Cointracker: File Crypto Taxes & Manage Holdings
Companies like CoinTracker are paving the way for the Bitcoin ecosystem to be bigger than we ever could have imagined.

This week, we’re talking with Chandan Lodha of CoinTracker. It’s perfect timing because crypto is back. CoinTracker is the best way for you to keep track of the crypto you own. The thing they do better than anyone else: they actually automatically synchronize with hundreds of exchanges and hundreds of cryptocurrencies, so you don’t ever have to enter manual trades. From there, it’ll help you with everything, including your tax filings. Today, we’re going to talk about crypto startups and how you can get started in crypto, even if you haven’t bought anything yet.
Garry: Chandan, thank you so much for joining us today. I mean, what a crazy day it is… Bitcoin at some $30,000 [and] Ethereum’s back up to north of $1,000. Who knows where it’s going to be when people actually watch the video because it’s so volatile, but thank you for hopping on. I’m really excited to hear about CoinTracker.
Chandan: It’s my pleasure. It’s always really fun to talk to you, Garry.
Garry: What is CoinTracker, and how did you guys think of working on this?
Chandan: My co-founder Jon and I basically became crypto enthusiasts a couple of years ago. We fell into our own personal pain point of having different cryptocurrency assets — whether it be Bitcoin, Ethereum or a number of other coins — and just trying to keep track of what assets do we have, how much and where were the transactions taking place. It was kind of a mess to all aggregate into one place. So that was the initial pain point, and that led us to building CoinTracker, which is basically a simple way to manage your cryptocurrency portfolio and stay tax-compliant.

Garry: My favorite thing about it is that it’s actually automatic. [With] a lot of apps you have to manually enter [things like], “Oh, I bought this at this price, at this time.” It just doesn’t quite work the way it should. The way CoinTracker works is actually a lot like Mint. If people remember Mint, it’s just sort of magically correct about what your holdings are, whether you hold it in your ledger or on your paper wallet or you keep it on an exchange. At a glance, it’s all up-to-date, all of the time.
Chandan: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It was basically that insight that you just mentioned ***—***it’s super annoying and tiresome to keep track of every transaction, item by item — that ultimately leads to people just not doing it. So it had to be totally seamless and automatic, and that’s exactly what Mint did, and we’ve kind of brought that to the crypto space.
Garry: And I guess once you actually have that, the taxes are actually just obvious. If you have one source of truth for where all your holdings are and at what price they were bought or sold, the obvious next step is to be able to support basically every tax scenario that both beginner and advanced traders could possibly run across.
Chandan: That’s exactly what we found out too. So we initially set out to build an awesome portfolio tracker for cryptocurrency, but as soon as we started doing that, people basically started yelling at us like, “Why aren’t you doing my taxes too?” And it was a very natural extension of that. So that’s what we’ve done both in the U.S. and also abroad for users in the U.K., Australia, Canada, et cetera.

Garry: So big news today… You’re actually doing something with Coinbase. What’s happening?
Chandan: Yeah, we’re super stoked about this. Coinbase is the biggest US-based exchange, and we have partnered with Coinbase now as a recommended software for users to calculate their cryptocurrency capital gains and losses. With the click of a button, Coinbase users can sign up for CoinTracker; import all of the history for their transactions; and get an output of their actual tax reports so that they can be compliant with the IRS or whatever their regulatory authority might be. We’re dramatically lowering the barrier for all Coinbase retail and exchange users to get their crypto taxes done really, really easily.
Garry: It’s actually kind of surprising how many edge cases there are. There are so many different exchanges, so many different types of wallets. If you ask someone, “Do you want a crypto tracker that is accurate and fast?” The answer is “Yes,” but as an engineer or a product person, you dig a little bit deeper, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s actually really hard.” There’s actually so many things you have to nail. How did you think about that, the heavy lift of the 10,000 bugs that you would have to face to get this right? And you do have to nail it because it’s people’s taxes.
