Crypto fair market value: the same holding, three price conventions, three answers

Enter a quantity and up to three prices, each representing a different venue-price convention. The tool values the holding under each and shows the spread between the highest and lowest result. The point is not the number. The point is that you have to pick one convention and document it.

General information on accounting treatment, not accounting, valuation or tax advice. No live price data is used. Verify against the applicable standards (IFRS / US GAAP) and your auditor.

The problem this makes visible

The same token at the same instant has a different last-traded price on every venue. Order books are separate, liquidity is uneven, and there is no single consolidated tape. So there is no such thing as *the* price at a cut-off. There is only the price on a particular venue, at a particular timestamp, under a particular convention.

Which means the thing that makes a crypto valuation defensible to an auditor is not the number. It is that the entity picked one source-and-time convention, wrote it into its accounting policy, and applied it to every measurement in every period. An entity that quietly uses whichever venue is most convenient at each close is not measuring, it is choosing. This tool exists to put the size of that discretion in front of you.

The three conventions

• Principal market price: the price on the venue the entity has identified as its principal market for the asset, which is the reference point most reporting frameworks push you toward.
• Average across named venues: an average of the venues the entity has explicitly named in its policy. Naming them in advance is what stops the average from being a convenient result rather than a method.
• Fixed daily close: a single stated cut-off, applied the same way every period regardless of what the intraday range did.

You enter the quantity held and up to three prices. The tool multiplies quantity by each price and reports the spread between the highest and lowest resulting value, as an absolute amount and as a percentage of the lowest. On a large position, or on a thin token, that percentage is frequently larger than the materiality threshold the engagement is working to. That is the whole argument for a documented policy in one figure.

What this tool cannot do

It reads no live price feed, and that is a deliberate design decision rather than a limitation we would remove if we could. This site prerenders its pages, so any price baked in at build time would be wrong within seconds of publication. And wiring in a third-party feed would put a number on an accounting page that we cannot stand behind, on a page whose entire argument is that unsourced numbers are the problem.

So the prices are yours. You bring them from your own sources, which is the same discipline the underlying accounting requires.

• The output is not a valuation and is not evidence of one. It is arithmetic on figures you typed.
• It does not tell you which venue or cut-off constitutes fair value for your entity. That is set by the reporting framework and your documented policy.
• It applies no fair value hierarchy, no active-market assessment and no adjustment for illiquidity, lock-ups or restricted transferability.
• It handles a single asset and a single point in time. It does not value a portfolio, translate currencies, or produce a period-end remeasurement entry.
• It retains nothing and creates no audit trail.

Where the answer actually comes from

Whether a holding is measured at fair value at all, and on what basis, depends on how the asset is classified under the entity's framework. The IFRS treatment and the US GAAP treatment differ on classification and on how value changes are recognised, and those pages are the place to start rather than a price comparison. Once the framework question is settled, the policy has to say concretely: which venue or venues, which timestamp, what happens when a venue halts trading or delists the asset, and who approves a change to any of it.

A reviewer will ask for exactly that document, and then test whether the numbers in the ledger were produced by it. Consistency is what gets tested, more than the specific choice. Switching convention between periods without disclosure is far harder to defend than picking a convention an auditor might not have chosen themselves.

Applying one convention at scale

One holding at one timestamp is easy to price by hand. A treasury holding dozens of assets across several chains, revalued at every period end, is not. Every measurement has to use the same source and the same cut-off, and it has to still do so when a wallet is added late or a transaction is reclassified and the whole period is re-run.

CryptaCount applies the entity's pricing policy consistently across 90+ blockchain networks and 100+ exchange and wallet connectors, keeps the source of each measurement attached to the measurement, and posts the resulting movements through IFRS and US GAAP ledgers into QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage or Zoho. When a reviewer asks where a carrying amount came from, the answer is a record rather than a recollection.

The valuation figure is only useful once it becomes a posting. The journal entry generator shows the structure that follows, the cost basis calculator covers which lots a disposal relieves, and the profit calculator and Ethereum gas fee calculator round out the set on the free tools hub.

An auditor is not checking whether you found the right price. They are checking whether you applied the price convention you said you would.