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Today Jason and Will are joined by the Co-Founder and President of CoinTracker, Chandan Lodha. “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” wrote Ben Franklin in 1789. These 233 years later, that remains true albeit far more complex than in that era. Today the breakneck-pace of crypto has left users and regulators confused and reactive to the changing landscape. CoinTracker’s focus is making crypto tax compliance user-friendly. Founded in the 2017-2018 market frenzy around crypto, CoinTracker used the subsequent “crypto winter” to run lean and refine their product. This persistence through the highs and especially the lows in crypto markets has set them up for tremendous success in this new era of mainstream adoption of crypto technologies.
Welcome to the Perfectly Boring Podcast, a show where we talk to the people transforming the world's most boring industries. On each podcast, we will be sitting down with executives, investors, and entrepreneurs to talk about the boring industries they operate in and the exciting businesses they’ve built.
Strap in for the most marvelously mundane ride of your life.
Will: Welcome to the Perfectly Boring podcast, a show where we talk to the people transforming the world’s most boring industries.
Jason: I’m Jason Black, general partner at RRE ventures.
Will: And I’m Will Coffield, general partner at Riot Ventures.
Jason: And today we’re talking to the co-founder and president of CoinTracker, Chandan Lodha. Chandan is actually a classmate of mine in school and has since built, now, a unicorn business in the crypto tax space called CoinTracker. Not my first time talking to Chandan about the business, but maybe, Will, what were your impressions after our conversation?
Will: Yeah, I was really impressed with, I think, the simplicity of the value proposition for CoinTracker. Which is—Jason, as you highlighted in the podcast, it’s sort of death and taxes. And they found a kind of ubiquitous pain point that everybody participating in the crypto space feels around needing to become tax compliant at a certain point, and how they not only solve that problem but then think about it not as the finite value proposition, but as the beginning of what will be a sort of ubiquitous relationship with the consumer, and how to be a partner for them as they go deeper in their crypto portfolio and life.
Jason: Yeah. And matching the increasingly complex landscape of crypto with an increasingly, kind of, simplified, approachable version that is within the confines of taxable events, et cetera, that brings that kind of trust all the way back.
Will: Yeah, I mean, the landscape of integrations and assets that they have to get their arms around is not static. It is—
Jason: It is not.
Will: —[laugh] it is not static at all. And just really impressive what they’ve built over a relatively short period of time while also being founded in the midst of a bull market in 2017, building through the course of crypto winter, and now positioning themselves as you know, one of the category-defining platforms as we kind of go into another major building cycle for crypto.
Jason: Yeah. Well, before we get too deep, let’s jump into the interview.
Will: Welcome to Perfectly Boring. Today, we’re joined by Chandan Lodha who is the president and co-founder of CoinTracker. And today, we’re going to be going on a deep dive into the very esoteric and complex world of taxes as it relates to the explosion in activity that is happening in Web3 and crypto trading. Chandan, thank you for joining us today, and we’d love to start by giving the audience a little bit of a background into your career and how you kind of ended up at this place and building what you’re working on.
Chandan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So, my background is mostly in the tech space. I was a product manager by training; I worked at Google for a couple of years. And basically ended up getting more interested in FinTech.
And so my co-founder and I—my co-founder, John who’s also from Google—basically ended up starting building in the FinTech space. And it was actually building on traditional financial rails, like, automated clearing house ACH and SWIFT network that was super slow, super inefficient, didn’t work in a, kind of, internet-enabled digital way. That led us to be frustrated and diving deeper into the crypto space.
Will: Awesome.
Jason: And what in particular about the, kind of, tax angle was interesting to you? And give us—I mean, obviously crypto is moving so quickly, has been kind of accelerating, certainly recently, but it’s gone through these waves. It’s kind of important to know what the timing is and where that entry point was. So, maybe you can give us a little bit of sense of timing there, too.
Chandan: Right. So, we started working on this in 2017, kind of mid-2017. And what was happening was we were building a personal financial assistant type of app that would help people save money, build wealth, kind of automate financial assistance. And like I was saying, it was really frustrating to work on ACH and SWIFT network. And the reason why is it would take 11 days for our first settlement between a checking and savings account bank transfer, with a $1 fee on a $5 transfer. So, it was slow, it was inefficient, it was expensive, it didn’t work on weekends, it didn’t work on holidays, it was not a 24/7, 365 system.