Chandan: Totally. It’s honestly a journey. I can’t say that everything is perfect. We’re always working through new issues in the crypto space. Even within the tech space, it moves super fast. So like you mentioned, there’s always a new coin, a new exchange, a new coin swap, fork, airdrop, mining scenario… and the guidance itself from tax authorities is evolving and changing as we go. So there’s plenty for us to keep adapting and building on, making it better.
A recent example is sort of the surge of the Ethereum space and DeFi ecosystem where users are now doing yield farming and all kinds of liquidity mining and moving assets out into staked platforms to earn interest in yield. So kind of integrating that whole ecosystem through decentralized integrations, essentially going straight to the Blockchain, has been a recent challenge that we’ve faced. But now, we’ve integrated all of the top DeFi platforms, and users can track all [of] those assets. What’s particularly interesting — and somewhat different from what people might be used to seeing in traditional fintech or traditional finances — [is] these are autonomous platforms. There is no company there or a Delaware C-Corp that’s going to generate your tax forms or tell you what transactions you had, right? These are totally autonomous. So platforms like CoinTracker help take the complexity of all of these smart contracts and define integrations into just a simple ledger of: here are all the transactions made; here’s what I need for taxes; here’s my performance metrics; and here’s how I can even optimize my portfolio by taking some of these tax considerations in to making smarter or better trades.
Garry: Yeah. I mean, concretely, this is actually really, really important to have the right tools alongside you. There are people out there right now who probably bought Ethereum at $80, and they’re looking at the Ethereum price at $1,000 — and they did more than a 10-bagger. But at the same time, maybe they bought a bunch of Altcoins. They probably needed to do some tax loss harvesting. And what is that? How do you even know what that is, and what should you do? You actually probably wouldn’t know what to do without a tool like CoinTracker.
Chandan: I’ve constantly come across users who are in the same boat. Maybe they’re earlier crypto investors or maybe they’ve recently gotten in, but they want to make sure that they’re trading to the best of their ability or if they’re hodling, making sure they’re taking advantage of different kinds of tax strategies, of which there are many. Despite how annoying crypto taxes can sometimes be, given how complicated the rules are, that actually creates an opportunity for the savvy investor to basically make their portfolio have a better post-tax return. You mentioned tax-loss harvesting. In particular, that’s one that’s kind of interesting. Basically, what it allows people to do is sell an asset being held at an unrealized capital loss and then get it back. The result is that you have the same exact portfolio that you had before, but you have a lower tax bill — totally free. It’s allowed by the IRS, and you can actually do this in other asset classes too. People do this with stocks all the time, but there are some intricacies to the tax code that make it even more favorable for cryptocurrency. So we’ve built tools that basically allow people to take advantage of these strategies in a fairly automated way. So it’s not like you’re pouring through spreadsheets, counting tax lots, trying to figure out what to do… CoinTracker automates away that complexity and just says, “You have this much bitcoin with these many harvestable losses.” So it becomes really obvious and straightforward on how you can take advantage of these strategies.
Garry: So how did you guys get into crypto initially, and what do you think is happening right now?
Chandan: My story for crypto is I sort of got interested in it back in college. [I] was working on various projects around it, but actually, when I first got my Bitcoin, was in 2014 because I was at Google as a Product Manager, working on a pretty small integration with Coinbase. Coinbase, at the time, was already becoming one of the leaders in good user-experience around buying and selling cryptocurrencies, and as a small token of the integration work that we built with them, they just let me have some small amount of bitcoin. I had stopped paying attention to it for a few years, but then in early 2017, I was checking that same bitcoin, and I couldn’t believe how much it had appreciated in value in just three years.

Garry: Brian Armstrong, early on, was giving away one whole bitcoin to people, but it was worth $7 or $10 back then, back when he was in Y Combinator.
