Since CoinTracker launched in 2017, there have been many defining moments in crypto. Bitcoin breaking $100k, the SEC approving spot ETFs, NFTs dominating the art market, just to name a few.

But one thing that’s never been defined – until now – is our brand.

So, why reimagine our brand now?

Over the past year, the team at CoinTracker has been hard at work designing new product experiences for our community, in addition to launching CoinTracker Enterprise.

To support this continued growth, CoinTracker's design team undertook a meaty challenge: redefine the brand and visual identity. The result is a tangible representation of our original mission and values, providing a foundation to build the next chapter of CoinTracker.

The updated design includes:

• A logo and supportive wordmark that depict interlocking wallets and represents CoinTracker as the singular place to view — and make sense of — all your onchain activity
• A color palette rooted in black and white, with complementary pops of color — a refreshing change from the deep blues and purples of crypto startups
• An illustrative visual style that celebrates the future-forward nature of crypto and expresses it through unique geometric environments, soft textures, and vibrant colors
• A technically robust design system that unifies our marketing and product pages for the first time, providing a seamless end-to-end experience for customers
• A flexible new typeface, CoinTracker Pro, that’s both friendly and functional, able to convey everything from headline-worthy messaging to dense transactional details on our Enterprise product
• A tone of voice that makes difficult and complicated topics easy to understand, approachable, and actionable

Designing for the future of crypto

The overall design intention was to simplify the experience (taxes are hard enough!) by reducing visual complexity, differentiating ourselves from our imitators, and avoiding worn-out tropes in crypto and fintech.

To provide an outside perspective, we called upon Bakken & Baeck, a world-class design and technology studio whose work we have long admired. As it turns out, one of the cofounders, Tobias Baeck, has been a CoinTracker customer since 2017.

“Understanding and getting taxes right is a universal challenge for crypto users, and I’ve used CoinTracker myself since the early days because they make it so much easier,” said Tobias. “Making complex things more accessible to many through tech and design is what we love doing, so we were excited to partner with them on this journey when Jude reached out.”

Together, we worked from the outside in, rebuilding the brand, design system, and UI to support new user experiences across all of our surfaces. Read about the product updates.

Defining our brand DNA

While crypto can remove barriers, connect people, and move at the speed of the internet, it can also be fragmented, frustrating, and confusing.

Our mission, to enable everyone to use crypto with peace of mind, has remained our north star since day one. We decided to build upon this mission of CoinTracker – for both our Consumer and Enterprise products. As crypto continues to grow in complexity, a product that can offer users peace of mind as they complete their taxes is an evergreen value proposition and one worth building a generational brand upon. The hot memecoin of the moment might change week- to-week, but we designed our brand to look, feel, and sound like a trusted, reliable thought partner throughout the tax journey.

This meant investing deeply in our visuals, logo, and key touchpoints of the brand. For example, our previous logo from 2018 was a simplified illustration of wallets wrapping together. In crypto, we've already seen innovations that move us from wallets, to smart wallets, to... who knows what's next. Whatever the next big thing in crypto is, CoinTracker's value prop is that we will intelligently manage multiple forces coming together in one place for our users.

We decided to move away from this literal and illustration-based logo to something that could sustain broader interpretation and work on several levels. You could see our new logo as a representation of portfolios, wallets, or forces interlocking as one, but if you didn't know that you could also see it as a badge of high or premium quality.

Finding our flow state

When users lean into our expertise, CoinTracker enables them to become super productive, filing their taxes with efficiency and ease. As a team, we had many discussions about how we wanted CoinTracker users to enter into a flow state while using it. Flow state might sound like a fuzzy proposition with a lot of woo – but actually it's a necessary state to enter for maximum efficiency.

"There's this focus that leads to a sense of... clarity. You know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other, you get immediate feedback… time disappears… you feel part of something larger."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined "flow state"

This naturally led to our new positioning statement, crypto accounting in perfect flow. A flow state feels effortless, sharpens your focus, optimizes your productivity, and feels enjoyable. You may have heard famous musicians, coders, or chess masters talking about how flow state is necessary for them to do their deepest and best work.

