After two months of frantic development, I hereby present the initial version of a new tool for calculating the capital gains made on crypto trades. Driven by personal need, I had to take a detour from my usual projects…

Some Background

When the tax authorities contacted me about declaring the capital gain income related to trading cryptocurrencies, I already had a hunch that things could get complicated. I had been trading on a number of exchanges that no longer exist, traded crypto currencies that are no longer relevant and I have used many differents wallets.

Numerous online tools exist today that make the job easier by importing transactions from the blockchain or from popular exchanges. After trying out a few of them though, I noticed several common issues:

  • They were slow. The browser isn’t well known for creating efficient user interfaces, and even when just showing 25 transactions at a time they were laggy. Navigating over a 1000 transactions was very painful.

  • They were expensive. Once you reach over 1000 transactions, most of these services aren’t cheap and generally have a yearly recurring plan.

  • They owned my data. They generally did not provide a way to export or import all the data I was putting into them. This creates a lock-in and makes it hard to understand the changes you make over time.

There were many other issues. I could only manage a single portfolio per account. I ran into UI bugs and other strange behavior. It was impossible for me to confidently declare my capital gain taxes using any of the services I tried.

A New Tool was Born

The great thing about the services I tried was their friendly user interface. I wanted that, but I also wanted it to be fast, free and with the data owned by me.

I also was looking for an excuse to start a project in Rust and try out Slint.

I thought it would take a few weeks at most, but unfortunately it took over two months. But now, I can present to you the initial release of Raccoin, yet another crypto tax tool!

Raccoin Welcome

The wallets page shows the transaction sources The transactions page provides a detailed view of events Reports can be exported as CSV files

It loads a portfolio of over a 1000 transactions in a split second, is free as in freedom and you can simply keep your portfolios and all their data sources in a local git repository.

Yet it still doesn’t do many things that most people would need from this kind of software:

  • It can’t yet download crypto currency price history on-demand (but it can be hard-coded to do so, so this shouldn’t be too far away). The price history is necessary to calculate the gains on crypto to crypto trades, or when generally sending and receiving crypto.

  • While it can sync Bitcoin, Ethereum and Stellar wallets, it is not possible to add these sources through the UI yet. The syncing also still hangs the UI, sometimes indefinitely.

  • It only recognizes a static list of built-in currencies. It should really dynamically get the information, icons, etc. from CoinMarketCap and other sources (like for Ethereum tokens or Stellar assets).

  • It thinks fiat means Euro. Yes, some work will be needed to make it work with other fiat currencies.

But it can only get better from here! If you see this and think it could work for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!