DRW VC Portfolio Company Spotlight: David Kemmerer, CoinLedger

CoinLedger, formerly known as Cryptotrader.tax, is expanding their services from robust tax reporting to portfolio management software for the digital asset economy. As CoinLedger has recently announced $6 million raised in funding, CEO David Kemmerer explains why CoinLedger tax and portfolio management software is a must-have and what he expects from the company this year.

How did CoinLedger, formerly cryptotrader.tax come to be?

In 2017, my partners and I built cryptocurrency arbitrage trading systems between exchanges. On those exchanges, some assets were mispriced, and we were trading on those mispriced assets, executing over 120,000 transactions a month. All of that activity had to be reported on our taxes which presented a problem—how do we correctly calculate our capital gains and capital losses across thousands of transactions? The solution was simple. We built tax software to automate all cryptocurrency users' capital gains and losses and income tax reporting— this is exactly what Cryptotrader.tax (now CoinLedger) delivers.

Can you explain the new product launch that led to Cryptotrader.tax’s rebrand?

Over the past three years, we have collected and built to the feedback from our user base. Some assumptions we made while launching Cryptotrader.tax had to be adjusted to better serve our users. Moving forward, CoinLedger is expanding beyond tax reporting to portfolio management across the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. CoinLedger can track your portfolio performance for free, and of course, complete your taxes as well.

The new portfolio management product aligns with our mission to connect the crypto economy. So today, CoinLedger is far more than just tax reporting, which inspired our re-branding.

How does CoinLedger help solve the tax reporting problem for cryptocurrency users?

It’s important to remember that everyone's crypto experience is different. Users can use CoinLedger as a one-stop-shop to manage all of their crypto activity across the entire cryptocurrency economy. We can automate users’ tax reporting portfolio management, calculate gains and losses, and income incurred throughout any user's crypto journey. We have solved the primary tax reporting pain point by integrating with various pieces of the crypto economy (NFTs and DeFi functionality, for example), and will continue as the crypto economy evolves.

Any user can create an account, integrate wallets, exchanges, and blockchains, and use our platform to view their entire transaction history and manage their crypto activity.

What has been the most surprising market development for you? How has it impacted the way you do business?

The ecosystem was much different when we founded CoinLedger. As crypto has continued to evolve, we have grown to support many other cryptocurrency use cases from a tax reporting perspective that we didn't necessarily foresee when we first started the company.

The most surprising market developments are the creative use cases that people have developed to utilize cryptocurrency technology, whether NFTs or DeFi, which we expect to continue to see. The most important thing for us is to keep building flexible technology that can continue to support the ever-changing technologies, and that's what we're well-positioned to do with our new CoinLedger product.

What can we expect from CoinLedger in 2022?

CoinLedger has deep connectivity that will continue to expand across even more platforms this year. Our goal is for CoinLedger to grow with our customers and deliver perfect efficiency. We’ve recently announced a fundraising round led by FinTech collective, DRW Venture Capital, and CMT Digital. This latest fundraising is a testament to the validity of our product and supports our expansion to new markets and cryptoassets to continue to grow with our customer base.

Learn more about CoinLedger.