Crypto Taxes — How Voyager is screwing me over one more time

Hey folks, so it’s unfortunately that time of year again — taxes. And although I didn’t sell a whole lot last year, as an unfortunate Voyager creditor, instead of using my go-to Crypto Tax platform Koinly, for 2023 I was encouraged (or perhaps coerced) into using Coinledger instead.

In today’s article, I’m going to breakdowndown my experiences with using Coinledger, and outline some similarities and differences with Koinly, the crypto tax software that I’ve trusted in the past. And if you read this all the way to the end, I’ll detail how you might be able to give your middle finger to Voyager (figuratively of course) if you find yourself in the same boat.

But first, why am I even using Coinledger in the first place?

If you’re one of the smart ones that didn’t f*ck around with centralized exchanges in 2022 — drop me your twitter handle so I can follow you, for I definitely followed the wrong people. Unfortunately like a fly towards honey, I wasn’t smart enough to stop myself from chasing some of the juicy yields that CEXes like Voyager had to offer, and when the 3AC contagion completely rekt the market, I became one of the many Voyager creditors, hoping that I would get at least a fraction of my original funds back.

Fast forwarding to 2023, after their liquidations payouts were finally sent out, I was able to get approximately 1/13th of my original holdings back, and now I need to realize all the losses as I can in order to keep my overall capital gains taxes as low as possible.

In late January this year, if you were on Voyager’s mailing list you should have gotten an e-mail similar to this one that details Voyager’s “partnership” with Coinledger:

What the e-mail doesn’t really specify is that the “free” CSV transaction file isn’t for 2023, it’s for 2022. This means that if you’re trying to realize some of your losses from last year (which is the year that Voyager accounts officially realized their losses) in order to access their 2023 CSV or other tax forms, you need to opt into one of their paid plans, which you can get with a “generous” discount of 10%.

This “discount” is aggravating on a few fronts:

1. It deters creditors from being able to choose which crypto software they wish to use. Yes, you could technically manually input each transaction into your own CSV and upload it on your own, but personally I don’t trust myself that I’d do it correctly, and furthermore I’m just too damn lazy.
2. I’m not sure what the partnership details CoinLedger and Voyager entail, but it’s a bit annoying to think that I’m helping out Voyager in anyway by clicking on their referral link in their e-mail in order to setup a new CoinLedger account. In no way shape or form do I want to assist Voyager in anything post-haste.
3. The 10% discount is frankly a sham deal. After just a few minutes scouring the internet for discount codes, I found that you can use “DIGITALASSETNEWS” instead in order to get a 20% discount instead of Voyager’s 10%.

Regardless, enough with the venting…let’s get into the details of how CoinLedger compares with Koinly shall we?

Both CoinLedger and Koinly are highly respected different crypto tax software programs, but there are some significant differences that might make more sense for you to use one over the other.

Costs

Perhaps the biggest factor for most people are how much they need to pay in order to get the data/tax forms that they need. Both CoinLedger and Koinly have free plans that will analyze the transactions in your wallets/exchanges, but in order to get CSVs or tax forms, you’ll need to buy into one of their paid plans.

For Coinledger, the pricing plan is as follows:

For Koinly, the plans are priced as follows:

As you can tell from both of the graphics above, both plans are similarly priced, with the only difference being on the upper end if you’re going to the 10s of thousands of transactions. For most people I’d imagine that you’ll looking at the up to 1,000 transaction plan or lower, which would price you around $99. Obviously if you’re going into the higher ranges, you’d have to calculate on your own whether or not it’s better to pay CoinLedger’s flat fee of $499 dollars, or to go through Koinly’ customizable plan where you’d have to pay per batch of 10k transactions.

Bottom Line: For most people they’ll find the costs to be comparable. If you’re a heavy user with 1,000+ transactions, you’ll have to determine whether or not you want to pay a flat $499 dollar fee, or go with Koinly’s $279+ customizable plan.

Integrations

Now with both platforms having hundreds of different of integrations with different wallets and exchanges, I can only speak to my own personal experiences for what I needed to file. Both Koinly and CoinLedger provide support for NFTs, and have a great deal of step-by-step instructions and/or videos for how to integrate each data set, assuming that you can’t do it automatically.

Additionally as I’ve already mentioned, the only platform that allows automatic importing of Voyager transactions is Coinledger, whereas Koinly does not. However a big glaring hole that Coinledger is missing are automatic imports of Cosmos chains, namely with major wallets such as Keplr or Leap. This means that wallet holders have to manually import their transactions via CSV files, which they’ve outlined the steps of how to do so here. Koinly on the other hand does have Cosmos-chain auto-integrations.

Bottom Line: If you need to realize some significant Voyager losses, CoinLedger offers easy import of your transactions. However if you’re a Cosmos-heavy user, Koinly is most likely your better bet.

Other Differences?

Perhaps one of the things I found most interesting are articles from both Koinly and Coinledger that highlight different strengths that are on both platforms. Personally I think some of these “differences” are a bit arbitrary, but before signing up for one or the other, I’d recommend reading through both reviews in order to determine which option is best for you. :

Koinly’s Review of Coinledger

Coinledger’s Review of Koinly

Bottom Line: Perhaps the factors that I’ve found most important are that although Koinly has significantly more integrations with different Crypto Wallets/Blockchains as well as more country-specific options, Coinledger has more integrations with different Tax software programs, namely H&R Block and Taxslayer.

The differences I’ve highlighted really only scratch the surface, and as I mentioned before, I can only speak to my own personal experiences for the things that I needed to file, so your own tax situation might be significantly different compared to mine. Due to the losses I’m trying to realize through Voyager, this year I felt that I had little choice but to use CoinLedger, which has pushed me to do a bit of digging as to whether or not the transition this year was worth it.

If you’re a Voyager creditor like me, please do me a favor and do NOT click through one of their referral links when setting up your CoinLedger. The last thing I’d want any of us to do is to do Voyager any more favors. Instead I’d recommend opting into not using a referral link at all, or if you’ve found value in this article and would like to support my blog, you could consider using my referral link instead: https://coinledger.io?fpr=fjwrr. And once again, be sure to use the promo code “DIGITALASSETNEWS” in order to get 20% off on your plan — it’s by far the best one that I could find.

If you’re interested in learning more about Koinly and why it’s the Crypto Tax software I’ve primarily chosen to use in the past, check out my deep dive article I wrote this same time last year:

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any public promo codes for Koinly, but if you subscribe to their e-mail list, they’ll periodically send out 30% off promo codes such as this, and hopefully they’ll publish one more code before the deadline hits:

And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!

Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, I am not a financial advisor and this is for entertainment and educational purposes only. In addition, I am in no way shape or form a CPA or a tax professional — this is only a personal account of my experiences using both CoinLedger and Koinly.