Chandan: That’s a great growth strategy for the early days, and it’s really paid off well for him and for the company. I had this small amount of bitcoin, and it appreciated a ton. I was super interested in fintech at the time, and initially, I actually had a fairly skeptical view of cryptocurrency. Just kind of like, “What is this fake money? What gives it value?” A lot of the common things you hear from people… But I think actually just tinkering around a little bit more with bitcoin; trying it out; getting a small amount; setting up some wallets; seeing how I can actually custody my own wealth and take it wherever I wanted, send it to whomever I wanted, pay international contractors without having to ask them for their mailing address and waiting for multiple intermediary banks to charge their fee for international FX conversions… Seeing the value myself is what really made me think, “Okay, this is amazing. I have to dedicate my career to this, quit my job at Google and start working on this.”
Garry: I was probably pre-exposed to the concepts that led to Bitcoin because I was working on hedge fund software for Peter Thiel in 2004 and 2005. One of the books they forced me to read was The Dollar Crisis. Today, there’s a lot more broad understanding of what’s happening in some ways because there are websites like wtfhappenedin1971.com. We came off of the gold standard. The dollar used to be worth something, and then now, it is basically like Zynga bucks. It is like a virtual currency issued by an authority; it’s a fiat currency but totally unmoored. It is sort of the underlying basis for the global financial system. It is almost kind of funny. I joke with my friends, especially people from my era of computer science at Stanford. We all studied to be engineers, but if you look at what a lot of us are doing, it’s PE (private equity); it’s hedge fund; it’s VC. Why is that? I don’t know if this is a good thing for society to be frank. Elon Musk is right when he talks about why are the best minds of our generations — they should be doing what you’re doing instead of what I’m doing actually. I feel very guilty about that. On the other hand, all of this tracks back to the stock market, asset price accumulation and bubbles, but then also bitcoin as an alternative to gold. Here we are. The Nasdaq and the S&P are higher than they ever have been; tech IPOs are completely unbelievable. But at the same time, we’re in the middle of a pandemic that seemingly will never end. Though hopefully, the light is at the end of the tunnel. How many of those $600 stimulus checks are getting dropped right into Bitcoin and Ethereum? Probably quite a lot, and it might actually be a smart move for them.
Chandan: There’s a lot there. I totally agree with some of those points. First of all though, Garry, we really appreciate what you do, and you help many entrepreneurs actually do their thing. So you’re much needed in the ecosystem. I think it is pretty crazy when you zoom back and look at a longer, sort of monetary view of how things are working. I never thought about money. To be honest, I never once really thought about money before working on bitcoin. I think this is quite a common thing for people in this space. It’s super prolific; [and] everyone takes it for granted. It kind of works, especially if you’re in a country like the United States, which has this global reserve currency, and you can buy whatever you want, whenever you want. And maybe if you’re unlucky, you might see the edges of the financial system causing problems. Let’s say if you’re trying to do some kind of international wire stuff or maybe if you’re doing some kind of online gambling type of stuff, you might see the edges of where the system starts to break. But for the average person, you probably won’t; it probably works well enough. Money gets inflated away at 2% a year, but it’s small enough that you don’t really notice it in any given year. But like that website you mentioned, if you take a broader view and you look at what happens in the long-term or how long we’ve actually even had fiat currencies on more to any kind of bare asset like gold, it’s a really small amount of time. It’s been the last 50 years maybe that that’s been the case, certainly not before. I would be hard pressed to imagine that’s going to continue forever. I think re-examining the fundamentals of money and just learning about it, learning about the history of the economy has been really, really exciting and interesting for me, and I think also for seeing where the space is going to go forward. One of the core reasons why I’m super excited about CoinTracker and what we’re working on is [that] we basically think that the crypto market cap and the crypto ecosystem is super nascent. Even with the recent bull runs and things like that, there’s going to be short-term volatility for sure. It’ll go up; it’ll go down.
Garry: First pitch of the first inning actually.
Chandan: Totally. It’s super small. We’re talking about a couple hundred billion dollar market cap that we haven’t even had a trillion.
Garry: We’re at 800 now, which is still crazy though.
