u/Findep18

I had to help someone value their crypto holdings for a divorce filing and learned a few things that I hadn't seen written up anywhere and wanted to share.

The core issue is there's no official daily close for crypto like stocks have. CoinGecko and CryptoCompare are the two most commonly used aggregators, but they pull from different exchange sets and don't agree.. differences of 1-3% on historical daily prices are normal and while courts don't care about a 2% gap, you need to pick one source and apply it consistently everywhere.

Using CoinGecko for BTC and CryptoCompare for ETH in the same filing is the kind of inconsistency that gets flagged.

Same goes for price type eg. daily open, daily close (midnight UTC), etc it doesn't matter which, but you have to pick one and use it everywhere.

One thing that came up was that they had USDC listed as a 2017 holding while USDC launched in 2018. Sounds obvious but forensic accountants apparently see impossible asset dates all the time and it tanks credibility on the whole disclosure.

Anyway, hope this saves someone a headache.

I was helping someone with their filing recently and they had USDC listed as a holding on their 2017 marriage date. USDC didn't launch until 2018... a mistake that made the judge question the entire disclosure.

A couple other things I didn't know before going through this: there's no official closing price for crypto like stocks have, so you need to pick one pricing source and use it consistently for everything. And screenshots of wallet balances are basically worthless as evidence in court.

Anyway, hope this saves someone a headache.