The line between a share and a token is thinning. A stablecoin can buy a real share at a broker, or a tokenized one on a chain. Most trackers make you keep two sets of books and reconcile them by hand at tax time. FolioBright treats a trade that crosses the line as one event, because that is what it is.
Buying a share with a stablecoin
Pay for a stock with USDC and two things happen. You acquire the shares — and you dispose of the coins. For a US taxpayer a stablecoin is property rather than currency, so spending it realizes a gain or loss against its own cost basis.
Individually that gain is pennies. Across a year of small purchases it is the difference between a realized-gains report that is complete and one that is quietly short, which is worse than no report at all because it looks finished. FolioBright records the disposal as a real sale, linked to the purchase, drawn from your actual tax lots.
You see it before you commit. Choose your coin as the funding source and the form tells you how many coins will leave, the price they leave at, which date that price came from, and the gain it realizes — split short and long term. If the coins you would spend have no recorded cost basis, it says so and refuses, rather than booking the whole amount as profit.
A stablecoin is not exactly a dollar
Anyone who holds USDC knows it does not sit precisely on a dollar, and during a depeg it can move a long way off. A tracker that hard-codes it to $1.00 is asserting something its own users can see is false — and doing it in the one place that ends up on a tax return.
FolioBright prices a stablecoin from its market quote where one is available, shows it to four decimal places so a real quote is visible as a real quote, and tells you which it used. “$1.0000, its close on 4 August” reads differently from “$1.0000, its peg — no quote for that date”. Same figure, different provenance, and you can always tell which you are looking at.
Token for token
Swapping one token for another is a disposal of the first and an acquisition of the second. FolioBright books both legs, keeps them linked so they read as one line in your history, and lets you choose FIFO or specific tax lots for the side you are giving up. Delete the swap and both legs reverse together.
It will also stop you doing the wrong thing. Try to receive a listed share in a swap and it declines, because you cannot receive a real NVDA share in an on-chain trade. It points you to whichever route you actually meant: the tokenized ticker if you bought the token, or a purchase funded from your coin if you bought the share.
Tokenized shares
A tokenized share has its own ticker — NVIDIA's is NVDAx — and its
own market price. Because these tokens trade outside exchange hours, the token can move while
the share sits at its last close. They are backed one-for-one, so the two track closely, but
closely is not identically.
So FolioBright tracks the token under its own symbol and prices it from the token's own quote, rather than assuming it matches the underlying. It is the same principle as the stablecoin: value what you hold at what it actually trades for, not at what it is supposed to be worth.
One thing worth knowing, because it surprises people. Tokenized shares generally do not pay a cash dividend — the dividend arrives as more tokens, with your balance rising instead. When that happens, record the increase as income and FolioBright books it as earned income with its own dated tax lot, so a position that is quietly earning does not read as though it earned nothing.
What this is not
FolioBright is a portfolio tracker, not a tax adviser and not a crypto tax engine. It records disposals so your realized-gains report is complete and your accountant has real numbers to work from. It does not file anything, and it does not attempt to compute what you owe.
Nor does it pretend to a price it cannot get. Where no quote exists for something you hold, it says so and lets you set the price yourself — rather than showing a confident number with nothing behind it.