Clear launches crypto tax software to track and manage portfolios for 1 Cr Indians

Three days after the Union Budget 2022 announcement that income from transfer of virtual digital assets such as cryptocurrencies and NFTs will be taxed at 30 percent, tax services and fintech SaaS startup Clear (formerly ClearTax) launched a crypto tax platform to track and manage portfolios across exchanges and wallets.

Clear aims to help users track their crypto returns, market value and taxes on their transactions, Founder and CEO Archit Gupta revealed.

With its new crypto tax platform, Clear is targetting one crore Indians, and has integrated with exchanges CoinDCX, WazirX, Binance, and Unocoin for giving users a single view of all their investments, as per its website.

The startup claimed that due to the rule stating users cannot offset crypto losses across different crypto tokens, tracking transactions at the asset level and being able to track net P/L (profit/loss) of those trades has become critical for crypto trading.

Archit told The Decrypting Story:

"The intersection of crypto and taxes was missing in India. Crypto and Web 3.0 is a space defined and driven by technologists, while tax policies lagged behind. Marrying technology and taxes is what we do at Clear, and we didn't see anyone else building a high quality tax platform for crypto, so we decided to build and launch it ourselves."

Clear has been working on its new tax platform for a few months now. In fact, on January 13, 2022, global Web 3.0 product engineers and investors such as Aparna Chennapragada, CPO, Robinhood; Surojit Chatterjee, CPO, Coinbase; and Balaji Srinivasan, ex-CTO, Coinbase invested an undisclosed amount in Clear.

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Clear's foray into crypto tax has four segments: helping crypto exchanges with invoicing and managing GST and TDS on crypto transactions, working with exchanges to facilitate accurate crypto tax reporting for retail traders, optimising crypto taxes in terms of offsetting losses, and potentially finding taxable events on decentralised blockchains and converting them into tax incidences.

In terms of considering on-chain activity as taxable events, Archit admits there lies a conflict, as decentralised services are designed to be free of regulatory oversight. He also recognises the lack of clarity in the crypto tax regime set by the government earlier this week.

He says, "Whatever clarity emerges, we will identify multiple interpretations, encode it, and let the users decide what they want to do. If we don't launch now and iterate with users, feedback cycles will be slow. As a tech startup, we have to be oriented towards such emerging frontiers even as policies catch up. Thus, are looking towards common interpretations of the tax regime coming from experts, exchanges, customers, internal stakeholders, etc, and turning it into a product."