[DAO:1ae81d8] Accurate portfolio accounting with Cartera Tax

by 0x9ec7fb8a02ddb7a29fc03c13e01c4878d22a7ab5

Should the following $10,000 grant in the Platform category be approved?

Abstract

Cartera is a crypto accounting tool that provides a streamlined, accurate solution to maintain tax compliance. Our tool is the first to automate the analysis of transaction data as an indicator of tax treatment in order to maintain total coverage of transactions on chains we support. Through our integration with Ethereum, we have achieved complete coverage of Ethereum protocols in our tax calculator in under 6 months of development time with a single developer, far exceeding the capabilities of any existing tax calculation platform. As Decentraland users are more and more often trading in different DeFi tokens (even within the Decentraland platform), we are passionate about giving your community peace of mind in their portfolio accounting

Grant size

10,000 USD in MANA

Project duration

6 months

Beneficiary address

0xdBb63a19a309ADd33621805A596E2EBb022fc823

Email address

elias@cartera.io

Description

We reduce barriers to adoption for retail and sophisticated users participating in DeFi by providing an intuitive user interface and accurate tax reporting. Demand for crypto tax software increased 33x from 2018 to 2022, indicating that tax filing may be one of the primary anxieties of new users and institutions jumping into DeFi. Integration with Cartera means no more manual tax calculation, no more egregious errors, and no more dedicated tax accounting departments for users in your ecosystem.

Our initial release will feature everything you need to get a comprehensive view of your portfolio and associated tax obligations, including capital gains and losses calculations, transaction history reporting, and data aggregation from both wallets and exchanges.

A key pillar of our platform is our commitment to user privacy and security. We understand that many DeFi users value their privacy and want to keep their financial information confidential. As such, we are designing our platform to comply with the highest industry standards for security and privacy. We will not store identifying user data in any centrally accessible fashion after rolling out Cartera.

We are applying for $10,000 in grant funding, to be used in two ways:

  • $2,000 USD to compensate a developer who will run a light audit to ensure Cartera is properly integrated with PROTOCOL; this will ensure that any potential issues are captured upfront by our team
  • $8,000 USD will be paid out to new customers of Cartera who made transactions on Decentraland. We’ll payout redemptions based on a simple off-chain confirmation method to ensure new customers must be users of Decentraland to receive the discount.

Our goal for the project is timely rollout of Cartera in preparation for the 2023 tax season and confirmation that our platform works seamlessly with all transaction types on Decentraland. A key part of our goal is also to facilitate onboarding of DeFi users onto Cartera in our covered regions (starting with the US).

We will measure success based on our ability to carry out the above, and so far have gotten great feedback from prospective users and comparative analyses alike in assessing accuracy of our tool against incumbents.

Roadmap and milestones

[DONE] Discord bot (May) - a discord bot that feeds back transaction summary data when sent a transaction ID; this transaction summary data is the basis of DeFi accounting and tax calculation

MVP (June) - MVP for reporting transaction summary data for a wallet’s end of year tx history

Protocol accuracy testing (July) - validating that MVP is 100% accurate on PROTOCOL

Analytics dashboard (September) - expanded portfolio analytics features incl. daily capital gains & losses

Final front-end (November) - usable Cartera app

Setup apply for a refund / discount code flow (Dec) - redemptions from customers who provide evidence that they use Decentraland. At this point we will make a public announcement to the community that Cartera is available and free for the first ~100 Decentraland users

Launch and marketing (Jan) - official launch of Cartera for tax season 2023

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

From my understanding, 80% of the grant funds will be used to compensate users who sign up to use your tax software? I am nervous that this will attract bot wallets. But also, I reviewed your website and Twitter and did not find ANY information on the tax software, a roadmap, whitepaper, or recent communication/promotions from your team.

In addition, you would be competing with large competitors like Coinledger, Cointracker, and CryptoTax, with hard-to-beat integrations for their users already transacting on their accounts.

I do like the idea of a Decentraland-specific Tax calculator (i.e. wearable income/purchases, land sales ,rental income gain/loss calculators), however, I do not believe this is the right company to execute this idea, with little to no product or even blueprint to show.

For all these reasons, I am voting NO.

4 Likes

I am not worried that Cartera is a lot smaller and newer than larger and more established crypto accounting companies such as Coinledger and Cointracker. I do not think that it is fair for the DAO to limit funding to companies just because they are less established.

However, my main concern lies in the absence of a prototype that allows us to assess the current product.

To gain a better understanding of the product you are developing, I would appreciate more details.

  1. Could you provide an outline of what transactions Decentraland users would be able to track? Would they be able to track their MANA and NFT transactions?

  2. Do you have any example mocks or videos of the product? Specifically, how it would look for Decentraland users?

  3. Do you have a link to the Discord bot that you have built?

Accurate portfolio accounting with Cartera Tax

This proposal is now in status: REJECTED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 1% 895 VP (15 votes)
  • No 98% 6,765,960 VP (65 votes)
  • Abstain 1% 1 VP (2 votes)