Confused About Crypto and Taxes? Wealthsimple Tax Does It for You

Listen, we hate to generalize. We really do. We believe that every person is a special unique flower in a field full of special unique flowers and all that sort of good stuff. But, we assume that, if you traded cryptocurrencies last year, you probably don’t know what you’re supposed to do about paying taxes on your crypto. Why do we make that presumption? Well, we recently surveyed 1,221 Canadians (with help from the polling firm Angus Reid). And we discovered, first of all, that a lot of people started trading crypto last year — two-thirds of the traders we surveyed said they bought or sold digital currency for the first time in 2021. And, second, the majority of crypto retail traders — aka everyday folks, as opposed to professionals who work for trading firms and the like — don’t know whether, or how, to report capital gains on their crypto earnings.

How many specifically? 85% of the crypto traders we surveyed said they didn’t know how to calculate capital gains — which is something they’ll need to do.

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If you just read that sentence and thought, Wait, I have to pay capital gains on my crypto earnings!?, we’re talking about you, we’re afraid. But that’s good, actually! You’re the person we want to talk to. Because this year, we improved Wealthsimple Tax so that it will import your crypto transactions from more than 300 popular exchanges and wallets and automatically calculate your gains and losses. That means there’s a whole lot of math you won’t be doing. And, so long as you made fewer than 500 transactions last year, we’ll charge you exactly zero dollars for the service.

How does it work? Well, if you’re curious, Wealthsimple Tax will match historical crypto prices with the movement of coins in and out of your crypto wallet to figure out how much you earned or lost, and how much you owe in taxes. Then, once Wealthsimple Tax has crunched the numbers, it’ll automatically add your gains to your tax return. Simple, right? And if you didn’t trade crypto last year and instead stuck with stocks and other traditional financial assets, we’ll do the math on your capital gains for that stuff, too. (Sixty-six percent of stock traders said they had little to no knowledge of how to report capital gains on their tax return, so the confusion isn’t crypto-specific!)

We hate to boast, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Wealthsimple is the first company to offer Canadians a regulated crypto platform AND a DIY tax-filing tool that calculates crypto capital gains.

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What’s the catch? Um, nothing? We really just want you to like Wealthsimple Tax. Because if you do, we suspect you’ll try Wealthsimple’s other handy, intuitive apps and products — all of which we designed to make investing and managing your money super easy. But no pressure.

And, lastly, a reminder: NETFILE opens on February 21. Give Wealthsimple Tax a whirl and let us make filing taxes slightly less awful and time-consuming. You are, after all, a special unique flower who, we’re sure, has better things to do.

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Wealthsimple

Wealthsimple uses technology and smart, friendly humans to help you grow and manage your money. Invest, save, trade, and even do your taxes in a better, simpler way.