
Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager - chanfest22
Hi — we’re Chandan and Jon, co-founders of CoinTracker (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cointracker.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;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&#x27;d love to get feedback from the HN community on CoinTracker and how we can improve. Thank you!
======
a_d
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...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series/)

~~~
chanfest22
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 :)

~~~
a_d
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.

~~~
chanfest22
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!

~~~
a_d
>Would really welcome your thoughts and ideas here as well!

Will write to feedback@cointracker.io

------
dmichulke
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](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.

~~~
asymmetric
Nice idea, but you should support HTTPS. People are entering their balances
and I for one wouldn’t wanna be snooped!

~~~
dmichulke
I fully agree, will probably happen within the next few weeks.

~~~
prophesi
It likely will only take you an hour at most with LetsEncrypt. Why wait that
long?

~~~
dmichulke
It's done!

~~~
prophesi
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.

~~~
dmichulke
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.

------
tommygunz99
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

~~~
jonlerner
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](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.

------
hisabness
I'm a blockchain investor abi at ldgr.capital 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.

~~~
chanfest22
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.

~~~
paulie_a
Just of curiosity, why do specifically support and mention DOGE?

~~~
thinkmassive
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.

------
tharindufit
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](https://cointracker.cash))
But, the domain is .cash :-)

~~~
htormey
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.

~~~
tharindufit
Yes. It is slightly different in function, but basically the same main
functionality in a different way probably. The name is fine anyway.

------
idonotknowwhy
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?

~~~
trothamel
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.

~~~
idonotknowwhy
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.

~~~
htormey
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...](https://www.breaker.audio/unchained-big-ideas-from-the-worlds-of-
blockchain-and/e/30531723)

It talks about this scenario. I’d also consider just hiring one of them.

------
samgnesin
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.

------
simonebrunozzi
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).

~~~
colecut
"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?

------
lettergram
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/](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).

------
treepunch
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.

~~~
meritt
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.

~~~
lavezzi
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.

------
brianprovost
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.

~~~
chanfest22
Great point! We need to add support for trades that are in stop/limit orders.
We'll work on adding support for this.

~~~
brianprovost
Great, thanks!

------
flowctrl
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
> _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.taxtips.ca/personaltax/barter.htm)

[https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-
agency/news/newsroom/fact-s...](https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-
agency/news/newsroom/fact-sheets/fact-sheets-2013/what-you-should-know-about-
digital-currency.html)

[https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-
agency/services/...](https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-
agency/services/payment/digital-currency.html)

~~~
flowctrl
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
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.

------
omdv
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

------
nicpottier
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?

~~~
chanfest22
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?

~~~
PKop
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?

~~~
chanfest22
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

------
askmike
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.

------
charleyma
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?

~~~
chanfest22
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.

------
xur17
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.

~~~
chanfest22
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?

~~~
xur17
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!

------
nickreese
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.

~~~
chanfest22
Sorry about that! Drop us a line at feedback@cointracker.io and we'll figure
out what we did wrong here.

~~~
jeffshek
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.

------
Moter8
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$".

------
htormey
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.

------
qwtel
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?

------
tyrust
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:

    
    
       * 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.
    

Also, it's great that you provide a lightweight tracker with no ads
([https://www.cointracker.io/prices](https://www.cointracker.io/prices)).

~~~
chanfest22
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

~~~
tyrust
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.

------
pteredactyl
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](https://localcoinportfolio.com)

It's free, open source and is about 12kb total.
[https://https://github.com/59023g/local-crypto-
wallet](https://https://github.com/59023g/local-crypto-wallet)

------
biggodoggo
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.

------
htormey
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?

~~~
chanfest22
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)

~~~
htormey
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?

------
ertand
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?

~~~
tesrx
The tracker is awesome, however it's missing the real-time price updates.

Site like Cryptowatch or CryptoPrice
([https://cryptoprice.io/](https://cryptoprice.io/)) are nice for the real-
time aggregate price updates across exchanges, however they are missing the
portfolio tracking feature.

