Everyone loves money and the ones who are serious about their money, account for their cash flow. For fiat currencies, there is the celebrated personal finance management app – Mint. What about cryptocurrencies? How do people who need to manage cryptocurrencies keep track of inflows, expenses and balances across many wallets and exchanges? This is the problem that Tapeke, a personal finance app for Bitcoins, is about to solve for its users.
Tapeke is the brainchild of Nicolo Maria Lazzarin. He was the interface developer for Hive Wallet. Tapeke is entirely built with Node.js, Angular.js and BitCore – a powerful Open Source Bitcoin Javascript library.
It is important to note that Tapeke is NOT a wallet service. It is merely a financial dashboard application. The reason this startup is about to solve a problem that’s worth solving is this — Many jurisdictions including the US have imposed capital gains tax on Bitcoins. Which means Bitcoins are viewed as properties, the profits accrued on which, from the time of acquisition to sale is taxable according to bitcoin price. But who is going to keep the books in this case? Accounting firms? Or the user him/herself?
This is where a certain amount of automation from a SaaS solution like Tapeke would be of value. The value is not just for the casual individual users, but for the big players and VC’s who are starting to play out solely in cryptocurrencies.
A 100% Bitcoin Startup
When I usually cover a startup, I stop with the technology and don’t speak much about the company/startup culture. But Tapeke’s culture is worth a mention. It would be unjust to speak of their culture in atleast one paragraph. It is often interesting to see the preachers practise their preachings. Tapeke being a Bitcoin centred solution, stands by this in their startup culture. Tapeke is a 100% Bitcoin startup — which means, they pay their employees in Bitcoins, they are funded by Bitcoins and they don’t have a traditional bank account.
What about security?
Tapeke calls themselves a zero-knowledge personal finance app, meaning that it is an end-to-end encrypted system. The app is client-side encrypted and never requires users’ private keys. No app should require access to private keys. Just adding this bit on information to keep the readers informed of the norms of the cryptocurrency system.
What’s yet to be seen
What’s yet to be seen as Tapeke moves out of the Beta mode are the following:
- How is Tapeke going to include the offline wallets into their solution design?
- How would Tapeke expand their services to become a bitcoin exchange too — as there is a dearth of API availability, currently.
- How can Tapeke keep the security vulnerabilities at bay, considering they are about to create a chain from different services and wallets. Since we know that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
It sure seems to be a blossoming time for the startups in Bitcoin arena, we have recently covered many startup companies at NEWSBTC; namely, ChangeTip and its recent Facebook Integration, a Healthcare Information App called BitHealth.io, and now Tapeke. Rest assured, we will bring more news about the Startups that add value to the ecosystem as they happen.
Images from Tapeke.