And at around the same time, people were getting super hyped around cryptocurrency, right? This was leading up to one of the biggest bull runs at the time. And so we kind of got curious. We were pretty skeptical at first, to be completely honest, but we kind of dove in a little deeper. Like, what are the fundamentals here behind bitcoin and why is there so much hype here?
And what we ended up finding out was, it was a digital-native, global financial system that could be built using this technology. So, that got us, kind of, intrigued from a technological perspective. And next thing you know, I had an Ethereum miner that we built in the office, I was running a Monero full node on my computer, I had 15 different cryptocurrency exchange accounts, it was just super wild. And as a result—
Jason: Yeah, it’s immediately going down the rabbit hole in crypto.
Chandan: Down the rabbit hole. Exactly. Down the rabbit hole. And as any, sort of, early crypto person can tell you, the next thing you’re trying to do is keep track of all your transactions and wallets and addresses. So, we had a complicated spreadsheet doing that.
And then we had formulas pulling in price feeds, and then we had Google Apps Scripts. And it was two minutes to open the Google spreadsheet, so we basically built a very, very simple landing page that only allowed people to track their cryptocurrency portfolio. And it was just—it was a solution for ourselves. We ourselves were like, “We need this.” So, we built that.
And we kind of knew we were onto something because immediately random people from around the world, people in Thailand, were emailing us saying, “This sucks and you need more features.” And we were like, “Wow, [laugh]. This random person in Thailand is emailing us complaining that our tool isn’t good enough. That means we’re onto something. We should make this better.” And, kind of, the rest is history.
Jason: Gotcha. And you wouldn’t have been the only one to continue down the path of, kind of, traditional financial tools. Like, there’s been plenty of companies that have gone on to be quite successful, certainly, to varying degrees, but it’s not like great tools having been built in that space. What was the tipping point into crypto? Was it this kind of global sense of scale when you have the people from Thailand or was it something else that made you switch and make a big bet, still? I know there was a lot of hype, but the fundamentals are still building in a big way.
Chandan: Right. So, this ties back to the question you were asking about tax, and it kind of bridges into crypto as well. So, on crypto, in particular, we really wanted to work on something that had the potential of a thousand-X-ing in the next five years. And the reason why is because you know, we were leaving our cushy, comfortable, privileged lives at Google, and so if we’re going to take a big risk, it better have asymmetric upside. And we felt like crypto is one of those few industries where yes, it’s really risky, it’s unclear whether it’s going to take off—this is 2017—but if it does, you could change the world.
And so that’s why we took a bet on crypto is because we felt like we had confidence that there was a lot of asymmetric upside potential because the financial system that we were building on before was not internet-enabled, it was not globalized, it was not working 24/7, 365. So, that gave us competence on the crypto angle. And then what we ended up kind of figuring out is that if we build all the infrastructure to connect people’s cryptocurrency exchanges, wallets, et cetera, then taxes becomes an obvious problem to solve for people with that same data set that people are willing to pay for right now. It wasn’t some hypothetical, sort of, future blockchain IoT AR, something-something magic; it was, “I have this problem right now. I need to file my taxes. It’s impossible to do by hand.” And we actually have all the data to make that possible. So, that’s why we had the confidence on that.
And to your other point, there were other people doing this; we were not the first. So, we actually, before building any of this stuff, googled it, tried to figure out what else was out there, and there were a couple solutions, but all of them were built for a very esoteric, sort of accounting-style audience, not smooth, really easy to use, best-in-class web apps that you would expect from, you know, 2017. And that gave us a lot of confidence that, wow, if a lot more people start using cryptocurrency, they’re going to need something that is as easy to use as any other top Web3 app or Web2 app at that time. And so we have the confidence to take the bet there.
Jason: Gotcha.
