TaxBit Courts Corporate America With Crypto Accounting Software

TaxBit has begun pitching corporate America on specialized crypto tax prep software in a sign of the growing business behind bitcoin and other digital assets.

The “Corporate Accounting Suite” already has its first customer, Aaron Jacob, a strategy executive at TaxBit told CoinDesk: BlockFi, the crypto lender and bitcoin exchange. He said banks, exchanges and investment firms are also in the crosshairs.

Expanding beyond retail and investigative clientele, the Draper, Utah-based company is betting that the next big wave of crypto-minded accountants will come from corporations, an area traditionally cautious about the $2.5 trillion asset class.

From a purely infrastructure-focused perspective, that hesitancy may soon become rarer. Earlier Monday, payments giant Mastercard said it would vastly expand its crypto capabilities as part of a push to get banks and merchants into cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, BlockFi is forming a new joint venture with investment firm Neuberger Berman.

“It’s much more complicated than transacting in fiat, because as you know, digital assets are not treated as cash,” Jacob said. “Even though we call it cryptocurrency, it’s really a crypto property from a tax perspective, and that’s also true from an accounting perspective as well.”

He said the software will help corporations keep tabs of their coins’ myriad movements. Exchanging coins, swapping, selling and bridging are all potential taxable events that a compliance-minded company needs to track.

“We’re helping enable companies to be able to expand their offerings to their consumers by opening up an entirely new universe of transactions and products and services that they can provide,” Jacob said.