Having trouble keeping track of your bitcoin transactions? A new service called Tapeke aims to help you keep them organised, across all of your wallets and exchange accounts.
Tapeke was conceived by Nicolò Maria Lazzarin, one of the original user interface developers for the Hive wallet. Like a Mint.com for cryptocurrency users, it enables users to track bitcoin transactions in various ways – tracking multiple wallets in one interface and allowing them to assign metadata to their bitcoin addresses and transactions.
Users can tag transactions with category tags that they define, for example, and can then graph these categories, so that you could see how much you’ve spent on a particular area over a period of time. You can also tie contacts to particular bitcoin addresses, so that you can see how much you’ve sent over time to Bob, for example.
Courting a mainstream user base
Will Pangman, a bitcoin community organiser and company spokesperson, said that services like Tapeke would appeal to a broader bitcoin user base.
“The user base is definitely there. People are only using bitcoin less than they want to because the tools aren’t there for the masses,” he said, adding:
“Things like the basic conveniences of financial management for a person with bitcoin certainly didn’t exist at all a year ago, and lately they’re getting a bit better, but it still has a long way to go.”
Tapeke isn’t a wallet, but it hopes to complement wallets by providing a dashboard for financial information. One of the areas where Pangman thinks this could be helpful is in monitoring bitcoin ownership for tax purposes, for example.
Several jurisdictions, including the US, have decided to impose capital gains tax on any value accrued on bitcoins in between acquisition and sale. That’s a big administrative overhead for the average user. A tool like this would provide a way of monitoring those changes in value, and it’s a business opportunity that others have already identified.
Third-party integration
To do this effectively, though, the service will have to integrate with many other services.
Mint.com’s developers made significant efforts to court financial institutions for online data feeds. Tapeke will need to interface with several stakeholders, including bitcoin exchanges and wallets. That’s still a work in progress, Pangman conceded.
“In the future, we will have integration with HD wallets and off-chain services, like Circle, Coinbase, and exchange accounts,” he said. “We are limiting ourselves to create occurrences. It could be a platform where any service could be pulled in and managed or analysed by the user with the confidence that they have a secure environment.”
Even Hive Wallet, the founder of which is listed as an adviser to the company, hasn’t undertaken any third-party integration with the service. That’s unsurprising, as Hive is a hierarchical deterministic wallet, which is a category of product that Pangman admits that Tapeke hasn’t yet figured out integrations for.
Tapeke clearly has some way to go before it achieves the ubiquitous integration that Pangman is hoping for, but he claims that the nascent service is already getting lots of interest.
“We have discussions with companies in the bitcoin space for integrating with us,” he said, adding that the ultimate goal is to give people a single point of access for multiple services, so that they don’t have to handle multiple logins for different cryptocurrency sites.
Expansion plans
Security has been a big concern for the development team, said Pangman. The site comes with three levels of security (basic, medium and advanced), with the top two encrypting user data.
The user data doesn’t include private keys, however, because the service doesn’t use those – storing only public keys in order to watch addresses, not make transactions. The encrypted data in question is the metadata, such as categories and contacts.
This is all part of a bigger plan for the bootstrapped firm, which was formed 12 months ago. In the longer term, it wants to go beyond exchange and wallet integration with an API for third party apps to integrate with. The idea is to create an app store with add-ons that will enhance the service, using events within Tapeke to trigger external actions.
“If I build out the Tapeke account with some app integration, I can set some preferences so that certain activities I perform are triggering certain things that I want,” Pangman said.
He explained:
“So I could set up my Tapeke account to let me know if there’s a 5% slide in the bitcoin price because I want to hedge, and then I could use this or that service.”
The system would also be able to suggest particular services to users based on such events, in the same way that Mint.com can, which is where its profit model comes in, said Pangman.
In the future, the company hopes to expand the service still further, covering altcoins, and perhaps even venturing into applications with custom tokens, should there be the demand.
“We aren’t limiting ourselves to cryptocurrencies. It could be a service where any platform could be pulled in and managed or analysed by the user with the confidence that they will secure this environment,” he said.
First thing’s first, though – Tapeke has to get some funding to start building out these additions to the service, which only went into beta on 1st January. Then, it will be able to put more weight behind a desktop app, which Pangman said is already in the works.
Money management image via Shutterstock