Will: I remember 2017 is when I personally started trading crypto and thinking about it as a piece of my personal portfolio. And I remember that at the time, there was little to no framework and a tremendous amount of debate going on about what was taxable, what wasn’t taxable, around what data the IRS was going to have, around what data the IRS was not going to have, and how to report your taxable information to the IRS. It felt a lot like the Wild West at that time. You must have made some, kind of, critical decisions about the way you believed taxes should be paid at the time without a lot of clear framework to substantiate it. Could you walk through it was going on at the time, how you were thinking about this maybe how things have evolved since?
Chandan: Well, I’ll start with a quick disclaimer that I am not a tax advisor, and this should not be taken as tax advice. [crosstalk 00:09:33]—
Jason: [laugh].
Will: That’s—we’re—
Jason: Probably should have had that at the top.
Will: —should have started with that. Yes.
Chandan: But given that, I have been working in this space for four-plus years, and so I’m happy to provide some informational—sort of, what I’ve seen, which is, at the time—so the first tax guidance that the IRS released about digital assets was in, actually 2014. It’s a public notice; you can Google it. It’s [2021-14 00:09:55].
And basically, the TL;DR of what it says is that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are taxed as property. Now, for the non-tax experts listening to this, what that means is that they have capital gains and losses somewhat similar to the way equities—stocks—do where there’s a cost basis, which is the price you acquire the asset, and then there’s the fair market value the time you sell, and the, kind of, the difference is your capital gain. So, that was kind of the framework that was already established. You know, if you’re looking at government agencies and seeing who’s moving the fastest, you know, the IRS is, you know, definitely wants to make sure that, you know, assets that people are speculating on are getting taxed properly.
So, they had that framework in place for three years before we started doing any of this, and that gave us, sort of, the first principles groundwork on how we should, sort of, build our tax engine. Now, of course, the crypto industry is moving super-fast, way faster than regulators are going to be able to keep up with, and especially now we’re seeing DeFi, we’re seeing NFTs, we’re seeing, sort of, all kinds of derivatives, perpetual futures, things that don’t even exist in equities world. So, there are plenty of gray areas, but the core fundamental of having a property-style tax sort of set of rules applying to crypto gave us the groundwork to cover the vast majority of, sort of, ordinary cases. When there were gray areas, what our philosophy has always been is to kind of interpret the rules to the best of our ability, give people—our users—the ability to choose and make decisions, and sort of default to conservative options. And then for advanced users who are working with a CPA or accountant, the option to take a more aggressive approach if they want to.
Jason: 2014. So, you already had a framework to kind of work with. Between then and now there’s been a crypto winter. Like, walk us through what that meant for the business, and what that kind of clarified about your mission. Because for the companies that I’ve talked to that have kind of built through it was a very clarifying period of time, and a lot of people that were really maybe not as committed to it fell out, and the people who stuck through were rewarded in a really big way. Maybe you can talk us through some of the, like, the trials and tribulations that you went through as the market took a really big downturn, kind of on the tail end of 2018.
Chandan: That resonates with me deeply. So, as you just said, basically, things were great in 2017. Anyone who was buying was going to make huge ROI. And then if you recall, early-2018, everything peaked and then plummeted. And so as a result, at the time, it was very painful, but in retrospect, it was actually very transformational for our company and for many others, in that a lot of hype and speculation and fraud and nonsense and BS and hysteria had built up because there were so much money being made.
And that brought in a lot of, sort of, grifters and sort of like unsavory characters into the cryptocurrency space. And that was not great because then it ended up having this reputation of being very shady, when in fact, actually, a lot of the transaction activity has nothing to do with being shady at all. And so because there was this multi-year winter, a lot of the people who weren’t long-term mission aligned with the, kind of, fundamentals of cryptocurrency building blocks, ended up leaving the space and moving on to other things. And it was really hard; we had to really tighten our bootstraps, really focus on cutting costs, really focus on delivering more user value. We, for example, launched a new portfolio subscription product during that time, which really helped us build up more revenue.
But I mean, it was dire times. We were small team, it was really hard. The IRS extended the tax deadline in the US for the first time in history. And it hit us—you know, Covid in 2020 hit us in March, right around the time it was tax season when we make a lot of our normal revenue during a normal season. And so yeah, it was brutal.
