Hi — we’re Chandan and Jon, co-founders of CoinTracker (<a href="https://www.cointracker.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.cointracker.io</a>). CoinTracker is a cryptocurrency portfolio manager that automatically pulls balances and transactions from top exchanges and wallets, and delivers tax information to users.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>3. Taxes are a nightmare. Having a great tool to help with taxes helps everyone sleep better<p>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.<p>Congrats on the launch. May the force be with you.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series...</a>
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:<p>A static HTML Website where you save your portfolio via
a bookmark.<p>- No tracking (no cookies, no emails, no JS* )<p>- Fast (~ 2 kB download)<p>- Cross-Platform ;-)<p><a href="http://www.cryptoport.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.cryptoport.net</a><p>* There is JS on the landing page to generate the link for your portfolio. The portfolio page itself is free of JS.
My use case is also tax reporting. Like others I’m getting numbers I suspect to be inaccurate.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Generally it may be difficult to get people to pay $150 with issues like this popping up.<p>You could consider some combination of:<p>-give a bit more info about the tax reporting before requesting payment, enough to convince users it’s calculated correctly<p>- clearly outline the scenarios where users will get flawed tax info in help docs<p>- 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?”)<p>-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
I'm a blockchain investor at [redacted] if you want to talk more. Initial thoughts:<p>-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.<p>-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.<p>-Most could probably get by with the exchanges you have listed so that's a a good thing<p>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.
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](<a href="https://cointracker.cash" rel="nofollow">https://cointracker.cash</a>) But, the domain is .cash :-)
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 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.<p>Something for my specific case:<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Finally - ask the user whether they are a US resident or not. A lot changes based on that.<p>Good job. Ping me if you want more detailed feedback (my HN username @ gmail).
If you're looking for investment advice, news updates, expert opinion tracking, etc.<p>(Essentially everything that doesn't touch money directly). I built a platform: <a href="https://projectpiglet.com/" rel="nofollow">https://projectpiglet.com/</a><p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I have open orders out almost all the time. I'd recommend either using Free + Locked or at least making it an option.<p>Looks good though, I will definitely use it if it can keep track of all of my trades and accurately reflect my balance.
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.
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?
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.<p>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!<p>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?
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.<p>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.
Overall, timely and looks like solid product.<p>Requests --<p>* Stellar accounts<p>* Nano public accounts<p>Issues --<p>* Doesn't appear to be importing in all the data from Binance thought it says it is complete.<p>* 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.
Why are you hiding the prices page for after sign up AND for after importing everything, and then why the <i>HELL</i> are you hiding the credit card purchases behind a "Getting Started" button?<p>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:<p>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.<p>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:<p>"We currently do not have the full deposit, withdrawal or trade history for some of your exchange accounts."<p>All of my coins are imported.<p>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:<p>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.<p>A couple of questions on top of your FAQ:<p><pre><code> * A list of what exchanges you support would be nice.
* It's not really clear what sort of tax help you get in the free tier.
* It would be nice to see pricing info without having to sign up.
</code></pre>
Also, it's great that you provide a lightweight tracker with no ads (<a href="https://www.cointracker.io/prices" rel="nofollow">https://www.cointracker.io/prices</a>).
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.<p><a href="https://localcoinportfolio.com" rel="nofollow">https://localcoinportfolio.com</a><p>It's free, open source and is about 12kb total.
<a href="https://https://github.com/59023g/local-crypto-wallet" rel="nofollow">https://https://github.com/59023g/local-crypto-wallet</a>
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:<p>1) Are most off your users from the USA or international?<p>2) What are the most popular exchanges people link with you? i.e is Coinbase number 1?<p>3) Do you disclose any data about your users to third parties?<p>4) What's the most surprising thing you have learnt so far building this?<p>5) Are their any laws around investing advise that you have to be wary of?
I think this is the best tracker I've seen. Congratulations on the launch!<p>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?<p>How do you aggregate the cryptocurrency prices across exchanges? Do you only calculate it based on the exchanges you support?
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!
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.
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.<p>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.
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.)<p>Would also be good to login in via method other than Coinbase after the fact.
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
Great idea. Highly automatized work that is very hard to do by hand and provides a concrete service.<p>I admit I find it interesting that Sam Altman is outspoken against crypto yet YC funds these endeavors.
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?<p>Update: Oh I just read through your FAQ and you plan on launching one soon. Any ETA on that?
Hello, congratulations on exposure.
I would like to express a concern.<p>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).
Hi everyone, my name is David and I'm the founder of YaxReturns.com. Great job so far, CoinTracker team!<p>Yax also provides a tax solution for cryptocurrencies.<p>We launched yesterday on Product Hunt: <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/posts/yaxreturns" rel="nofollow">https://www.producthunt.com/posts/yaxreturns</a>.<p>And our video walkthrough: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vViXhiMNufo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vViXhiMNufo</a><p>Website: <a href="https://yaxreturns.com/" rel="nofollow">https://yaxreturns.com/</a><p>We offer:<p>• Importing of transactions from major exchanges and wallets<p>• CSV uploads<p>• FIFO, LIFO, LIFO Perpetual, and Average Cost accounting methods<p>• PDF tax form downloads<p>• Editable transactions<p>• A unique interactive “Ledger Tool” for visualizing and editing your transaction data<p>• An emphasis on security, encryption, and user anonymity<p>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.<p>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 =).<p>Once again, congrats to the CoinTracker team on their launch!
There are no cryptocurrency investors, because cryptocurrencies are not an investment, they are speculation.<p>You have started a company to help people lose money.<p>In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.