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CoinLedger Terminology
CoinLedger Terminology

Find out what it all means - common terminology used by the CoinLedger app/team.

David Kemmerer avatar
Written by David Kemmerer
Updated over a year ago

Basic CoinLedger Terms

  • Trade: Any buy, sell, or coin-to-coin trade made from one currency to another.

  • Report: A representation of the crypto-related capital gains calculations made for a given year. (A report also houses different pages, or 'sub-reports', such as Short-Term Gains, Audit-Trail, etc)

  • Taxable Event: A taxable event refers to any scenario in which you trigger or realize taxable income.

  • Payment: A type of outgoing transaction in which you pay a person or entity in crypto. This can include giving crypto as a gift or in exchange for goods or services.

  • Fiat Buy: Buying cryptocurrency with fiat money. Ex: Buying BTC with USD.

  • Fiat Sell: Selling crypto for fiat money. Ex: Selling BTC for USD.

  • Cost Basis: How much money you put into your crypto and at what price. It is used to determine your capital gains/losses incurred whenever you dispose of your crypto (trade or sell), and includes fees, as well as the date and time of your purchase.

  • Historical Price: Part of cost basis, the historical price is the exact price you paid for an asset at that historic point in time.

  • Exchange: Any platform you use to buy, sell, or trade cryptocurrency. Ex: Coinbase.

  • Accounting Method/Cost Basis Method: Your crypto tax accounting method, also known as your cost basis method, is the method you use to tell the IRS at what specific time you realized a gain or loss on an asset you disposed of. Adjusting your accounting method can sometimes result in significant savings on your tax bill. While American crypto investors can use FIFO, LIFO, or HIFO as their accounting method, many choose to use FIFO because it is the most conservative option.

Import Stage Terms

  • Incoming Transaction: An instance where you received a coin without giving away a form of currency. (Examples - Mining payouts, Gifts, Crypto Income, etc)

  • Outgoing Transaction: An instance where you gave away a coin without receiving any form of currency. (Examples - Payment for Services, Gifts, etc)

  • Missing Cost Basis Warning: A trade flagged by CoinLedger because the app is not able to determine where the coin you're selling was originally acquired. (If you run a report with Negative Balance Warnings, reconciliation events with a zero cost-basis will be automatically generated. These are view-able on the Reconciliation tab of your report.)

  • Historical Price Warning: A trade flagged by CoinLedger because the app is not able to fetch the historical price of a specific coin. This prevents our system from assigning it a proper cost basis.

  • API: An application programming interface or API is a secure virtual connection that enables data transmission between two software applications. This is used in crypto to easily and safely transfer your transaction history from a crypto exchange to a service like CoinLedger. No funds or personal information is shared as an API is a read-only connection.

Price Quoting Terms

  • Quote: In a given trading pair, the "QUOTE" currency is the currency which is the "reference" of the pair.

  • Base:  In a given trading pair, the "BASE" currency is the currency which is being quoted in relation to the "reference" currency.
    ​
    ​Example: If the "BASE-QUOTE" pair BTC-USD show a price of 1000. This means that $1000 can be exchanged for 1-BTC (in other words 1000 USD/BTC).

NOTE: Although the "BASE-QUOTE" pattern is the standard following the ISO 4217 guidelines, not all cryptocurrency exchanges follow this pattern.

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