But because it was so brutal, it forced us to be really focused on product-market fit, delivering user value, growth, cutting costs, building profitability, which we did. And as a result, like you said, now the companies that have stuck with the crypto space through that winter, or through other winters, have built really loyal user bases that are highly retained, and people have seen what it’s like to go through good times and bad times. So, that has made us very much stronger company now.
Jason: And during that time, did you ever think about expanding into the enterprise side? I know you primarily focused on the… individuals who are less sophisticated, et cetera. Maybe you could walk us through the kinds of trade-offs that there are with working with enterprises. I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not you’d expand into that space.
Chandan: Definitely, we have thought about it. We actually even tested out some products and got some customers on board, and we do work with some enterprise customers. But like you said, our bread and butter is consumers. We built a really strong and compelling product in the B2C crypto tax and portfolio tracking space. I think what it comes down to is, as a startup—and you guys are, you know, investors; you talk to startups all the time—it’s like, our key advantage is being very focused on one problem, and executing on it faster than a bigger company can. Again, as a result that has driven us to be extremely focused on solving these B2C problems.
Now, I do think there’s a very large and growing compelling opportunity to focus on enterprise including in the spaces that we’re working in, but as a startup, the key thing we can do really well is focus. And so that’s why we’ve been razor-focused on the B2C problems and pain points and products. And I do think as more companies now, more public companies, are bringing Bitcoin onto their balance sheets and their treasuries, we’re seeing more—like, the crypto ecosystem itself is burgeoning. Like, there’s all these crypto startups now, a lot of them are accepting payments in crypto, paying out in crypto, and they’re all going to need ways of tracking this doing accounting, doing bookkeeping. It’s very much in our natural wheelhouse of extension, it’s just not the first thing we’ve chosen to tackle because we want to build excellent products in everything we take on.
Jason: That makes sense.
Will: What is the natural extension, in your perspective, about the relationship with the consumer after you solve this problem for them? What does this sort of open the door to, from kind of a product expansion and value expansion perspective?
Chandan: So, right now, one of the core problems that CoinTracker solves is at the end of the year, you’ve completed all your transactions; we will reconcile them for you and generate some tax forms. The extension of that is basically providing year-round value to people, not just once-a-year value at the end of the tax season. And so I’ll give you some examples. We, during Covid, like I was mentioning, launched this portfolio subscription that helps users basically get more insights into their cryptocurrency activity on a daily basis. That includes notifications, alerts, tax-loss harvesting strategies, cost basis information, the ability to optimize people’s portfolios, year-round.
And the reason why that matters so much is because it actually helps people do tax planning, wealth optimization, tax optimization, which can only be done during the actual tax calendar year, not when the year is over. So, that is one way that we’re adding more value. And to take that even one step further, what is going to be really amazing is being able to actually help people make actions on their cryptocurrency in a non-custodial way. So, it’s going to be really cool is now you have your wallets, you have your exchanges tracked here, we can help you do things like rebalance your portfolio, or tax-loss harvest your portfolio with a very simple UX, without storing your private keys because you’re already using this as your central, sort of, hub to manage your cryptocurrency portfolio.
Will: So, it’s really—it’s a path to being one of the definitive robo-advisor platforms for consumers as relates to their crypto exposure?
Chandan: I think it’s something similar to that. I’m not sure I would necessarily say it’s exactly a robo-advisor because we’re not imminently planning on becoming an investment advisor. But it’s something in that vein, where it’s a one-stop-shop to be really simple interface to interact with your cryptocurrency portfolio.
Will: Given the volatility in crypto, tax-loss harvesting feels like such an unbelievably powerful tool if you can effectively deliver it to folks where it should just be extraordinarily valuable. That’s really exciting. I hadn’t thought about that.
