PRACTICE
Records before you need them
Every version of this that starts after something has gone wrong is a worse version.
Why the timing is the whole point
Records are easy to build when nothing has happened and nearly impossible to reconstruct afterwards. The moment you need them — a tax filing, a lost device, an executor, a dispute with an exchange, a theft — is the moment when the sources you would have used have become unavailable, renamed, delisted or shut down.
This is not an argument for elaborate bookkeeping. It is an argument for writing a small number of things down now, while writing them down is boring.
What to record, and nothing more
Four things cover almost every situation.
What exists and where. A plain list: which wallets, which exchanges, which addresses, and roughly what is on each. Not amounts that change — the fact of the account. Anyone dealing with your affairs needs to know what to look for before they can look.
How each is reached. Not the credentials themselves, but what kind of credential it is and where the recovery material lives. "Hardware wallet, phrase in the safe, second copy with my sister" is a complete record. "Ledger" is not.
Acquisition details for tax. Date, amount, price at the time, and what it was acquired with. This is the one that is genuinely irrecoverable later — exchanges delist, close accounts and delete histories, and reconstructing a cost basis from block data years afterwards is miserable and approximate.
Who should know. One named person, and what they are supposed to do. A perfect record nobody can find is not a record.
Where to keep it
Two physical copies in separate places beats any single digital copy, and neither should be a photograph. Cloud storage is not wrong for the non-credential parts — the list of what exists, the tax records — and is categorically wrong for anything that grants access.
The useful distinction: material that helps someone understand your position can live anywhere reasonably secure. Material that grants control lives on paper or metal, in a place a flood or a fire will not reach, and is never typed into a machine again after it is first written down.
Tax, briefly and without pretending to be advice
Most jurisdictions treat disposals as taxable events, and "disposal" is usually broader than people expect — swapping one asset for another typically counts even though no conventional currency moved. Nothing here is tax advice and the rules differ enormously by country.
What is universal is the record-keeping burden, and it falls on you rather than on any platform. The practical advice is simply this: export your transaction history from every platform you use at least once a year and store the file. Platforms that disappear take their export function with them.
For active accounts, maintaining spreadsheets across hundreds of trades, transfers, and staking distributions becomes unmanageable. Standardised crypto tax and accounting platforms like CoinTracking and Koinly ingest read-only API keys or public ledger addresses to automatically calculate cost basis (FIFO/LIFO), capital gains, and compliant tax reports.
What to do when a platform disappears
Exchanges close, get acquired, exit a market, or freeze withdrawals. When it happens the window in which you can retrieve your own history is often short and announced badly.
Treat every annual export as insurance against this rather than as a tax chore. If a platform announces any change to its service, export first and read the announcement second — the export function is usually among the first things to go, and support queues at that moment are not a resource you can count on. Keep the raw export file rather than a tidied-up version of it; a tidied file reflects your understanding at the time, and the raw one reflects what actually happened.
Records for someone who is not you
The reader of these records is, quite often, not going to be you. It may be an accountant, an executor, a spouse, or you in five years having forgotten every detail.
Write for that person. Avoid abbreviations only you use. Say what things are rather than what they are called — "hardware wallet holding most of it" rather than a product name. Date the page. And state explicitly what is not covered, because a list that looks complete and is not is worse than one that admits its edges.
A worked example of a record that survives
Here is what one page looks like in practice, with nothing sensitive on it.
Holdings, updated March 2026. Hardware wallet (bought new, 2024) holds the majority; recovery phrase handwritten, original in the home safe, duplicate with my sister, neither photographed. Exchange account at a regulated European venue holds a small working balance; login in the password manager, two-factor on the phone, backup codes in the safe. Annual transaction exports for both, 2021 onward, in the folder marked TAX on the home server and on the backup drive. My executor is named in the will and has been told this page exists and where it is.
That is the entire system. It names what exists, what kind of credential reaches each thing, where the recovery material lives, where the tax history is, and who has been told. It contains no key, no phrase and no password, so it can sit in an ordinary filing cabinet.
What not to write down
Never the phrase itself in any document that circulates, never a password, and never a hint constructed to be solvable only by people who love you — those hints reliably turn out to be solvable by nobody. Never store the phrase in a password manager alongside the credentials it protects, because that turns two independent failures into one.
The five-minute version
If you do nothing else: write one page listing every place you hold something, what kind of credential reaches it, where the recovery material is, and who to tell. Put it with your will. Update it when something changes. That single page solves more real problems than any amount of software.
Last reviewed: 11 September 2026