Chandan: It’s super crazy for people who have been working in the space for a few years. I don’t think Satoshi Nakamoto would have dreamed of this day a decade ago. Kind of looking forward, if this crypto experiment is actually going to really work, we’re not going to be talking about hundreds of billions — we’re going to be talking about trillions, tens of trillions dollars of market cap. So from that perspective, this industry is at the very bottom of the S-curve, and it’s just starting to pick up more adoption. That’s the reason why that’s really exciting for us — because we already have a super dedicated, loyal, highly-retained user base of people who need this critical service of tracking all their transactions, having a unified view of what’s going on, definitely staying tax-compliant as government regulators want to make sure they’re getting their slice of the pie with so much capital inflow coming in here. And if you look at the long-term view of this industry — not just 10 X-ing but 100X-ing literally in market cap — then you basically see that there’s going to be multiple multi-billion dollar opportunities to build all these core financial services that exist in the traditional financial system but have no solution at scale for crypto. So that’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re really excited about it.

Garry: This isn’t the first boom that we’ve all seen, and it may not be the last one. So what advice would you have for people who look at crypto? Some of them may be still hodling. They probably need to be using CoinTracker right now, but there are a good number of people who might own a very small amount or might not own any of it. What would you say to them?
Chandan: I’m generally not in the business of giving financial advice because that’s not my specialty, but I would say generally speaking, if you’re interested in crypto, have an open mind and try the get-rich-slowly approach. I’m generally skeptical of people who are really getting into day trading unless they’re dedicating all of their time and expertise to that. Unless you’re one of those people who’s day in, day out and researching and knowing the ins and outs and details of different projects, I would say, if you’re interested, dip your feet in; get $10 a bitcoin. You don’t have to buy a $30,000 bitcoin to see what’s going on. You can spend $10 on an exchange, try it for yourself.
Garry: You can get 0.01.
Chandan: You can get 10 to the minus eight bitcoin-
Garry: There’s something very respectable about any, yeah.
Chandan: And that’s the way to do it.
Garry: You just get us a Toshi, and it’d still be a lot.
Chandan: Get us a Toshi.lay around with it. See what you could do. See how the tools work. See how the individual empowerment works when you can custody your own assets or send money to anyone anywhere, anytime 24/7/365 without anyone’s permission. In real-time, track it on a block explorer. It’s pretty empowering and pretty awesome. So I would say: start small; try it out yourself; and the biggest thing is don’t day trade unless you are an expert yourself. Just get a small amount, and if you do end up getting excited, you can dollar-cost average. You can buy whatever your budget allows on a weekly recurring cadence, so that you are getting exposure and not getting over indexed on any one particular price high, sort of screwing yourself based on the time of what your investment is. That allows you to get exposure. Try something new, and if you become interested or if it ends up being something that you want to learn more about, you can always double down on your investment later.
Garry: I think the big one for me is when my friends or family asks, I always tell them, “Don’t ever put anything more than you would be willing to lose. Be prepared to lose all of it actually.” If you look at that amount of money and say, “Oh, I really wouldn’t be able to get by without that,” you’re thinking too big. That’s why you have to start small, especially when the prices are historically quite high. A dollar-cost average is actually far safer than buying a bunch of what might be local maximum actually.
Chandan: Totally right. [I]100% agree with that, and we’ve seen time and time again, people get washed out when things get too hyped up. Then there’s a big crash, and people have to sell to get liquidity. Now they’re both underwater, and they might have incurred a huge tax bill on the previous calendar year.
Garry: That’s where the trading hurts a lot. It’s quite scary. If you bought Ethereum at $80 and it’s $1,000 now [and] if you sell out of it at $1,000, that’s actually great. Now, arguably what you should do is set aside 40% of that or whatever your tax bill might be, and just don’t touch it; leave it in fiat. And then if you do enter the market again, only put the non-tax amount back in. And if you don’t do that, what you’ll find is you will owe taxes on losses if the market goes the other way. And a lot of people in 2017/18 found themselves out a lot of money that way.