Jason: Well, and also, I think it’s a part of the tax portion that individuals aren’t typically thinking about, right? They’re like, certainly, we have the Wall Street Bets people that are day-trading, et cetera, [laugh] but I think for the most part, people are, you know, building a basket over time, you know, I’m just talking about your average person that maybe they bought Bitcoin or Ethereum, it’s gone up or down a little bit. And they wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about tax-loss harvesting in their own, kind of, course of doing business. But they might be checking their CoinTracker—I get my emails every day, which is [laugh] honestly, like, a huge value in and of itself—and I’ve seen that in there, just that one simple thing where you can be saving money. I mean, it can be pretty substantial impact on your taxes in a world that’s feels like it’s getting more complicated.
And maybe we can, kind of, circle back to the tax regulation. I don’t know if you want to speculate on how things are changing right now, but we saw some regulation go through that was attached to the infrastructure bill, and reporting. Obviously, an explosion of activity, tons of rug pulls and scams that are unfortunate headline grabbers, to your point, around, it’s not just shady actors, but they get the kind of the loudest, sometimes, out there. Where do you expect things to shift if you are able to make any kind of predictions? Or maybe you can give people a sense of since 2014, how the IRS has clarified their position on these assets.
Chandan: Right. So, in 2014, cryptocurrency usage was a tiny fraction of what it is today. So, there was some guidance, there were some people, but it wasn’t a central focus of the government. It was a very fringe thing, even in 2017 it was sort of like this. After that major bull run, people started making millions of dollars and it was just wild; it started getting more media coverage, things like that. There was a little bit more attention paid.
Then a few years later, we started seeing the IRS send out tens of thousands of warning letters to people that they knew had cryptocurrency activity but hadn’t filed. So, then we saw, okay, the IRS is stepping up its efforts and really paying attention to this. And now, like you just referenced an infrastructure bill in November of 2001, we basically saw that the government is going to basically force all US-based cryptocurrency exchanges to put all of their users into tax compliance by the end of ’23. So, what we’re going to see over the next few years is a very small number of people being tax compliant, going to really high level of compliance. And as a result, there’s going to be tens of millions of American taxpayers are going to need to find a way to become tax compliant in their cryptocurrency transaction activity. And that is what makes such a compelling opportunity for us right now is that we’ve built a really compelling solution for exactly those users.
Jason: Gotcha. And what is the role of, you know, the individual wallets? I mean, just from my own, I bought Bitcoin in 2014, you know [laugh]? I’ve been in it for a while. I ended up—
Will: You love to brag, man. Congratulations.
Jason: No, I sold it [crosstalk 00:20:48] eight grand. I thought it was a genius. Bought it, like, you know, $200 sold almost all of it at eight grand. So, it was it a great return on investment, but like, should have obviously held on. But I’m fairly deep in this space, have been for a while, and boy, do I have sprawl across—now I’ve got Solana Wallet, an Avalanche Wallet, I’ve got a Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask Wallet, I have crypto staked here, there, and everywhere.
If you really are going down the rabbit hole, your assets are spread out in a big way. And I’m curious how you are helping your user base as I assume, you know, that these are accessible markets now to the normal person, right? You and I can become a market maker on Uniswap, and that’s, like, a new thing for an individual user. Is that an interesting avenue for you guys to explore and expand your relationship with consumers? And do you have any insights as how that will be treated over time by the IRS?
Chandan: Absolutely. Okay. So, I think you’ve touched upon multiple good points. The first is people are getting into more and more complexity in the crypto space. It’s not just buying and selling Bitcoin anymore; it’s all kinds of Web3 stuff. It’s DeFi, it’s NFTs, it’s staking, it’s lending, there’s new crazier things that people are coming up with every day.
And so this just further exacerbates that original problem that we saw in 2017 of people need a simple, unified way to keep track of everything that’s going on, the sprawling sort of nature of cryptocurrency, like you said. So, that is absolutely in our wheelhouse. It’s a major area of focus. We’ve recently added support for NFT tracking and portfolio tracking, and we’re going to continue developing that further in the DeFi realm as well, like you said. We already support hundreds of different exchange integrations, thousands of different cryptocurrencies, and now there’s things like L2s, all this kind of stuff.
