How CoinTracker survived multiple crypto boom-bust cycles

Executive overview

Crypto companies face uniquely violent market swings — multi-year winters where the entire space is declared dead, followed by explosive bull runs. CoinTracker nearly shut down in 2020, then grew 14x in 2021, then fell behind on product quality.

Survival requires two things: a long-term conviction that outlasts the cycle, and relentless focus on users when growth disappears.

Ship fast and talk to users constantly — that's the whole framework.

Origins and the problem CoinTracker solves

• Founders Chandan Lodha and John came from fintech, frustrated by slow traditional financial rails
• Pivoted to crypto in 2017; first pain point was simply tracking assets across exchanges
• Built CoinTracker to handle portfolio tracking and crypto tax compliance
• Mission: enable everyone to use crypto with peace of mind

Surviving crypto winter

• In 2020, CoinTracker was six months from running out of money
• Pressure compounds: company morale collapses while the outside world calls the entire space dead
• Survival required radical transparency — honest, vulnerable conversations with the team about the real situation
• Long-term conviction ("does this mission actually improve lives?") kept the founders going
• A strong co-founder relationship was essential; Chandan credits his co-founder as critical to getting through it

The product quality crisis

• During the 2021 bull run, CoinTracker grew 14x but neglected product development
• Users reported the product had fallen behind — it didn't support DeFi activity, liquidity pools, or Uniswap transactions
• Painful realization: users were saying CoinTracker no longer solved their problem

CoinTracker 2.0: the rebuild

• Halted all other work for nine months to reimagine product and company
• Two core changes drove the transformation:
  1. User obsession — every team member at every level now talks to users constantly; Chandan himself talks to users daily and monitors Reddit and Discord
  2. "Think long term, ship today" — adding "ship today" to the guiding principle unlocked experimentation and dramatically accelerated execution almost overnight

Advice for building in crypto

• Stay humble during bull markets; stay believing during bear markets
• Use winters intelligently — companies that survive them are positioned to win the next cycle
• Take the longest view possible; patience determines how much of the upside you capture