------
osrec
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!

~~~
chanfest22
Thanks! I'd love to better understand the bulk wallet use case. Do you have
them stored in a database or CSV file somewhere?

~~~
osrec
Yes, a MySQL database.

~~~
chanfest22
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?

~~~
osrec
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.

------
willyyr
Hi Chandan, great to see you put the domain to a good use and making it to YC
W18 :). Congrats on the launch.

------
slavoingilizov
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!

------
tzumby
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.

~~~
jonlerner
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.

------
navpan01
Great tool!! Good UX and this integrated view across exchanges is what I was
looking for. Thanks guys!!

------
tastyfreeze
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?

------
omarchowdhury
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.

~~~
chanfest22
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](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.

~~~
ncallaway
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?

~~~
chanfest22
We have a paid tax service: www.cointracker.io/tax/package

------
rrggrr
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.

------
zitterbewegung
Why should I trust you with my data from Coinbase and or my google account and
why?

~~~
chanfest22
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

~~~
zitterbewegung
So you have a paid service to calculate a persons taxes. This is offered on
[https://www.bitcoin.tax](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?

~~~
htormey
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.

------
avenoir
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?

------
oscarteg
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

------
Outofthebot
Looks absolutely amazing. Eagerly awaiting wallet monitoring for more
currencies

------
conanbatt
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.

~~~
lettergram
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.

------
Hydraulix989
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?

------
htormey
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?

------
xwvvvvwx
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

------
dharma1
Cool. How does the read-only access work?

~~~
chanfest22
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

~~~
Klonoar
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. :)

------
asasidh
how do you differentiate from Libra tax that provides this service for free
and others like bitcoin.tax ?

~~~
htormey
Well if you link via the API, they give you an overview of your portfolio.

------
JoeyPardella
Lack of support for XRP wallet address (like xrp on Ledger hardware wallet) is
a big problem for me.

------
lug0r
Why does noone support BitMEX? Derivatives are expicially interesting when it
comes to taxation.

------
sputknick
I could have really used this a few months ago. Definitely a market for this.
Best of luck to you.

------
donatj
Dumb question but is there a way to import the tax information this generates
into TurboTax?

~~~
jonlerner
We plan to add an export option for TurboTax as soon as possible - we should
have it in the next 1-2 weeks.

~~~
donatj
This literally makes my day! Thank you guys so much!

------
encoderer
Congrats on shipping.

Total footnote, but having built a product on a .io domain, I wouldn't do it
again.

~~~
chanfest22
Interesting; how come? We aren't necessarily tied to our domain name, just
curious.

~~~
encoderer
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.

------
Danilka
Finally I know if I'm making money or not. You guys will do great!

------
kang
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).

~~~
phn
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.

~~~
kang
The least we can say is satoshi's whitepaper lists eliminating financial
intermediaries as the prime motive, in the first paragraph itself.

~~~
phn
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.

------
giffarage
Great tool!

It'd be very helpful to have Uphold available as an exchange.

------
jzig
Feature Request: Tracking extended public keys.

~~~
nobrains
Yes please. Cryptoport does that.

------
makkesk8
Great UI! Finally a competitor to altpocket :)

------
heelhook
Hey guys, is this open source? any chance I can send a PR to add another
exchange you don't currently support (like CEX)?

------
i_shankar
Nice!

------
newyankee
DM possible ?

~~~
chanfest22
Feel free to reach out to us at feedback@cointracker.io

------
hollandaise
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](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/yaxreturns).

And our video walkthrough:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vViXhiMNufo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vViXhiMNufo)

Website: [https://yaxreturns.com/](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!

~~~
htormey
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.

~~~
hollandaise
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](https://yaxreturns.com)

~~~
ledil
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](https://www.coinapse.io)

------
itamarst
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.

~~~
liquidise
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.

~~~
itamarst
Well-executed marketing in the service of helping people lose their savings.

~~~
capoDanger
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.

