Published 10 November 2026
To track a crypto portfolio, keep one ledger of every buy, sell, transfer and fee across all your exchanges and wallets, and work out your holdings, cost basis and profit from that ledger rather than from any one exchange's dashboard. An exchange only knows what happened on it. Your ledger knows everything, so it is the only place where the numbers add up.
Most people who have held crypto for a while use more than one place: an exchange or two, a hardware wallet, perhaps a mobile wallet for small amounts. Each shows its own balance. None knows what you paid for coins you moved in from elsewhere, so a coin withdrawn from one exchange and deposited on another arrives with no cost attached. The second exchange shows its value, and your profit on it becomes a guess. A portfolio is the sum of all of those places, and only a ledger you keep yourself holds the whole of it.
A transfer between two of your own wallets is not a sale. It moves coins and costs a network fee, and the coins keep the cost they had. (Some tax rules treat the fee itself, paid in the coin, as a small disposal; check yours.) Recording it as a sell and a buy is the most common way a tracked portfolio drifts from the truth.
A spreadsheet. Free, entirely yours, and as accurate as your typing. It needs a formula for average cost or FIFO, and it watches nothing while it is closed: no prices, no alerts. Fine for a handful of trades a year.
A tracker connected by API key. You give the tracker a read-only key and it fills itself in. It is the fastest start, and it leaves a key that reads every balance and trade sitting on somebody else's server for as long as the key exists. Our guide to private portfolio trackers goes through what that hands over.
A tracker fed from CSV exports. Every major exchange lets you download your history as a file — here is how on Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. You import it, check it, and nothing stays connected afterwards. It takes a few minutes per exchange, a few times a year.
Watching public addresses. For coins in your own wallet, a tracker can read a public Bitcoin address or extended public key (xpub) and list what arrived and left. It cannot spend anything, but it now knows those addresses are yours, and on a public chain an address shows its whole history to whoever has it.
Once the ledger is complete, four figures tell you where you stand: holdings (what you own now, per asset), cost basis (what those holdings cost, fees included), unrealized profit (current value minus cost basis) and realized profit (what your sales actually made). The arithmetic is in how to calculate crypto profit. If you hold mostly bitcoin, it is worth also measuring the rest of the portfolio in bitcoin: a coin up 30% in dollars while bitcoin rose 60% has lost you bitcoin.
A complete portfolio is a precise map of what you own, and that map is worth protecting. Three habits keep it yours: never give a tracker a seed phrase or private key, prefer CSV imports to API keys, and prefer a tracker that encrypts your amounts in your browser, so its own servers hold only ciphertext. The rest of the security side is in hot vs cold wallets and how to store a seed phrase.
One ledger that covers every exchange and wallet, filled from CSV exports or by hand, with cost basis worked out from the full history. Whether that ledger is a spreadsheet or an app matters less than whether it is complete.
Yes. Download your trade history as a CSV from each exchange and import it into a tracker or a spreadsheet. Nothing stays connected, and no key sits on anyone's server.
No. It moves coins you already own and costs a network fee. The coins keep their original cost basis.
Monthly is enough for most people, plus a quarterly check of every balance against the ledger. Active traders import more often.
This guide explains how things work. It is not financial, investment or tax advice. Something wrong? Write to hi@perly.io and we will correct it.
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