CoinTracker raises $1.5M to make tracking cryptocurrency investments easy

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/10/cointracker-raises-1-5m/

by jonlerner • 8 years ago

161 90 8 years ago

tarstarr• 8 years ago

love cointracker! super useful while doing my taxes, couldn't have done it without them.

I prefer CoinTracker over Bitcoin.Tax, but I hope they add the ability to import en masse for next year. I use a decentralized exchange (BitShares), and I had to switch from CoinTracker to Bitcoin.Tax because of a few thousand trades I had to track. If I was just trading on Coinbase/Gdax/Bittrex, then I would have stuck with CoinTracker for sure.

kumarski• 8 years ago

We launched zenledger.io

There's going to be many players in this space across geographies and more.

Godspeed to them all.

flurdy• 8 years ago

More choice is good.

I wrote my own cryptocurrency portfolio management tool https://tulips.flurdy.io to replace a complicated a spreadsheet I used before.

Still needs plenty of polish and still beta, but Tulips works for me.

drharby• 8 years ago

Tulips lol

I see what you did there

criddell2• 8 years ago

Investments? When you buy a crypto currency, what are you investing in?

908087• 8 years ago

Delusional dreams of vast riches seems to be the common theme.

alehul• 8 years ago

While you're being downvoted, I wouldn't necessarily disagree.

On the stock market (which we consider a more legitimate investment), share price is entirely driven by perception and the amount of buyers vs sellers. This resembles cryptocurrencies as well.

The difference, however, is that there is an underlying company you're betting on with a stock, and buyers often believe that a company will have more buyers in the future due to the company's performance and its actual returns.

Cryptocurrencies are a much more volatile, short-term investment with virtually no regulations, and there's very rarely an underlying bet aside from "this sounds good and will sound good to other people too."

deadmetheny2• 8 years ago

Hot air, quite literally in the case of mining pool server farm energy waste.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

Thank you for saying so. As far as I'm concerned, it's speculation, not investment. Investment has some sort of underlying productive asset which one gets a part of and that then hopefully pays returns. Speculation is betting money on price movements.

As long as we're trying to rehabilitate financial terms, cryptocurrencies don't have "market caps". Stocks do, because they represent companies which could plausibly be purchased in one go for something near that number. But currencies and commodities don't have market caps, because buying up an entire currency a) doesn't make any sense (the value of a currency is in its continued circulation), and b) would wildly distort the price if even a fraction of the total were purchased.

mtnGoat• 8 years ago

isn't most investing speculative though?

kolinko3• 8 years ago

In case of some of the any currency - the volume that flows through it.

If Ethereum is a go-to place to do equity crowdfunding in the future, and we estimate the volume of such operations at $120B a year, then - assuming it takes a month from the moment someone buys ETH to invest in an ETO, to the moment a startup sells it for a fiat money, Ethereum's market cap will need to be at least $10B to fulfil that need, and that would be a cap bottom then.

On top of that, there will be other uses, and of course speculation/hype factor, which you can count in as well.

Now, with the advent of stable coins, it's possible that most of the ETOs won't be funded using Eth, but a dollar derivative (e.g. MakerDAO), or a token represented by a locked-up asset (e.g. Digix). Right now MakerDAO uses Eth as a backing, so it doesn't change the math, but if the Digix model proves successful, it affect this calculations.

Another line of reasoning for Eth is that you have transaction fees, and here again you can easily calculate the money velocity, and a potential volume flowing through the system.

Finally, when PoS arrives, Eth will yield de facto dividends - that's planned to happen within a year, although it has been postponed a few times already.

For other cryptocurrencies - MakerDAO, Digix, or Ocean have economies that can be calculated in a similar way. A plenty of other ones to.

Now, if you say that there is a low chance of such projects being successful - keep in mind that all these projects aim high. If there is 1% probability that BananaCoin will really help people grow bananas, it will deserve a $100M valuation, since it will be worth $10B in case of success.

Oh oh, in case of some projects, if not most, their book to equity rate is very high by Wall Street's standards. Golem may seem overpriced with their $200M valuation (that is - you believe they either have <1% of success, or their target market cap is <$10B), until you realise they have around $100M-$150M in assets after their ICO. That's a lot of money they can spend to deliver the value.

jraines• 8 years ago

the ability of a consensus protocol & its associated distributed system(s) to preserve an accurate history in the face of a multi-million (or billion) dollar bug bounty and/or state-level attack. You get a price that discounts the risk of failure on that front and the failure to win mindshare / real use.