Chandan: Exactly. We hate to see when that happens because it really sucks if you have a huge tax bill in general, but it’s worse if you’ve actually made a realized loss in the next tax year — definitely don’t do that. And this is where tools like CoinTracker can help you predict these things before they happen and plan for them and tax loss harvest, so you don’t run into those scenarios.
Garry: But even on the day-to-day aspect, I switched over from Blockfolio to CoinTracker 100%. It was just funny to see Blockfolio totally down on the day Ethereum finally hit $1,000, and it was down for all day. I mean, everyone has some downtime, but of all days, that’s the day that you want [it] to be up I guess. One of the things I really like about [it] after I’ve switched [was] you can actually really see exactly what the net amount in and out is. If you spend too much time on some of the crypto exchanges, it does kind of feel like you’re at the gambling hall, and they don’t want you to know, [things like:] how much money did I put in; [and] how much money did I take out. They don’t want you to take the chips off the table. And that’s why CoinTracker to me is so important because CoinTracker works for you, the user. CoinTracker doesn’t make more money if you keep more money at the gambling table. If anything, it’s sort of your buddy in the back being like, “Hey, maybe you should think about this.”
Chandan: Yeah, that’s right. We basically want our incentives to be aligned with the user’s incentives, which is having transparency over your portfolio and education around what you’re doing and how to make better decisions. Both providing that information in an unbiased way to users and also having them see all of the relevant metrics around their investing is super critical. And that’s another key thing that CoinTracker does really well that you won’t see on a lot of other tracking apps or on exchanges — personalized metrics for your portfolio and across all the different exchanges and wallets you’re using, like your net deposits, your net withdrawals, your ROI at different timeframes by asset, et cetera. So yeah, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.

Garry: It gets complicated fast. I mean Tezos, for instance, you have staking, which is a form of putting your crypto in a lockbox in order to support the network, but then they’re actually paying you a staking reward, which correct me if I’m wrong, but depending on where you’re at in the world, some people might treat that as income actually. Multiply out the complexity across every exchange, every type of cryptocurrency, and then things like staking or options or all of these things, it’s a pretty exponential fan out on complexity.
Chandan: That’s exactly right. Yeah, you have all the complexity of traditional finance plus all of these new crypto concepts that aren’t always necessarily super well-defined in the tax code.
Garry: And some of them didn’t exist five years ago or three years ago or last year.
Chandan: Exactly. So it’s always keeping up with the latest things, and it is super important that we do that. That’s another core tenant for CoinTracker because if we just did the top 10 exchanges or the top 10 coins, then we would basically be solving 80% of people’s crypto portfolio tracking or 80% of their taxes, but that would leave them holding the bag in the water, not being able to finish their full tax holding. The key thing there is having hundreds of exchanges integrated; thousands of blockchains integrated; supporting derivatives and margin trading; supporting DeFi integration; supporting staking with Tezos and Earn; covering the whole gamut of things; and staying up to speed with the latest developments. That’s what we do best.
Garry: Taking a step back, one of my favorite things to ask for founders in particular [is] what are the things that you wish you knew when you first entered tech, even before starting the business. If you could put a message in a bottle to yourself when you were first starting out, what surprised you? What do you wish you knew?
Chandan: My background, just for context, is…Out of college, I joined a two-year rotational program at Google called Associate Product Manager, and then I spent an additional two years working at Google X on a project called Loon about providing internet access to people via stratospheric balloons. I had a great experience at Alphabet as a Product Manager. I thought it was a great place to get my feet wet with product management and learn things. But I think if there was one lesson that I would take away for my younger self, it would just be: Just do it. Just get into it. Just try something. For me, that was entrepreneurship, which I have loved working on CoinTracker with, but it might be something different for each person. But I would say, just try it. I think there’s a lot of hedging for me. It’s like, “Oh, maybe if I get one more promo, then I will be qualified enough to be an entrepreneur.” No, there’s always going to be another thing, another obstacle, another project, another promotion, another job… Do the thing that you actually want to do. That might not always be possible for everyone depending on your financial circumstances, your location and what opportunities are available. But I think if you do not have all of these other constraints, then just go for it. Some other things that were kind of interesting for me… making the jump from a bigger tech company to entrepreneurship. So for those folks who were working at one of these GAFA-style FAANG companies and who might be interested in working at a startup or starting their own thing, I think one thing is you just are not prepared for going from zero to one at a big company. I was working on projects that had 30 million users, and we were trying to get them to 40 million users at Google, which is so totally different than trying to get one random stranger to try your beta version of your product or whatever random thing. It’s just a totally different skill set, and you have to be your own sales team, your own marketing team, your own UX team, your own everything… the only way to really learn that is by doing it yourself. There was a lot of unlearning that had to happen from my Google background before I was able to start doing that in a sort of startup environment.
