Crypto investor CFO services: manage the money around the coins

A CFO for crypto runs the ledger, not opinions on coins

We hold no view on which tokens win — that line matters, because it defines the job. What a corporate treasurer does for a company holding volatile currency, we do for your portfolio: written policy on sizing, reserves, realization, and custody, reviewed on a fixed cadence against real numbers. Fixed fees, quoted after a discovery call.

None of it works on top of guesswork. Reconstructing thousands of trades, transfers, and DeFi transactions into a defensible cost history is its own discipline, covered on our crypto bookkeeping page — CFO work begins once those records hold.

Position size starts with your living costs, not your conviction

The first policy we write has nothing to do with crypto: how many months of household spending sit in cash, outside every exchange and wallet. Money you will need within a few years — a home down payment, next year's tuition — never belongs in an asset that can halve in a quarter, however strong the thesis. From there we cap crypto as a percentage of net worth, decided in a calm month and enforced with rebalancing bands: when the position grows through the ceiling, a mechanical sale trims it back, so the decision was made before the euphoria arrived.

The rule that saves the most net worth runs the other way. The household never borrows — no HELOC, no margin, no payday-adjacent leverage — to add exposure after a drawdown. Averaging down with money your family needs converts an investment loss into a life problem.

Paper gains and realized gains are different assets

Treating them as the same number is the core crypto finance error. One point catches almost everyone: under CRA's view, trading one coin for another is a disposition at fair market value — swaps create real gains even though no dollars touched your bank account.

So realization gets a written plan: which life goals paper gains are earmarked to fund, what triggers a sale — a rebalancing breach, a purchase date, a milestone price — and where the proceeds land. Deciding this in advance is the difference between an investor and a passenger.

The tax reserve rule: fund the CRA at the moment of gain

The classic failure sequence: large gains realized in a bull year, proceeds kept on-exchange in crypto, market halves, and the April balance owing has not moved. A loss carryback may claw some tax back later, but the payment is due in cash now, out of a shrunken portfolio. Our rule is mechanical: at every disposition — sale, swap, or purchase made with crypto — the estimated tax moves to Canadian dollars in an account that holds no volatile assets. The percentage depends on whether your gains are capital or business income — full inclusion versus half changes the reserve materially — so we set it from your actual characterization and bracket, then layer in quarterly instalments once CRA expects them.

Custody is counterparty risk, and treasurers diversify it

QuadrigaCX and FTX were not market losses — investors were right about prices and still lost everything, because the balance sat with one failed custodian. A treasury policy treats exchanges the way corporations treat banks: a maximum share of the portfolio per platform, a cold-storage allocation for long-term positions, and preference for regulated Canadian platforms for the trading float. It also covers the risk nobody prices: a documented, secure access plan so hardware wallets and keys do not die with you — self-custody without an estate plan is a donation to the blockchain.

Foreign platforms carry a reporting tail as well — holdings on non-Canadian exchanges can trigger T1135 foreign-property reporting, covered with the business-versus-capital question on our crypto cross-border tax page.