There are many strong arguments as to why that's a bad bet, but that's the bet IMO.

cft5• 8 years ago

Value store, which will come in handy after US defaults on its debts.

RivieraKid• 8 years ago

Value store is not an investment. And a US default is extremely unlikely.

weavie• 8 years ago

In your opinion, what is the probability of that happening?

deadmetheny2• 8 years ago

In the extraordinarily unlikely chance of that happening you're going to want guns, ammunition, and a food supply, not digital Beanie Babies.

mihaifm3• 8 years ago

It's the same as with other investments. You're putting some money in, with the hope that the thing you buy will appreciate in the future.

When you buy stocks what exactly do you buy? Some stake in a company? Nonsense. You're just hoping that company will do well and your stock will appreciate.

Sure you can invest in commodities like oil or gold. Does that mean that an oil tank will be delivered to you door? No. You're just creating a virtual position with that commodity, hoping to close it later at a better price.

Same with crypto currencies.

perl4ever• 8 years ago

If I believe that shares of stocks generally come with votes, which allow you to control the company if you have enough of them...and I believe that oil or gold futures do indeed entitle you to take physical delivery, does that mean I should not invest in cryptocurrencies, because I inhabit a different reality than those who do?

hyprCoin• 8 years ago

For platforms, I invest to get a discount on apps I intend to release. SONM falls into this category and is one of my largest holdings.

lallysingh2• 8 years ago

Just like any currency - the goods that can be traded for it. Not useful as a currency in places with solid currencies like the US or EU, but some countries have poorly functioning currencies where cryptocurrencies provide some benefit. Also, it has value as a transfer currency, like when your own country limits how much money you can take out of the country.

In places where you can move money easily, and the local currency is stable and generally usable, then it's basically a trading commodity like gold or oil.

htormey• 8 years ago

Cointracker is my goto for automatically tracking trades across multiple exchanges and wallets. I don't even use it for Taxes yet. It's really worth checking out. I expect big things from these guys.

_fs• 8 years ago

I tried it before and found https://cointracking.info/ much more useful in nearly all comparisons. Better tax info and preperation, better syncing, more supported sync targets, faster updates, more tracked coins, and better stats pages. And this is all on the free version of coointracking. If you pay the yearly fee, the auto syncing and auto-wallet sync is a huge standout.

chanfest226• 8 years ago

(co-founder of CoinTracker here). CoinTracking is indeed a great tool. That said we have also made a lot of progress over the last several weeks and now support unlimited free tracking with auto-syncing (no yearly fee!). We'd love for you to take another look at https://www.cointracker.io and see how we can improve further.

NeonVice• 8 years ago

Can we please get xpub import? I use a trezor and importing each wallet address is a pain.

Thanks for a great service. I used it for my taxes this year.

siukwai• 8 years ago

Does CoinTracker support ethereum (smart contract) multi-sig wallets?

lemoncucumber• 8 years ago

I used CoinTracker this year to help me figure out how to report cryptocurrency on my taxes, and felt like it was a total ripoff. $50 for a two line csv file? Give me a break.

LeoPanthera3• 8 years ago

You still don't support Bitcoin Cash local wallets, and you still don't support any kind of local wallet that is more than a single address. Come on guys, it's been months, this is basic stuff.

marshiker• 8 years ago

Your service is much expensive than them

mecha92• 8 years ago

Mistake, thought guy replying was talking about Cointracking.info which does have a bad UI

sockgrant• 8 years ago

Do you support importing from gdax?

cft5• 8 years ago

Does cointracking generate 8949 statements when you have >100k transactions?

avenoir• 8 years ago

I am too interested in this. It'd be a massive stack of 8949s.

michaelgrosner22• 8 years ago

EDIT: Wrote this on my phone where I confused Cointracker with Cointracking

I had something like 50k+ transactions last year. Cointracking wouldn’t create a 8949 for me because their servers couldn’t handle a dataset that large, but they could create a capital gains CSV file that was super easy for my acccountant to sum up a few columns and make the 8949. That said, their very high transaction count plans are $1000+, which seems insane. Through a bug they had interfacing with HitBtc I was able to get the CSV for free, but next year I doubt I’ll use this service at that high price.

