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What’s the Best Way to Keep Track of My Crypto?

By Evan Jones03/10/2023

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One of the most fun things about crypto is keeping track of the value of your assets. Though depending on when you bought your crypto, it may be less fun for you than it is for others to see their portfolio values.

Entry points aside, it’s important to keep track of your crypto holdings in order to make decisions such as selling, rebalancing, or buying more. These decisions can be made easier when you can easily track your cryptocurrency values, but what’s the best way to do so? In this guide we’ll discuss the benefits and drawbacks of three different ways to track your digital assets, while recommending one over the others. Let’s jump in.

Three Ways to Keep Track of Your Crypto

There are three main ways in which you can keep track of your crypto easily. Realistically, you can do a combination of all three of these methods if you wish, but it really comes down to personal preference. Each of these methods have varying benefits and drawbacks, but they’ll all do the trick. Let’s start with using your crypto wallet.

Crypto Wallet

Cryptocurrency wallets have come a long way over the past few years. While it wasn’t always easy to use a crypto wallet to keep track of your crypto and its value, developers have made a point in integrating price feeds into crypto wallets. This means that the majority of assets you hold in a crypto wallet will always have their current dollar value reflected when looking at holdings. 

The exception to this is generally brand new assets, but it really depends on the amount of coding the wallet developer has done in adding data feeds for the wallet. For example, they may have all Ethereum (ERC-20) assets tracked, but not all Cardano or Solana assets. This means that there could be gaps in your wallet for certain blockchain network’s assets, but over time they should be added.

Exchange Dashboard

Cryptocurrency exchanges have always tracked dollar values of assets, meaning that in order to keep track of your crypto, you simply have to look at our exchange dashboard. This can be an extremely easy way to track your holdings, especially if the exchange has a mobile app. However, there are a couple disadvantages to tracking your holdings in this way. 

The first disadvantage is that the exchange has to support the asset, meaning have it as something you can buy and sell. With there being so many crypto assets on the market, there isn’t really any exchange that has every digital asset available for buying and selling. That being said, exchanges like Binance and Gate.io come fairly close, and cover a large array of assets.

The other disadvantage is that you have to store the assets on the exchange in order to be able to track them. With the collapse of FTX, it has become fairly common to not store crypto assets on an exchange in case something similar to FTX happens again. That’s not to say you can’t store any crypto on an exchange, but doing so just to keep track of your holdings is a bit excessive. 

Realistically, if your holdings are already on the exchange, you can leave them there to keep track of them, but we don’t recommend doing that unless you’re planning on trading them sooner than later. It’s much easier to withdraw them to your own wallet and use said wallet to track the values, or use a portfolio tracker (more below).

Portfolio Trackers

Portfolio trackers are probably the best way for you to keep track of your crypto holdings. You can use something like CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko and their respective apps in order to do this. The biggest advantage being that these platforms track the prices of just about every crypto asset on the market, with new assets being added daily. As long as the crypto project has submitted their asset’s information to these platforms, they’ll have the price data. 

You can create as many portfolios as you like, and simply note how much of each asset you hold, the app will do the rest of the work for you. You can even add what price you bought each asset at in order to keep track of gains or losses, though you don’t have to include that information when adding to your portfolio. Instead, you can simply say you hold X amount of Bitcoin, Y amount of Ethereum, and so forth.

There are two main advantages to using a portfolio tracker over a crypto wallet or exchange dashboard. The first is that you don’t have to add a crypto wallet or exchange app to your mobile device in order to track your holdings. Instead, you can just CoinMarketCap and create your portfolio, which will then be viewable on the website as well assuming you create an account, which solely requires an email address. 

The other advantage is that you don’t have to have your crypto holdings in one place. If you were using a crypto wallet or exchange to keep track of your holdings, then you’d have to have all your assets there in order to see your entire portfolio. With a portfolio tracker, you can simply add assets you hold across multiple blockchain networks and wallets into one portfolio, while keeping them stored securely in as many wallets as you wish. You can then see the entirety of your holdings in one convenient place.

Closing Thoughts: Choose the Right Method for You

Keeping track of your crypto is important for many reasons. Clearly, the best way to do so is using a portfolio tracker, but it’s really up to you as an individual to decide how you’d like to do so.

Which method is best for you really depends on personal situation though, as many of the disadvantages noted for wallets and exchange dashboards are somewhat mitigated if you only hold Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, if you have more than a couple assets and they’re spread out at various wallets, it’s best to use a portfolio tracker. 

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Beginner
cryptocurrency
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Evan Jones

Author

Evan entered the crypto scene in 2017, attracted to the many disruptive possibilities that blockchain could have on current world systems. He has a keen interest in decentralized services, payment processing, and viable NFT use cases such as event ticketing. He spends his days writing with his dog Kobe under his feet, if not on his lap.

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