophies of Hacker News in general.
Well-executed marketing in the service of helping people lose their savings.
I hope no one is investing all of their savings in any one type of asset, let alone cryptocurrency. Generally people diversify their investments according to their risk-tolerance. I am fairly young and not that risk-averse but still only have a tiny fraction of my investment portfolio in cryptocurrency.
You may be right — the difference between investing and speculation is a fine line and buying and trading cryptocurrency is definitely risky business. We certainly don't deny that.
Some pretty interesting industries have gotten bootstrapped with speculation though, and we are hopeful that more practical applications will develop in the future.
Trains got bootstrapped with speculation... but they were clearly useful before the speculation.
Same for the Internet.
As you admit yourself, cryptocurrencies are a solution looking for a problem. They do nothing, they provide nothing, they're just—"valuable". It's a scam, thousands of people will lose money, and you will have done your part to help those people lose money.
Now you're breaking another of the site guidelines too: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Could you please stop now? You're a fine HN commenter otherwise. It's fine to be skeptical about cryptocurrencies, as many HN users are—but it's not fine to do flamewars or break the site rules.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are you just incapable of shutting the fuck up?
Solutions looking for a problem are OK and are a healthy part of the economy.
In countries that have problems with their fiat currency, non government controlled currencies are quite useful. Especially as crypto cannot be confiscated.
Or, if you're a complete and utter pessimist: When there are too many solutions looking for a problem, it could also mean that there is too much money in the wrong hands.
That's a property any sort of investment. Do you decry the existence of Y-Combinator because the majority of the alumni's businesses will fail?
^this comment is not helpful