Taking into account the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, investors are faced with an ongoing dilemma – exit the position or ‘HODL’. For those investors in it for the long run, they will simply look to hold on their cryptocurrencies with the hope that in the near future they will be worth significantly more.

Until then, the coins remain idle in a private wallet – resulting in opportunity costs along the way. After all – and much like gold, Bitcoin does not yield any income.

With this in mind, YouHodler has created an online platform that allows you to earn interest by depositing your digital currencies. In turn, this will then be loaned out to those that wish to engage with crypto-loans.  Today, the company presents itself as a crypto-fiat finance service that offers half a dozen distinct features to meet the needs of both investors and borrowers.

In my YouHodler review, I explore the ins and outs of how the platform works. Not only does this include a breakdown of its interest-yielding service, but I also have a closer look at a number of other key features found at the platform.

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Earn interest on crypto

Did you know that you could earn interest on Bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto-assets that you own?

Bitcoin has been criticized by certain people in the past for being an asset that does not yield any dividends, but this argument no longer holds any water.

Many crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges like Coinbase and Binance for long-term safekeeping. Doing so means they are assuming counterparty risk, however, so in my opinion, if you’re going to opt for keeping your crypto with a third-party custodian, you might as well put it to work.

These are my favorite crypto lending platforms where you can earn interest on your crypto and also obtain loans by providing crypto as collateral.

• YouHodler – biggest number of cryptos supported, lowest fees
• Nexo – best all-rounder in terms of provided services

Alternatively, you can store your crypto in cold storage, but you won’t be able to grow your wealth in that way unless your crypto asset prices appreciate over time.

In this post, I’ll show you how you can earn 5% and upwards on your Bitcoin by using the interest accounts on the platforms featured here.

Most of the platforms I will describe help you earn interest on your crypto by implementing some form of lending. I have written extensively about my P2P lending experience and my favorite P2P lending platforms, but today we’ll add the crypto factor into the mix – hence we will be talking about crypto-backed loans. In my opinion, as an investor, the addition of crypto as collateral marks a huge improvement over the traditional P2P lending platforms, which can lack transparency and that mostly work with no collateral.

Crypto lending is becoming a huge industry, and we can take a look at Google trends to verify this. Have a look at the chart showing a strong worldwide uptick in interest in crypto lending options over the past three years.

Let’s take a look at the best platforms available. One of the important things to note before we start is that these platforms exclude fewer people than traditional P2P lending platforms. While the traditional platforms operate within very strict geographical limitations, with crypto lending platforms basically anyone who holds crypto can participate.

YouHodler

YouHodler offers an extensive set of crypto-fiat financial services. In its essence, the platform intends to help investors take advantage of cryptocurrencies, without having to actively trade them.

YouHodler has managed to make crypto-HODLing an active strategy. For investors, access to a crypto-exclusive savings account and interest-bearing loans are preferable ways to expand your portfolio.

This solves an instant issue with digital currencies – opportunity costs. That is to say, rather than leaving your digital coins sitting idle in a private wallet, YouHodler allows you to earn a yield on your holdings. At the same time, you get to keep hold of your investment and thus – you can cash out your coins whenever you see fit.

YouHodler implements some innovative strategies to boost your returns, so it is an ideal platform for those who like to tweak things and see what works best. The company is registered in Cyprus and is regulated in Europe, while client funds are stored securely within the Ledger Vault platform.

You can also use YouHodler as an exchange to trade cryptocurrencies. If you’ve already made some amazing profits on your Bitcoin, perhaps it’s time to give yourself a break. For example, YouHodler savings accounts pay 12% annual interest on stablecoins. Hence, you could do a Bitcoin to fiat exchange with just a 2% fee right on our platform, and then convert fiat to your favorite stablecoin in orer to start earning interest.

You can read my full review of YouHodler if you want to learn more about this platform, or just click the link below to go to the Youhodler website directly and get started.

Earn interest with YouHodler

Binance Savings and Staking

With Binance, you have several ways of earning money on your cryptos.

Flexible Savings

The easiest way is probably using their Flexible Savings product. Flexible Savings is your Crypto savings account. Subscribe your crypto to earn interest, with the flexibility to redeem your funds at any time.

To quote a few estimated annual yields available at the moment, we have:

• BUSD at 2.44%
• USDT at 2.11%
• DASH at 1.83%

There are 24 coins you can use for the flexible savings account.

