Crypto belongs in your net worth (carefully)

If you own crypto it belongs in your net worth: leaving it out does not make the picture prudent, just wrong. The trick is including it without creating new risks along the way. Public addresses, read-only keys, pounds pricing and some honesty about volatility. Here is the method.

Count it, carefully

Whether it is a serious allocation or a small experiment left over from a previous cycle, crypto is part of what you own, and a net worth that omits it is incomplete rather than conservative. The rule is the same as for every other asset: include it, value it honestly, and make sure the tracking itself never creates a new way to lose it. That last clause is the part crypto makes interesting.

Wallets: public addresses only

A self-custody wallet has two parts: a public address anyone may safely see, and private keys, usually held as a seed phrase, that control the money. Net worth tracking needs only the first. A public address lets you, or any portfolio tool, read balances and history straight from the blockchain, with no power to move anything at all.

So the safety rule is absolute: a tracker needs your public addresses, never your seed phrase or private keys. Nothing that merely reports balances has any business asking for them, and a service that does ask is either badly designed or a phishing attempt; close the tab. WealthWelly stores public addresses only, by design, and will never ask for anything else.

Exchanges: read-only keys, never withdraw scope

Coins held on an exchange are read through the exchange's API. Exchanges let you create API keys with specific permissions, and the only scope a tracker ever needs is read. Never grant trade scope, and never, under any circumstances, withdrawal scope. A leaked read-only key exposes your privacy, which is bad; a leaked withdrawal key exposes your money, which is unrecoverable.

Where the exchange offers it, restrict the key to named IP addresses so a stolen key is useless from anywhere else, and delete keys you no longer use. Five minutes of settings removes most of the tail risk of connecting an exchange account to anything.

Price it in pounds, and say when

Crypto trades around the clock, mostly against the dollar, so a sterling net worth needs a consistent conversion. Pick one pricing source that quotes prices in GBP directly, CoinGecko is a common choice, and stamp every valuation with the time it was taken. A bitcoin figure without a timestamp is close to meaningless: the price at breakfast and the price at supper can differ by more than a month's savings.

Consistency matters more than perfection here. One source, one method, dated values: that is what makes this month comparable with last month, which is the whole point of tracking. If you hold stablecoins, price those too rather than assuming a fixed value; the peg is a promise, not a law of nature.

Volatility, honestly

Crypto can fall further and faster than anything else on your balance sheet. In March 2020 bitcoin lost roughly half its value in two days; it has also multiplied over longer stretches. A net worth with a meaningful crypto slice inherits that behaviour, and pretending otherwise defeats the purpose of measuring.

Two habits keep it honest. Watch the allocation, not just the value: a holding that drifts from five per cent of your worth to twenty-five per cent has transformed your risk without a single new purchase. And glance at the total both with and without the crypto line; if the version without it would change your decisions, the position is larger than your plans are assuming.

Cost basis: your future self needs it

Record what you paid and when, for every purchase, and keep the records as you go, including crypto-to-crypto swaps, which UK tax rules generally treat as disposals. Selling, swapping or spending crypto can create capital gains that HMRC expects you to report, and reconstructing cost basis years later, from closed exchanges and lost emails, is genuinely miserable. A dated record of buys, sells and fees turns a future nightmare into an export.

If the sums are getting serious, this is also the point where paying for proper tax advice earns its fee many times over.

This guide is general information, not financial advice; if you are unsure what is right for your circumstances, speak to a regulated financial adviser.