A sunny night many many days ago, I realized that my spreadsheet, which had been with me in good times and bad (of which there were so many...), had reached its end of life.
Not only had it botched my last tax report but it was quickly becoming a maintenance nightmare. It's not a pleasant moment when you realize the gains on your tax reports are much higher than what you actually made. I knew it was too good to be true... Alas, it was time to find a better solution...
It began with a lot of googling, attempts to find products that can fill my spreadsheet's shoes, a lot of failed product trials, a lot of sleepless nights (well maybe not) and eventually a realization that my spreadsheet is not that bad after all. Its not that I didnt find any other trackers, there are tons out there. My issue was that they all lacked something fundamental.
The mobile trackers like Delta & Blockfolio were terrible at generating reports, the online "tax calculators" like coin tracking or bitcoin tax could only be used for tax reports and it required a lot of manual effort to get them working. And, if god forbid the numbers didn't match up, you were pretty much on your own to figure out what went wrong. Have fun going through every one of your transactions to solve that -why is my gain so high- problem. There were numerous other issues from non-existant or overly-complex ways of adding fees, terrible user interfaces to lack of support.
There had to be a better way!
As an avid crypto investor myself I had a fairly good idea of what a good portfolio tracker should have and what the existing solutions were lacking. My requirements were rather simple, things that can be easily automated or made more efficient through better ui design. After all, if I am to leave my cosy spreadsheet I want to be sure that the solution I am moving to is at least 10x better.
Basically, I would like my crypto portfolio tracker to be able to:
With a clear goal in mind, I embarked on a mini-adventure to #JustBuildIt. After 4 months of development with a lot of sleepless nights powered by magical wings, I am happy to announce that these requirements have been molded into an actual working product: ala Koinly!
The result: Automated cryptocurrency tracker & tax calculator!
The vision behind Koinly is to make it easier to track, analyze and generate reports from your cryptocurrency. All this without ever touching your private keys or other sensitive data. If blockchain is the replacement for banks, Koinly is the replacement for the bank's UI (just not as fugly).
Koinly is in active development which means new features are added regularly, so if there is something you have been longing for in a crypto tracker, now is your chance to get it!
Any feedback, ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks for reading!