Locked Savings

For higher returns, you will want to opt for the Locked Savings product. By subscribing your crypto to locked savings periods you will in return get higher interest earnings. You can choose from several durations depending on the coin you are using, but it’s typically one or more options from the following:

• 7 Days
• 14 Days
• 30 Days
• 90 Days

For example, with BUSD you get an annualized interest rate of 7.42% at the time of writing, while USDT gives you 6.79%. Both of these are stablecoins that can be easily bought from the Binance exchange itself.

See also: How to earn interest on crypto with Binance

The range of coins available for locked savings is more limited, we can only choose between 6 coins: BUSD, USDT, COCOS, ONE, EOS.

Earn money on crypto with Binance

Nexo – The All-Round Financial Service

Nexo is an excellent platform for those investors seeking an active strategy for their crypto holdings by providing access to a crypto-exclusive savings account, interest-bearing loans, crypto exchange and a Nexo card which will give you access to fiat without needing to sell your crypto.

Once you top up and buy crypto you can start earning up to 17% annual interest immediately without further action being required from your side. Apart from earning interest on cryptocurrencies, you can also earn up to 12% APR on USDx, EURx and GBPx stablecoins. The actual APR is determined based on Loyalty Tiers depending on the ratio of Nexo Tokens against the balance of other assets in your portfolio.

Read my in-depth review of Nexo’s plethora of services here.

Nexo also offers crypto-backed loans where your digital assets act as collateral without any further need for a credit assessment. Put simply, Nexo gives you fiat or stablecoins, and you provide crypto as security for repayment. Apart from the tax benefit associated with not selling your crypto, Nexo provides you with the opportunity to access fiat funds at the touch of a button, something that with legacy banks is unimaginable.

Invest with Nexo

Concluding Thoughts

I’ve tried out all these platforms and found YouHodler and Nexo to be the ones I liked most. The platforms mentioned in this post all work fine, but you’ll need to find the one that has the best branding and user interface for your tastes. Some of them also reward you in their native tokens, but in general, I prefer going for Bitcoin rewards.

Read more: The Best Books about Bitcoin and Crypto

What do you think of P2P lending platforms that provide crypto-backed collateral? I think it’s a nice upgrade on the traditional P2P lending platforms and as an investor, it gives me more security.

Buy crypto on Coinbase

If you’re looking to join the cryptocurrency revolution by buying Bitcoin for the very first time, you’ll likely want to use a platform like Coinbase.

The reason for this is that this broker tailors its website to the newbie investor. For example, it takes just minutes to open a Coinbase account, and you can buy Bitcoin with a debit card or bank account.

With that being said, Coinbase does come with its flaws – especially in the fees department. As such, I would suggest reading my in-depth Coinbase review prior to taking the plunge. I cover factors such as user-friendliness, fees, commissions, safety, and customer support.
[Read more…]

Note: This review only applies to non-US residents.

eToro is a Jack of all Trades in the online investment space, with the broker offering a full range of asset types that can be purchased at the click of a button. On top of traditional stocks, ETFs, and thousands of CFD (Contract For Differences) products (CFDs are not available in the US though) – eToro also allows you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

If you are thinking about using eToro, I welcome you to read my in-depth review. I cover the ins and outs of what you need to know before opening an account – including metrics surrounding regulation, fees, commissions, payment methods, and of course – safety.

Open an eToro account

*76% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

What is eToro?

Launched in 2006, eToro is an online broker and trading platform. As a member of the site, you will have access to a full range of asset classes. In terms of traditional ownership – you can buy and sell over 800 stocks from a number of international markets, as can you do with ETFs. Moreover, eToro is also home to thousands of CFD products – including but not limited to hard metals, energies, indices, interest rates, and currencies.

With that being said, if you’re more interested in the cryptocurrency side of the platform – the broker gives you the best of both worlds. This is because you can invest in digital currencies and retain full ownership of the asset, or alternatively, trade via CFDs. As I cover in greater depth further down, eToro does not allow you to withdraw your cryptocurrencies out to a private wallet. Instead, you will need to keep your coins on the platform, making it a better option for those who want to profit from trading rather than hold crypto assets for the long term.

[Read more…]

Buy cryptos

With thousands of crypto tradeable assets available, it is hard to keep track of your crypto portfolio these days. Even if you’re just buying and selling one or two different coins, you can quickly lose track of things, especially if you’re using several crypto exchanges or trading apps like Coinbase, Binance etc. Not to mention if you’ve been dabbling around in DeFi and DEXes like Uniswap and Sushiswap.

It is also important to track other crypto-related activities, for example when earning interest on your crypto through platforms like Nexo and YouHodler.

You could also be using one of the various crypto debit and credit cards where for tax purposes you will need to keep track of every single purchase done with your card.

