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It's April, it means very soon the tax return for people in the United States. Considering the crucial year that the crypt has had in 2017 – despite the prices have cooled in recent months – and well-intentioned people may think to present taxes based on the gains they enjoyed from bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies.
It's a good time, therefore, for CoinTracker – a San Francisco-based startup that tracks $ 200 million in cryptographic resources – to peek over the parapet and announce that it has collected a round of $ 1.5 millions.
We wrote about the company at the beginning of this year when it was part of the Y Combinator winter cohort, and now it has spread its wings with a round led by Initialized Capital – a seed investor in billions of dollars in exchange Coinbase – with Y Combinator and a host of angelic investors who join for the race. Some of these include Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet and Paul Buchheit, the engineer who created Gmail.
CoinTracker is (as the name suggests) a product that allows you to monitor your crypto wallet.
Of course, there are a ton of such services and apps on the market, but after buying and using most of them, there is not one that fits really well. This is because many of the data entered are manual. This is important if you really want to monitor the success of your investment, you need to know obvious information like the price of the bitcoin when you bought it. When you consider crypto-to-crypto trading – e.g. trading bitcoins for ethereum – and the price changes that occur, suddenly miss the manual attempt to track performance.
He's just talking like a hobbyist. The most serious investors are even more subservient, and this is where CoinTracker aims to make its mark.
The service keeps track of your crypts through the wallet addresses – using public information, nothing private – while throwing API keys from the first 14 cryptographic exchanges. This helps fill in more gaps and gives you a more complete reading on how your encrypted investment has been performed. A transfer matching algorithm is available to help understand transactions on decentralized exchanges, which are more complicated to track.
By pulling this information, CoinTracker is also able to help the well-meaning people I mentioned earlier to give the taxi driver an accurate reading of the encryption gains to stay compliant with the IRS.
In the future, the plan is to tap into that holistic framework of cryptographic portfolios to offer more services, CoinTracker co-founder Chandan Lodha told TechCrunch in co-operation.
Lodha, former product manager with Google X, started the service with the co-founder and former CTO of TextNow Jon Lerner because they were both looking for something to track their encrypted investment hobby. When they realized a far greater number of people – both on the more serious and informal side of the spectrum – that they were, they made it their main goal.
Lodha said the service aims to stand out with a focus on ease of use and simplicity, and expects it to continue and be reflected in future services that could include trading through exchanges within the company. app.
"The main reason we've had some success so far is due to focusing on UX," said Lodha. "There are tons of other tools, but one thing that really resonates with our users is that we've made it easy for ordinary people to use, not just for cryptographers."
In fact, gathering and acting on user feedback is a common theme with Lodha, who said that the money will be added to CoinTracker team of developers to work on the "large number" of user requests received.
Now for the price: the basic tracking service is free, but users pay from $ 49 to $ 999 a year for more advanced features focused on optimizing tax documentation by filling out capital gains reports using FIFO accounting , LIFO or HIFO.
Disclosure: Writer has a small amount of cryptocurrency.
