Why I built SmartViewAI
I spent years telling people to track their portfolio properly, then realised I was asking them to do something the tools made genuinely hard.
I have an IT background. Ten years of building software before crypto was anything I talked about publicly. So when I started teaching, I assumed the tooling problem was somebody else’s.
It took a long time to accept that it was mine.
The question I could not answer well
The question I got most often was not “which coin”. It was some version of: how do I know where I actually stand?
Someone holds a little on one exchange, a little on another, some in a wallet, and made a few P2P trades along the way. They want one number. In India they also need that number in a form that survives a tax filing. With the 1% TDS accounted for, and every transfer distinguished from every sale.
My honest answer for years was a spreadsheet. Which is fine advice for the five percent of people who will actually maintain one.
What the existing tools got wrong for India
Most portfolio trackers are built for a US or European user. They assume bank rails that we do not have, they do not understand P2P as a first-class way of getting rupees in and out, and they treat tax as an export button rather than something structural.
The 30% rate and the no-set-off rule are not an edge case here. They change which trades are worth making. A tool that treats tax as an afterthought is missing the part that matters most to an Indian user.
Building it was the education
I had explained exchange APIs on camera many times. Connecting to a dozen of them properly, handling the ones that rate-limit you, reconciling a trade history that three different exchanges report three different ways. That taught me more about how this industry actually works than any amount of reading.
It also made me a better teacher. It is difficult to hand-wave through an explanation once you have had to make the thing work.
Why it matters for what I say here
I am not only someone with an audience. I run a product with paying customers, which means I see the unglamorous parts: support tickets, failed payments, people who cannot complete a verification step, the gap between what people say they want and what they use.
When I look at a project now, I look at it partly as someone who has tried to ship something in this industry. That is a different lens from the one most commentary is written through, and I think it is a more useful one.
If you want to see it, it is at SmartViewAI. There is a free plan, and I would rather you try it than take my word for it.