So yes, absolutely, very core to the focus of what we’re doing. The second thing is helping make some of this more complexity and sprawling sort of cryptocurrency stuff more easily accessible to more people. Because yes, if you’re Jason and you’re a crypto guru who got into the space in 2014 and are super deep, awesome, but the average person isn’t necessarily going to know how to be an automated market maker on Uniswap, or how to, like, stake their Avalanche or whatever. So that’s, again, where some of the stuff that we were just chatting about becomes really critical is super simple, easy to use interfaces that wrap the complexity behind using all these protocols behind the scenes and make very simple UIs and user experiences for people to understand, what am I actually doing? How can I actually do it, but with simple buttons, not complicated tooling, or command-line tools, or you know, whatever other kind of complicated stuff people are having to do. So, that’s sort of the second area where I think we can really help bring people into these new types of opportunities in a responsible way that helps them actually understand what’s going on.
Jason: What’s so interesting about that is if we think of just like TurboTax, as, like, the really reductive [laugh] parallel here, right, to a certain extent, you are going the opposite direction that TurboTax is going, which I think is really, really fascinating. That you’re kind of like leaning into, hey, we’re actually going to help you proactively manage this, rather than just stay in the tax lane. Which I think is such a—you know, people do need, kind of, that trusted service or advisor or product or something like that, where they do know that they can be tax compliant, right? My parents aren’t looking to, like, go super deep, and, like, figure out the tax stuff later, you know, but they want to be kind of active in some of that more trustworthy activities that are now accessible. So, I think that’s a really interesting avenue of expansion and does feel really kind of core to your initial thrust.
Will: Going to that point that Jason was just hammering on around the sprawl and this constant expansion of where relevant tax data sits, how do you think about the ecosystem of integrations and the depth that happens there maybe, particularly around some of the exchanges and major wallet providers? That’s got to be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, as you think about product and engineering.
Chandan: Right. So, this gets to the sort of the core secret sauce of what makes CoinTracker valuable is that it is very hard to integrate all these things. Everyone has their own spec, everyone has their own API, everyone has their own format, many people don’t have any format at all. The same coin has different names in different places, different prices in different places, different trading pairs in different places, and it’s a total mess. And so what CoinTracker does, the key, the essence of what we do really well is integrate all of these things as they’re always changing, evolving, adapting, getting more complex, and reconciling it into one straight-forward ledger of transaction activity.
So, the core of what we’re doing is basically partnering with all these different people and integrating them. So, you mentioned some of these APIs, like, for example, Coinbase is one of our partners, and we basically help make this super simple for anyone who’s using Coinbase or Coinbase Pro. No matter what kind of activity you out there, it will be easily reconciled into CoinTracker. You mentioned TurboTax, too. Like, our ambition here is not to build a tax company. It’s to make all of this sprawling complexity super simple and provide people value in various ways, for example, by integrating into TurboTax, and then you can get your taxes filed in TurboTax if you choose to be a TurboTax [unintelligible 00:26:06]—yes, that’s exactly what we’re focused on is taking the sprawling complexity of integrations, making all the engineering effort that’s required to work on that at scale, but then obfuscating it away from users, so they don’t have to think about it at all.
Will: Yeah. And I would imagine all of those different stakeholders and exchanges and wallets are aligned in wanting to see a CoinTracker integration because they’re going to see regulatory hurdles here around tax compliance be a hindrance on engagement from a consumer base and a hindrance on transaction volume if there isn’t a really robust and really intuitive platform for folks to consolidate all that information.
Chandan: You nailed it.
Jason: I think also, it’s just a brilliant way to funnel the largest possible footprint of crypto users into a single product, which is death and taxes. Like, [laugh] you know, like—
Chandan: And Bitcoin.
Jason: If you just think about it, it’s like, okay, great. There’s going to be a project here that does this, right? And this, that the other thing that’s, like, trying to help you, but everybody is going to need to file their taxes. [laugh]. So, we can hit—some service provider in the US will hit basically one hundred percent of crypto users, and you guys are making yourself the most attractive point and then expanding that relationship with other products and services throughout the rest of the year. Which is—yeah, I think it’s phenomenal.
Will: Super. Yeah, it’s really cool. So, now that we’re full-swing in another bull market, what are the big challenges facing the business? What are the big, kind of, campaigns that you guys are on right now?
