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Connect Coinbase

Coinbase, budgeted like a bank account.

Most apps that mention Coinbase pull a balance and stop. This one pulls what happened: fills, fees, transfers, cost basis.

Read only, and refused if the key can trade or withdraw. How we check that is below.

What lands in the book

A balance is where other apps stop.

Three rivals name Coinbase and take the number. The number is the easy half.

  • Monarch lists a Coinbase integration on both its tiers. Copilot connects it on Apple devices. Lunch Money syncs its balance. All three stop at the number
  • Here a buy and a sell become two legs each, with the price recorded at the moment of the fill, and the fee its own row in the currency it was charged
  • That is the difference between knowing what your coins are worth and being able to file what you did with them
  • The first sync reaches back to 1 January of the previous calendar year, then keeps up hourly

The key you give us

Coinbase can list what a key is allowed to do. We ask, before we save it.

Promising read only is easy. This is what we do instead of promising.

Before the connection existsNot afterThe key is tried against Coinbase first, and nothing is stored until it answers
What we ask CoinbaseTheir own answerCoinbase exposes the permissions attached to a key. One that carries the right to trade or to withdraw is rejected outright
If the permissions are missingThe important halfRefused. An answer without them is treated as no answer, because a venue that renamed the fields would otherwise pass every key as read only
Where the secret livesAfter it is acceptedEncrypted at rest, and never returned by our API again
If the key stops workingRotation and expirySync stops after repeated auth failures, the space owner gets one message, and you replace the key in place

One thing worth knowing

Moving coins off Coinbase is not a disposal.

Paired, it is one move; unpaired, it leaves the report.How the pairing works.

Questions

The questions people ask before connecting.

Can Orla trade or withdraw on my Coinbase account?
No. Coinbase exposes the permissions attached to a key, and one carrying the right to trade or withdraw is rejected before the connection is created. If the permissions are absent from the answer, the key is refused as well.
Does it import my history or just the balance?
Both, and the history is the point. Fills, deposits and withdrawals become transactions in the ledger, so the capital gains engine can work a cost basis out by lot. The first sync reaches back to 1 January of the previous calendar year, which covers the current tax year and the one before it.
Will moving coins to my own wallet look like a sale?
No. The withdrawal is matched to the arrival on the other side, by transaction hash where the venue gives one and by coin, amount and date where it does not, and the pair becomes one internal move. An unmatched withdrawal is left out of disposals rather than counted as a sale.

Didn't find your answer? [email protected]

Read next: how crypto works in the ledger, capital gains and the tax year, what getting paid in crypto really costs.

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Connect Coinbase, and see the year add up.

Connecting an exchange is on the paid plans; the free plan holds the book, manual accounts and imports.