About Me - Ronan McGovern: I’m an Irish engineer and entrepreneur, now based in Dublin. I did a PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT and founded a membrane technology business in 2015, which I sold at the end of 2020. I had limited exposure to crypto during that time period, but I did buy a little Bitcoin in 2017. I also learned that Rene and Marek - both of whom I knew from MIT - had a new startup focused on financial inclusion called Celo. Rene and Marek (and Sep, their co-founder for Celo) had strong track records building startups and also a holistic vision for blockchain focused on community over pure technology. So, with the acquisition of my own startup in 2020, I thought I would take some time to dig in more on Bitcoin, Ethereum and also Celo, which I did by starting a blog at Pinotio.com. It didn’t take long trying out different dApps to realise that calculating taxes was a mess. There were some solutions out there for Bitcoin and Ethereum, but Celo was all manual calculation. Thus, the idea for Celo.Tax was born!
What We Built
During Celo Camp, Celo.Tax launched a csv export tool to make it easy to download wallet transactions for import into tax software like Koinly. We’ve since built on this to provide a tax dashboard that directly reports income and capital gains for a Celo wallet. Quite soon, we’ll allow users to analyse multiple wallets at once and also expand our offerings for businesses and dApps.
Celo.Tax web app screenshot
Celo Camp gave me a flavour for the kinds of projects being built on Celo - lots of them practical, but many also fun (entertainment, NFTs, and games). I like that crypto and Celo blend the serious and the fun and I’m hoping to incorporate some fun NFTs into some of our Celo Tax subscriptions.
Next in Celo.Tax
Celo.Tax already has customers using our tax dashboard and we are adding functionality every month. The April 15th tax deadline in the US is an important one to be ready for, but we are finding that our users are quite international, so we’re making a point of not being too US centric (e.g. we already support USD, EUR, BRL and GBP as base currencies).
From a big picture standpoint, I see tax, accounting and payments all as interconnected. Celo.Tax is just the first tool I see in a suite of solutions that will make use of the Celo payment network to cheaply, quickly and reliably conduct business on an international basis. There’s more to announce on this front early in 2022, so keep an eye out.
Stay in Touch:
Twitter: @CeloTax
Website: www.Celo.tax
Early access list for new customers: Find the “Early Access” button on our website
Author: Ronan McGovern, Founder at Celo.Tax