LeoPanthera3• 8 years ago

I checked this out but fell at the first hurdle. CoinTracker connects to your Coinbase account and auto-imports. CoinTracking requires you to go through an export/import cycle whenever you make more trades. Yikes.

donjh• 8 years ago

Great product and great team. Congrats Cointracker

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

Are people still doing this crypto stuff? I'm an "early adopter" of Bitcoin. Made a 1000% return on my initial "investment". I got into it because we need decentralised electronic cash. The investment part is ridiculous, though.

CiPHPerCoder2• 8 years ago

Can the title be updated to say 'cryptocurrency' rather than 'crypto'?

http://cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com

wanderfowl• 8 years ago

Agreed. As pointless as railing against language change is, it bothers me a bit that 'crypto' has come to be synonymous with a very small (yet very loud) area of the application of Cryptography. But this too shall pass.

owlninja• 8 years ago

If cryptography was exciting to the non-IT crowd it would still hold the belt, but...

rando444• 8 years ago

I think you mean that we'll come to accept it, correct?

Much like we accept that most people say 'USB' when they mean memory stick, or when someone says the word 'microwave' we assume they are talking about the metal oven that cooks their food.

asasidh• 8 years ago

when enough people start to say crypto to mean cryptocurrency, the meaning will change.

jacobr• 8 years ago

Which type of cryptography investments do you think readers will confuse this with?

CiPHPerCoder2• 8 years ago

The other day someone invested $50MM into a non-profit to further the development of Signal/WhatsApp, two phone apps that provide end-to-end encryption for billions of people around the world.

That's a crypto investment that has nothing to do with blockchainiacs.

aviv• 8 years ago

Why do people get so pedantic over a title? Even if it is confusing at first - so what? I never understood the need to correct such minor details...

TomK32• 8 years ago

German here, we really need some tool to keep track of our bigram tables. Last time my granddad lost one it didn't end well...

AznHisoka• 8 years ago

Coin trackers are all commodities.

In fact, the best tracker is the one where the price of the coins I am holding increases.

Please optimize for that one single metric, coin tracker creators :)

flashmob• 8 years ago

These coin/porfolio trackers are a privacy nightmare. You're basically telling some stranger your detailed crypto finances, and it's unknown how your data may be used.

One of the golden rules in crypto is to never disclose your holdings to anyone on the internet, yet people are using these apps without a second thought!

BenElgar• 8 years ago

Why is that a golden rule? Genuine curiosity.

gonzoflip• 8 years ago

I believe people say that because by announcing your digital assets you are making yourself a target and raising the opportunity benefit of compromising your computer and/or web accounts.

synthmeat• 8 years ago

Meh. It can be done pretty damn good. †[1]

† Not affiliated in any way.

[1] https://www.cryptocompare.com/portfolio-public/

kolinko3• 8 years ago

That's why in Trivial.co we all things client-side only, with the data never touching the servers - that's true for your accounts, but also for stuff like tokens that you watch, and so on.

I hope more startups picked up this way.

jumpbug2• 8 years ago

Does anybody else not worry about providing access to their investments via direct access to the various exchanges? If they are hacked, they have a direct pipeline to my accounts? Surely not all exchanges are setup to provide secure read only data? And what about the initial auth connection?

I just hate to add another point of vulnerability into an area that is no doubt being heavily targeted by hacking groups

cft5• 8 years ago

You can create read only API keys in most cases, and revoke them once you upload your transactions.

mihaifm3• 8 years ago

to be honest anything with "tracker" in the name gives me the creeps, to begin with.

tada1232• 8 years ago

The number one automatic tax calculation is CryptoInsight (https://www.trackr.im/), they're coming up with a new version that automatically synchronize your exchange/s accounts and trading, according to your country of origin (for tax purposes).

tada1232• 8 years ago

FYI - they are using TKR token for their project - https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/trackr/

velcro• 8 years ago

Have taken a quick look at it, still seems in very early stage. Keep up the good work! Is the platform releasing soon?

BTW whats the purpose of having your own token? What is it used for?

iblaine• 8 years ago

I wish people would refer to crypto as a service and not an investment. The goal of these alt coins is to enable services. People are doing a disservice to the industry by referring to them or using them as an investment.

jumpbug2• 8 years ago

ideally that would be true, but 95% of the people i know who have bought cryptocurrency have bought it for the investment.

stouset• 8 years ago

And do you not see why this is a problem?

CoinTracker raises $1.5M to make tracking cryptocurrency investments easy

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