As you can see, it is important to know your positions in an easy way, and there is no better way than to use an app or software solution.

You need to know where you stand at all times:

• to keep track of your overall investment
• to be prepared when tax time comes along

Here are my favorite portfolio tracking and tax preparation tools.

CoinTracking

CoinTracking is the most complete portfolio tracker on the market. They have automatic import from exchanges built-in, and the interface is very clean. Their support is fantastic, and best of all, everything is free for those with few transactions. This is the system I would have built if I had to build a tracker myself.

CoinTracking analyzes your trades and generates real-time reports on profit and loss, the value of your coins, realized and unrealized gains, reports for taxes and much more. With the prices for 7666 coins and assets, you’ll always have a complete overview.

• 620K+ Active Users
• 750+ CPAs & Corporate Clients
• 11 Years of Historical Data
• Coin Trends for 7666 Coins
• $4.3B Total Value of all Portfolios

This is one of the earliest and most complete services available out there. They have two offerings, one for crypto traders and the other for crypto companies.

See also: My detailed review of Cointracking

CoinTracking.info has one of the most extensive customer service areas I have seen on tax reporting platforms. It has an elaborate documentation section that covers almost every question you might have. It also has a separate FAQ that caters to the most commonly asked questions.

There is even a CoinTracking.info robot ready at your disposal. This is all aside from the typical customer service tools such as communities, live chat, video tutorials, and email contact. There is also a demo version of the website available that can give you a good idea of what to expect once you start using the platform.

Of course, CoinTracking also calculates crypto taxes every year for you. Given that it’s still so hard to find competent accountants who understand crypto (plus it would be very expensive), it’s well worth it to pay for a tool like this that prepares everything for you. At any point, you can review your tax summary, and download the reports you need to file your taxes. CoinTracking is seamlessly integrated with TurboTax and your accountant’s software. Full support is offered in US, UK, Canada, Australia, and partial support for every other country. They are adding full support for other countries too, so check out the site for the latest list.

I’ve spoken to the founder of CoinTracker on my podcast Mastermind.fm, so check that episode out if you’re interested in learning more about the platform and crypto taxation in general.

You can not only connect it to your exchanges to pull in all the data about trades you’ve made, but you can also mark transfers to your Ledger Nano or other cold wallets so that they are not deducted from your overall balance.

In terms of exchanges, they practically support every exchange out there, including my favorites Binance and Binance. You can import your data automatically via API or upload a CSV of all your trades. Cointracker uses read-only access to your exchange accounts to protect your funds. That is very very important as it means that Cointracker will never have any permission to operate with your crypto.

Read more: The Best Books about Bitcoin and Crypto

This service offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of your crypto portfolio – which allows you to manage all your digital currency accounts at once.

Moreover, its longstanding reputation has allowed the CoinTracking.info team to update the platform regularly to cater to the changing needs of the crypto community.

To ensure the provider is right for you, CoinTracking.info also offers a free account to help you understand whether the platform can fit your tax reporting needs. Overall, CoinTracking.info comes across as one of the most efficient management tools you can use for your crypto portfolios.

Get your 10% discount on Cointracking plans

Koinly

Koinly was established in 2018 and has already generated more than 11,000 tax reports for its clients.

I like it since it’s not 100% US-focused, and as such you can use it to prepare your German, Italian, Spanish, French taxes along with many other countries. The team behind Koinly is composed of tax lawyers, accountants and engineers who study the tax implementations of many countries and make sure the software can support these systems as well as a plethora of worldwide exchanges.

See also: My detailed review of Koinly

Koinly automatically imports your transactions, finds all the market prices at the time of your trades, matches transfers between your own wallets, calculates your crypto gains/losses and generates your tax reports.

Check out Koinly

Cointelli

Cointelli is one of the most recent additions to the crypto tax reporting tools and to date, it is only available to US-based crypto investors who are after obtaining automated US-tax reports.

Established in 2021, Cointelli’s service is intended to ease the pressure of accurate tax reporting by automatically compiling your transactions from across your wallets and exchanges. Once it generates your transaction list, Cointelli’s software will consequently help you to easily fix any errors therein, prepare a comprehensive report for tax purposes based on the latest tax provisions and have it sent out to your accountant or other relevant tax platforms.

Apart from freeing up a great deal of precious time, Cointelli places a lot of effort into helping you generate the required stats and reports as accurately as possible, thus saving you from paying any unnecessary tax.