Chandan: By far, the number one thing is scaling.
Will: Yeah.
Chandan: Like you said, last year was absolutely wild in the crypto space. The amount of growth that we’re seeing on all dimensions, crypto trading, DeFi, NFTs, new users getting into this space, transaction volume, every single record was broken last year. And as you can imagine, taxes are a sort of lagging indicator of the success of transaction activity in the prior year. So, this is going to be by far the biggest crypto tax year in history. And we’re a startup, so as a result, it’s all hands on deck to scale and handle way more transaction volume, way more users, way more integrations, way more people, basically trying to get all this stuff figured out. And so for our US-based customers, that’s kind of January through April, and we’re recording right now in February, so we’re getting right into busy season.
Jason: [laugh]. Well, thanks for making time.
Will: Yeah.
Jason: You referenced US-based customers. I was going to ask around—this is happening everywhere. I think India might have just announced how they’re going to be taxing crypto, there’s massive, massive markets that are finally bringing some clarity to the crypto space. Where does that fall in priorities? I guess you got to get the US [laugh] right first, and then figure out the rest of the world later? Or where do the ambitions lie in the next couple of years, do you think?
Chandan: I wish we had the luxury of just focusing on one country at a time, but like you said, new massive markets are coming online, and this is—you know, it’s a land grab. So, right now, for the tax side, we support US, UK, Canada, and Australia. And on the portfolio tracking and portfolio subscription side, we actually have paying users in many countries. And the reason why we can do that as a small team is because the cryptocurrency sort of system works the same globally, right? Bitcoin works the same in India, and the US, Brazil, China because it’s just an online protocol.
What’s different are the local tax rules, but 80% of what we’re doing is integrations, right? It’s understanding how the Bitcoin, sort of, blockchain works and setting up node infrastructure for the relevant chains, and reconciling all the data. And if we do that right in one place, it actually works everywhere. It’s that last 20% of the go-to-market, partnering with the local tax experts, making sure everything is localized, language, payments, that is the kind of the lift for bringing on new markets. And you mentioned India; like, yes, there’s tens of millions of new cryptocurrency users that are going to come online in the very near future who are going to basically need to figure out their taxes there as well and that is definitely an opportunity that we’re excited about.
Jason: That’s awesome. Yet another advantage of building in the crypto space is that kind of like commonality, at least the baseline transactions, you don’t have, like, a different system you’ve got to figure out for each country.
Chandan: That’s right.
Jason: Makes a lot of sense.
Will: The key question I have here, and this is sort of what we almost always wrap up with is if you’re really successful if CoinTracker reaches its full potential, how has the world changed? What’s the ten-year vision for where this company is going and the mark that you guys want to leave on not only this market but—it sounds like—the global economy?
Chandan: Love this question. So, I think what you have to believe—you know, if you sort of suspend disbelief, and you imagine, okay, we’re teleporting ten years into the future; what kind of currency are people using? And the kind of vision we have for this is a digital-native, global financial system. So, you can imagine, let’s say some kind of cryptocurrency—Bitcoin or otherwise—is kind of the way that people are transacting value over time and space. And if that’s the case, that means there’s going to be billions of daily active users of cryptocurrency, billions.
And all these people are going to have the same pain points around financial services that they do with fiat-based financial services, taxes, bookkeeping, portfolio tracking, sending, remittances, all these things. And what we want to do is build really simple tools that billions of people can use to manage all their cryptocurrency transactions. And the reason why we’re doing all of this is because our mission is to help increase the world’s financial freedom and prosperity. So, if we do this right, we will be able to do that on a global scale.
Jason: Incredible. Love the mission. Thanks so much for coming in, Chandan. It was lovely to have you and congrats on all the success today.
Will: Yeah, really unbelievably impressive, and we’re super excited to not only be customers but to continue to track the success of the company as you guys build.
Chandan: Awesome. Thank you guys so much, and good luck. I want to see your continued growth and success building out the podcast, too.
Will: We’ll need it. Thanks.
Will: Thank you for listening to Perfectly Boring. You can keep up the latest on the podcast at perfectlyboring.com, and follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll see you next time.