Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager
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!
163 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadYou have started a company to help people lose money.
In the future, kindly use your enthusiasm and skills for something more useful.
Some pretty interesting industries have gotten bootstrapped with speculation though, and we are hopeful that more practical applications will develop in the future.
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.
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
In countries that have problems with their fiat currency, non government controlled currencies are quite useful. Especially as crypto cannot be confiscated.
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.
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.
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.
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?
-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.
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.
Please do keep me posted in regard to investment opps. Thanks.
In addition, what is the best way to get in touch with you (website?)
Disclaimer: I run a crypto business / compliant fundraising platform.
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.
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...
#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 :)
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 #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!
Will write to feedback@cointracker.io
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: 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?
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!
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.
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?
www.cointracker.io/faq#section-cost-basis www.cointracker.io/faq#section-tax
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.
We'll look into the instability for point #2
At this point just going to write a simple script to generate the 8949 from the exchange myself.
Total footnote, but having built a product on a .io domain, I wouldn't do it again.
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.
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
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. :)
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/...
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.
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.
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.
(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).
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).Tax free tier & pricing: www.cointracker.io/tax/package
Let me know if anything else is unclear
I admit I find it interesting that Sam Altman is outspoken against crypto yet YC funds these endeavors.
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.
Update: Oh I just read through your FAQ and you plan on launching one soon. Any ETA on that?
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?
How are people buying alt coins? Specifically what is the top Alt exchanges on your platform? I.e is it binance, bitterex or another?
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?
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.
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.
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.