Prague’s digital currency-centric financial management service Wealthico has officially launched, offering a free 30-day trial to select new customers.
The wealth tracking tool boasts support for more than 300 altcoins – including automated address tracking for 80 digital currencies, and offers users the ability to login through popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Google and LinkedIn.
With the unveiling, Wealthico enters a budding sector of the digital currency market already partly served by competitors including CryptFolio, CoinFinance and MyAltCoins. However, the service is aiming to differentiate itself with novel tweaks to the established model.
For example, Wealthico allows users to track the movements of traditional stocks alongside entries in their digital currency portfolios, a move that CEO and founder Karel Javurek thinks will position the company to attract a more mainstream audience, even as it hones in on a very specific market segment.
As a former day trader in cryptocurrency himself, Javurek believes a solution that caters to this underserved market is much needed. He told CoinDesk:
“We see a lot of startups with wallets and exchanges, but nobody is focusing on the user [who wants] to see how much wealth they have. When you have a lot of altcoins, it’s very difficult to track them all and you worry about how much you have.”
Service overview
Wealthico offers users a clean interface that tracks digital currency investments on their behalf. However, it’s emphasis is on the real wealth that users accumulate with their holdings.
For example, for each digital currency user’s track, Wealthico displays the amount of the currency, the value of this currency in US dollars and the total actual wealth that users have accumulated through that investment.
Movements can then be sorted by day, week or month.
To add a digital currency to their central dashboard, users create a new ‘card’ for the currency, which is filled out with their receiving address or addresses and the volume of the currency contained in these accounts.
Cards can then be pinned to a user’s main screen. Free users are able to add three cards for digital currency tracking and three cards for stock tracking, but are unable to set alerts.
Premium accounts cost $4.99 in BTC, though users can save 35% with a 12-month subscription.
Sizing up the competition
Though a newcomer to the digital currency ecosystem, Javurek believes that Wealthico already has the edge on its competitors. He cites difficulties using other available market solutions, critiquing these offerings as having very basic features – if they work at all.
He also indicated that Wealthico will look to differentiate by providing a more stable service and seeking to integrate its service into other popular offerings, stating:
“Right now, we are focusing on cryptocurrency, and we building a platform for that. Even in the Android app, we will add some support for another company like Coinbase, BitPay and so on, so we add some functionality for paying.”
The CEO says he plans to stop short of turning Wealthico into a full-fledged trading platform, however, noting: “We don’t need to be a trading platform, we want to be the one place where you look for financial statistics.”
Competing against Mint
While Javurek shies away from the comparison, he sees his service as analogous to Mint.com, the popular web-based personal financial management tool.
Though he acknowledges Wealthico faces a real threat should Mint.com ever add support for digital currencies, Javurek sees Wealthico having value by taking a different approach, one that doesn’t require the centralization of user data on his company’s computers.
“Mint is the biggest competitor that can add cryptocurrencies, but we think we have a very nice and simple design with our cards. Mint is tracking whether you buy coffee or something like that, they are connected to the credit cards and so on.”
Going forward, Javurek foresees adding additional sections to Wealthico’s dashboard over time, including new features that would allow users to track the wealth they have stored in assets like cars and properties that have been overlooked by more traditional competitors.
However, for now, his focus remains on building the existing product, securing new team members, and potentially, raising new funding.
Images via Wealthico