Putting it all together

As a team we thought deeply about how our new brand and tone of voice would reach users across every touchpoint. The true end-to-end experience of a user begins on social media or word-of-mouth, and (hopefully) ends with them using your product and sharing about the experience.

Since our new brand launched, you'll see its impact on our landing pages, emails, daily portfolio tracking notices, the CoinTracker blog, and, of course, throughout the product. For the first time, we have a design system that spans product and marketing pages, giving us greater consistency and coherence end-to-end.

As our brand strategy articulated the need for CoinTracker to set itself apart from the sea of crypto and fintech startups, we landed on a visual style that was a departure from the line-heavy illustration styles that came to define startups in the mid-2010s. This led us to developing a colorful, textured and painterly illustration style with a lot of exciting possibilities – we've been build upon this visual vocabulary with hand-drawn, digital and Gen-AI tooling that embraces the hybridity of our current creative moment.

Users returning to CoinTracker this tax season will see a refreshed UI and UX updates in the information architecture, onboarding, portfolios, transactions, and even new features like account health. The smallest in-product modals and messaging are an opportunity for us to stay "on brand" and communicate clearly to users.

Notably, for the first time in CoinTracker’s history, we invested in content design as a key pillar of the design team, which helped shape the user’s overall experience from sign up to downloading tax forms.

As a tax product, it is especially important that our voice follows these principles to represent our brand:

• Communicate with clarity: We are plainspoken and precise with the words we choose. Everything we say is easy-to-understand, relevant and actionable.
• Enlighten the way: We are your knowledgeable guide through web3. We take the time to understand your needs so that we can provide the most helpful support possible.
• Power momentum: We drive progress. We speak with conviction and from experience, empowering users to feel optimistic, be decisive and achieve more with their crypto.

Initial user feedback

One of the keys for unlocking mainstream adoption of crypto is ease of use. As a design team that has worked on the launch of many other products in crypto, we’ve seen customers expect more: better usability, more polish, delightful experiences. We only expect this trend to continue with the next 100 million adopters of crypto.

After just a few weeks, we've already gotten signal that our design and UX updates are performing well and bring peace of mind to customers:

• New users are more likely to who add a wallet on their first day by a stat sig percentage.
• Conversion rates of users landing on our page and signing up are steadily climbing.

It's still early but here is some early feedback and quotes we've heard from our users returning to CoinTracker this tax season.

• "CoinTracker didn’t just rebuild; they redefined—setting a new gold standard for crypto users, from the curious to the seasoned, with unmatched accuracy, speed, and innovation in every detail. 💕" — Alexander J.
• "So I hadn't checked out CoinTracker in a couple of years and holy crap the redo of the UI and capabilities is ****ing amazing." — Alex

CoinTracker has always paid close attention to our users — we even have a “Voice of the Customer” segment in our regular All-Hands. As our new product and brand roll out, we'll continue to seek insights from them. This past year was also the first time that we invested in a user research pillar with dedicated resourcing. As a result, we are now producing foundational research and talking pre-emptively to users about pain points and opportunities. These insights drive our product design work and position us to be at the forefront of crypto and taxes.

Leave the tax grind to us

As a design and leadership team, we viewed the brand strategy and design work over the past several months as an investment in the next chapter of our company history. Articulating these foundational elements of the brand with intentionality and clarity also allowed us to launch the very first marketing campaign in CoinTracker history, just in time for this tax season.

As a company, we remain deeply optimistic about the future of crypto, and we wanted to capture this excitement and positive outlook by focusing on the emotional and tangible benefits of not having to worry about your crypto taxes.

We’re just getting started, and we’re excited to be on this journey with our customers. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Try CoinTracker and check it out for yourself.

(Special shoutout to the CoinTracker Design team and our collaborators. Want to help us design the future of crypto? We’re hiring.)