Robust portfolio management on the desktop

[petty]

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Idea name: Portfolio/Asset management pane
Description: long winded one below
Use case: As a user, I want to manage all my assets in a single place so that I understand what my money is doing
Target user: Anyone in crypto
Why this is important: Because it is fundamental to this technology (value management).
Any other comments:

I’ve been wanting to make a portfolio tracker for a long time but haven’t ever gotten around to it for <insert arbitrary reason here>. I have various digital assets spread out across wallets, networks, etc and there seems to lack a platform that allows me to keep track of those assets and the relevant metadata associated with them:

• access to them
• their respective price movements
• associated gains/losses
• distributions across
  • token
  • access methods
• provenance
• etc, etc, etc

I’ve been doing this in Google Sheets, leveraging their scripting system to pull data at a reasonable time rate. It’s a single API call from coingecko for all information I need. I hate that I use Google Sheets for this. It’s clunky, manual, isn’t safe, and it bothers me.

After spending some time speccing it out and thinking about required infrastructure and the associated stack this would be built on, it occurred to me that Status Desktop is already perfect for this. Here are some reasons why:

1. We’ve already built a good portion of the required work. Status Desktop already handles assets in Ethereum. It pulls price data for the accounts you have and tokens you’ve enabled. You can add “watch only accounts” to even keep track of things you don’t want to control within Status Desktop.
2. This gives people a reason to use Status Desktop. Portfolio management is a big deal in the crypto industry. People need quality context to their positions so they can make good decisions on how to manage it. If we claim to be a window into Web3, then asset management is crucial to doing that. I would venture a guess that a large section of people would download Status Desktop for this purpose alone. A portion of those users would then be converted to the other features Status Desktop offers, which is a function of what we continue to offer, and how we blend them together.
3. We’ve already decided that we want to provide a better experience for people to manage assets across different blockchains and networks because we assume a web3 future where assets live on multiple networks simultaneously and we need to provide for our users to handle that. Providing a portfolio context starts a lot of that work: Pulling data from multiple chains, managing the associated address structures and accounting mechanisms (UTXO vs accounts based), etc.
4. Any feature you would want to add to such a thing is already something that is reasonable to put into Status Desktop.
5. If we are building community-building software, and we consider value transfer to be a fundamental part of that, then we need a place to understand what that value is doing.
6. this allows for privacy-first portfolio management. I don’t want to have to give away all my information to a platform so that I can understand what my personal assets are doing. Ingest accounts and prices, add metadata for context, and everything can be built from there.
7. We don’t need to do complicated security related things to deliver this. There is a very large asymmetry between value added and risk added in the process of building this out.
8. it gets people using Status and talking about it. They will find issues, make feature requests, hopefully build things on top of it, grow communities within Status.
9. I want it

I could continue forever, I will eventually build something out that works for me. I hope it is on Status because I have a feeling that a lot of you who read this would also want something like this.

In any event, I wanted to start a discussion about whether or not our community wants this and if it’s reasonable to do. If so, when and how to prioritize it.

If you think this is a great idea and know how to implement it, consider posting a project proposal on Assemble.

[barry]

Have you looked at zerion and zapper.fi? Besides them tracking non-standard DeFi assets they have started to track across multiple networks.