Cointelli’s pricing structure is lean with a one-size-fits-all price for consumers and customized packages for large transaction-volume enterprises. For a flat annual fee of $49, clients can benefit from all the Cointelli suites and services for up to 100,000 crypto transactions, be it DeFi and margin trades. This is very competitive pricing, particularly when a number of other platforms offering similar services, already start charging a higher fee as soon as transaction volume exceeds 100.

Cointelli also scores high in terms of support. It not only offers customer support via email and chat widget, but also provides 24/7 live customer service with dedicated tax experts.

Get your crypto tax report with Cointelli

CryptoTaxCalculator

• Direct support for hundreds of exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase.
• Handles staking rewards, airdrops, margin/futures trading, perpetuals, lost/stolen funds, ICOs, and much more.
• Direct support for DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Binance Smart Chain.
• Pricing is an annual subscription, and you can cancel anytime, with a 30 day money back guarantee.
• The plan covers all historical tax years so if you need to amend your tax return for previous tax years the plan has you covered.
• Prices range from $49 (100 transactions); $99 (2,500 transactions); $249 (10,000 transactions), $399 (100,000 transactions).

Open an account with CryptoTaxCalculator

TokenTax

TokenTax is a crypto tax software platform and a full-service cryptocurrency tax accounting firm. This tool also takes care of tax-loss harvesting. If you hold assets at a loss, then you can save money on your taxes. TokenTax’s Tax Loss Harvesting dashboard tells you exactly how much losses you can claim by strategically selling off assets.

Read more: My in-depth review of TokenTax

Tax loss harvesting is selling off assets you hold at a loss to reduce your capital gains. When you reduce your capital gains, you owe less taxes. And, if you take a loss in crypto, you can offset other capital gains in assets like stocks.

Support for margin trading is also included.

Check out Tokentax

Cryptotrader

CryptoTrader.Tax takes away the pain of preparing your bitcoin and crypto taxes. Simply connect your exchanges, import trades, and download your tax report in minutes.

Check out Cryptotrader

Kubera

Kubera helps you to organize all your wealth in one place and keep regular track of your net worth in a very simple intuitive way. In fact, Kubera is a more holistic tracker than the above platforms in that apart from automatically tracking your crypto position and NFT holdings, it also captures your bank and brokerage accounts, real estate, vehicles, domains and metals. Kubera also allows you to manually input any other assets you own so that you can obtain a comprehensive view of your net worth in real-time.

Kubera will also provide you charts with analytics showing you how your net worth and investments changed over time. Every update to your asset value is kept in history to go back in time to see how you fared. It also allows you to keep an eye on the asset allocation and statistics indicating which asset experienced the highest appreciation or depreciation.

Kubera also calculates accurate rate of returns (IRR) for all your investments based on the multiple contributions & withdrawals and the time invested. It also benchmarks the IRR with the returns from popular indices and tickers (S&P 500, Dow Jones, AAPL, BTC etc.).

See also: My detailed review of Kubera

Another handy feature of Kubera is the possibility to store important financial or asset documents on the platform.

Through Kubera you will also be able to share a read-only link of your portfolio with others. In addition, with Kubera’s “Life Beat” feature you can allow portfolio and document access to your beneficiary of choice, however only after extended periods of inactivity.

Check out Kubera

How to Easily Prepare Your Crypto Taxes

So you’ve fallen down the crypto rabbit hole, started buying and selling some Bitcoin, then bought some Ether, and perhaps even ventured further to buy some other altcoins.

After some time, seeing that you’re profiting massively, you decide to sell some of your tokens. Sometime later, you decide to buy a new token that you believe will revolutionize the world.

The problem is, of course, keeping track of all these purchases and sales. You want to keep track of whether you’re actually turning a profit or not, plus you need to calculate what you owe your country’s taxman at the end of the year.

Crypto taxes are a complex topic, but I’ve done my best to summarise the situation in several major countries, so check out my post on how Bitcoin and other cryptos are taxed around the world.

So what are your options for crypto tax preparation?

You could keep track of things manually using a tool like Excel, but this quickly gets out of hand, especially if you’re trading on multiple platforms or have multiple wallets.

The better solution is to use an online crypto tax preparation tool.

All the tools mentioned in this post can help you in preparing your taxes apart from acting as a handy crypto portfolio.

If you’re preparing your crypto taxes for the first time, I would suggest you check out my favorite portfolio/tax preparation tools:

• CoinTracking
• Koinly

Depending on what your needs are, what jurisdiction you’re in, and what your budget is, you can choose one of those platforms. All three of them are excellent and run by serious people, so you cannot go wrong.

What’s your favorite crypto tax preparation tool?