Garry: Yeah, those experiences are incredibly different. It’s going from one to a hundred or one to a billion…So different than zero to one.
Chandan: Before we were working on CoinTracker, we were messing around with some other ideas that were not related to cryptocurrency. It was very humbling to send that out to 10, 50, 100 friends and family and have literally nobody care about what we were doing versus at Google, you write the blog post; the PR team sends it out; and millions of people are looking at it the next day. Getting ready for that switch is a big thing. In terms of the lessons there.. We went through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, and they really boil it down for you in quite a compelling way. In the early days, there’s basically two things that matter, at least for a software startup, which are: talk to your users, and build what they want; And then just iterate, just keep doing that over and over again. It’s that simple. There’s lots of other shiny things that are distracting, like tech press, fundraising, getting some shiny partnership and this and that…. and those things, they’re important; they’ll come. But in the early days, the only things that matter are understanding what your users want and talking to them.
Garry: It’s really interesting because today, we’re sort of standing on the other side of a valley in terms of crypto and what certainly the price is. Prices are not everything, but the volatility of crypto itself is probably more concentrated than any other market in the world. I feel like I have grown as an investor. I feel like I lived 20 years as an investor in the last, three years of my crypto holding experience because I guess, tip to trough, that really sucked. You experienced it; your users experienced it; and our friends in crypto experienced it. It was the euphoria of bitcoin at $20,000, Ethereum at $1,200 or $1,400 or whatever it was, then down to $80 and like $3,000. Now, we’re back to some other new highs…What was that experience like for you, especially as a founder who day in, day out, was exercising the talk to users and make things for them? Some of the users were not so happy for a long time. I mean, you had to have very, very strong hands, as they say in the industry.
Chandan: That is what they say. So it was a massive roller coaster ride as any startup is — but it felt particularly pronounced because at the end of 2017, things were just hitting unparalleled heights for the first time. People were going ballistic basically. Every day, it was just like a vertical chart, and we were getting crazy demand. Users were reaching out nonstop; it was so exciting. I mean, my wife at the time hated me because I would just be checking my phone constantly… just, another hour, another update, what’s happening… and then it was equally devastating. It was euphoria. I think that was actually necessary though because it brought in a lot of people, a lot of attention and a lot of excitement. However, it reached sort of unsustainable heights as we know in retrospect. Then in 2018, there was this big crash, and it really sucked. It was super hard. For almost two, three years now, we’ve been having [a] crypto winter, [but] there’ve been lots of activity, and the builders have been building in the background.
Garry: You’re one of them. You’re one of the builders who stuck it out because we have conviction for what’s going to happen long-term. The arc of history bends this way, but we’re going to go through some pretty crazy bumps, and I don’t think we’re done with them.
Chandan: Definitely not. I expect that this is going to happen more than one more time, but for those people who did stick around it, it’s been really rewarding to see the first principle of thinking pan out. This is sort of evidence of it, but I certainly don’t think this is going to be the end. I think there’s lots more to come. I will say one good thing though that happened from sort of like the 2018 crash was the amount of fraud, ICO scams and basic total money peddling that was going on […] that, I think, got cleaned out. Some of the SEC rulings and government regulation I think helped with that. Generally speaking, there were just too many scams happening in the industry that gave the whole crypto space a bad name. So I think washing out some of that stuff was actually quite useful. I think you see higher quality projects today because of it.
