CoinLedger

CoinLedger started in 2018 as CryptoTrader.Tax and rebranded along the way. It does what the category does: pulls your transaction history in from exchanges and wallets, matches each disposal to an acquisition, and produces the forms a tax return wants — Form 8949 and Schedule D in the United States, with exports that drop into TurboTax, TaxAct and H&R Block rather than needing to be retyped.

The pricing model is worth understanding before you start rather than after. Importing is free and unlimited: you can connect every exchange and wallet you have ever used, see your gains and losses, and preview the completed forms without paying anything. Payment comes at the download — tiers by transaction count, roughly $49, $99 and $199 and up, charged per tax year rather than as a subscription. There is a fair reading of that and an uncomfortable one, and both are true. The fair one is that you get to confirm the thing actually works on your data before spending money, which is more than most software offers. The uncomfortable one is that you find out which tier you are in only after importing, and by then you have done all the reconciliation work, so the moment you learn the price is the moment walking away is most expensive.

The number it gives you is a calculation over whatever you managed to import, and that is where the real risk sits. A wallet you forgot about, an exchange that shut down and took your export history with it, a chain the importer does not cover — each of those produces a report that looks every bit as authoritative as a correct one. The worst version is missing acquisition history: with no record of what you originally paid, cost basis tends toward zero and the software reports a gain far larger than anything that happened. Reconcile the totals against your own records before you file. The records you need before tax time is about assembling those, and it is much easier to do before you need them.

Which cost basis method you choose is a decision, not a preference. FIFO, HIFO and the rest produce materially different numbers from identical transactions, some methods are not permitted everywhere, and switching between years when you have already filed one way causes problems of its own. The software offers a default and will happily calculate whichever you pick. That is not the same as telling you which one you are allowed to use.

Connect exchanges with read-only API keys, and nothing else. Importing means handing your full financial history to a third party, which is a reasonable trade for not doing it by hand — but a key with withdrawal permission attached is a much larger trade than the job requires. Create read-only keys, and delete them when the filing is done. No tax tool ever needs a seed phrase or a private key, and anything calling itself an importer that asks for one is not an importer.

What it is not is a tax adviser, and the gap matters more in crypto than elsewhere. The treatment of staking rewards, DeFi positions, airdrops, NFTs and wrapped assets is genuinely unsettled in a lot of jurisdictions. Software cannot leave those blank, so it picks a treatment and presents the result with the same confidence as a straightforward spot trade. For a small, simple year that is fine. For anything with real money or real complexity in it, the output is a well-organised starting point for a professional rather than a finished return — and it is a good starting point, which is most of what you want from it.