Garry: Nobody has a crystal ball, and it’s really hard to know where the price might go. What’s interesting is now, I think we’ve been trained pretty well not to pay too much attention to the price. Don’t let the highs get that high because if you do, then the lows are going to suck really bad too.
Chandan: Right. Got to stay humble.
Garry: And that’s the thing. 2017 to the trough was terrible, but so was what Ethereum going… I think they went from $1 or $2 to $15 and then crashed back down to $2 or $3. That happened and then $300 – $400, [and then] back down. It’s just such a recurring event in the boom and bust cycle of crypto. It’s funny to be an older hand at this point.
Chandan: The price is exciting, but focusing on it is not the core thing. You’re missing the forest through the trees in that case. If you really have conviction around Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, then again, we’re super nascent, and whether it’s at zero or $30,000, it’s going to be a blip in terms of what we’re actually trying to do here.
Garry: My wild speculation — which is purely anecdotal though, but I do think is what’s happening — 17 was the day of your taxi driver or your Uber driver saying, “I have a hot ICO tip.” I don’t think that that’s what’s driving this at the moment. I actually think that there’s some really deep institutional demand, and there is a tipping point in terms of some of the world’s largest family offices and endowments that [are] in the stock market — among the strongest hands period that exist. It is interesting to see that, and we’re not even very far along into that. It’s more so that it’s still very early in terms of institutional buying. So that makes me quite hopeful actually. The stronger hands will be the ones who sort of prevail; it’s the traders who get sort of taken out to the wash, whether it’s taxes or just being on the wrong side of the trade, not being in the market at the right time…
Chandan: Exactly. We’ve seen the exact same thing, especially [on] an institutional side, like with Grayscale, Square and then legendary that’s coming in from microstrategy and things like that. It’s not just random, small fringe people [like] Paul Tudor Jones; you have really serious people on the institutional side wanting to diversify their portfolio. It makes sense. It’s super smart. These bets in the short-term already paid off massively, but in the long-term, it’s hedging every portfolio, which is a super standard thing that people do all the time. It’s not surprising to see this bearing to fruition. And I still think people are being relatively quiet about what they’re doing because they don’t want to announce all their positions.
Garry: Because they’re buying.
Chandan: Yeah, exactly.
Garry: So we might be in the earlier part of the inflect.
Chandan: I expect us to see more of that too. And again, in the short term, who knows? There’s going to be volatility. There’s going to be big jumps. There’s going to be big falls, but in the long-term, again, if you look at the first principles and what people are doing and why Bitcoin is valuable as additional course gold or a store of value, the principles all make sense. And so it seems really compelling for the long term.
Garry: Well, thank you so much for hopping on with us today. I think a few of these viewers who don’t own any crypto, if they run out and get a little bit, I suspect they will be pretty happy with that decision. And then those who hold a bunch of crypto may actually make and/or save a crazy amount of money if they have a better tool at their side helping them think through very important financial decisions ***—***a $850 billion market cap now and counting.
Chandan: And for folks who are interested or curious, please feel free to reach out to us. We love talking to users and building what you want. We’d love to hear from you.
Garry: Thanks for working with Initialized. Thanks for choosing us as seed investors. It’s been so awesome to watch you grow and just be alongside you as you build this business.
Chandan: It’s been a privilege honestly, and you guys are great. So it’s been our privilege to be able to be an Initialized portfolio company. For social, [my] Twitter [is] @cglodha, and CoinTracker is @cointracker. For listeners, you can get a 10% discount on any CoinTracker tax plan. If you’re a new user, just use the URL www.cointracker.io/a/initialized.
Garry: Thank you so much for doing that and coming on the show. I suspect a lot of our viewers will have made more money than they would have without watching it. That’s the craziest thing about crypto. Everyone remembers the moment they heard about it.
Chandan: I hope so. Well, you’re providing good content, Garry. Keep educating the masses.