Build vs buy: overview

Is building in-house really an option for crypto accounting and reporting? Many institutions think so—until they experience the hidden tech difficulties, budget creep, regulatory burdens, and data inaccuracies first-hand.

Use this side-by-side comparison to vet which approach is right for your business. A deep-dive into the cost breakdown is detailed under the section "Why self-building rarely makes sense".

The build vs. buy dilemma

With global crypto regulations requiring more precise and comprehensive reporting, strong back-office solutions have become essential.

Both crypto-native firms and traditional financial institutions face a crucial decision when scaling their accounting and reporting operations:

1.  Build an in-house system
2.  Use a specialised SaaS back-office platform like Cryptio

Self-building appears logical—offering control and customization. But in reality, creating an accurate, scalable and compliant crypto back-office solution is an enormous challenge.

Many companies underestimate the complexity and fail after investing significantly in engineering costs. Others succeed, but often with substantial delays, massive ongoing costs, and subpar performance—a risky trade-off when it comes to audit scrutiny, or further ambition in raising capital or acquiring licenses in such a rapidly moving market.

In contrast, some competitors bypass these challenges entirely by leveraging ready-made third-party solutions—accelerating time to market, gaining a competitive edge, and capturing market share long before in-house systems are even architected for build. 

Here are some of the reasons self-building is often the riskier and more costly choice:

• Audit risk: Uncertain auditability and accuracy of the system
• Regulatory compliance risk: Keeping software capabilities up to date with current accounting standards
• Technical risk: Potential compromised quality and reliability of the solution
• Organizational risk: Time & cost of hiring, development, testing, and delivery
• Budget creep: Underestimating the cost of delivering a working and reliable solution

Crypto accounting might seem straightforward: collect transaction data, reconcile balances, and generate reports. In practice, it’s vastly more complex.

Technical roadblocks: why self-built systems often perform poorly

1.  Data accuracy & completeness

Most assume public block explorers (Etherscan, Blockchair) always provide high-quality data. This is false.

Common data issues:

• Missing transactions → Internal transfers, staking rewards, and DeFi actions are often incomplete.
• Incorrect timestamps → An outbound transaction from a wallet may be UTC+1, while the inbound transaction to an exchange reports as UTC+8, causing reconciliation failures.
• UTXO vs. account model differences → Bitcoin nodes (and those of many other chains) do not store balance histories or detailed financial data, requiring a custom indexer to track detailed financial information for transactions over time.

Cryptio tackles this challenge by running proprietary nodes and building custom indexers for each blockchain.

While essential for complete and accurate data, building indexers is one of the hardest engineering challenges in crypto accounting. Teams without deep expertise often underestimate the complexity, leading to unreliable data, costly delays, and scalability issues.

2.  Exchange, custody & DeFi APIs constantly break

APIs frequently change, causing data loss, reporting errors, and reconciliation failures in reliant systems. 

Strong control and normalisation infrastructure is needed for exchange data.

API issues include:

• Exchanges change data formats → Breaking historical transaction records.
• Staking protocols update reward structures → Causing inaccurate revenue reporting.
• DeFi protocols modify smart contracts → Resulting in missing or incorrect data.

Self-built solutions require constant engineering resources just to keep data pipelines operational. Teams often underestimate this burden, leading to degraded systems and endless fixes.

Cryptio solves this with:

• Proactive monitoring – Tracks & adapts to API changes before issues arise.
• Automated recovery – Dedicated team detects & corrects discrepancies in real-time.
• Direct exchange & custody partnerships – Ensures priority access to updates & fixes.

Self-built systems break over time, while Cryptio delivers a fully maintained, audit-ready data pipeline—effortlessly.

3.  Data scalability & performance

Handling millions of transactions per month while performing daily balance reconciliations and complex calculations is an immense engineering challenge- often resulting in slow query times and scalability bottlenecks.

Most self-built systems fail due to:

• Complex cost basis and realized gain/loss calculations→ Calculating accurate acquisition costs, taxable events, and disposal values across multi-entity is computationally expensive and grinds most systems to a halt at scale.
• CoA mappings are inefficient and error-prone → Manual assignment of transactions to the correct accounts leads to misclassifications, compliance risks, and audit failures.
• Filters & aggregations become bottlenecks → Complex queries across massive datasets lead to performance issues.
• Slow query times → Reports become outdated before they are even generated, or at best hours of manual accounting time and oversight is needed daily.

Cryptio processes 1 billion+ transactions monthly across 100M+ wallets, with propriety filtering technologies enabling best in market querying speeds.

Without a well-architected data pipeline and complex algorithmic optimisations, even a seemingly functional system rapidly becomes unusable.

4.  Regulatory & accounting complexity

Crypto regulations and accounting standards are constantly evolving, making compliance a moving target. 

A self-built system must account for:

• Changing global regulatory frameworks – MiCA (EU), FASB, SAB 122 (U.S.), VARA (Dubai), PSA (Singapore).
• Evolving accounting standards – IFRS, GAAP, FMV, cost-basis tracking, and capital gains reconciliation.
• Complex reporting requirements – such as segregation of customer vs. corporate funds in omnibus wallet structures.

The real challenge? Embedding these ever-changing compliance rules into complex, evolving software. 

The result? Most self-built solutions fall behind compliance updates, leading to audit failures, penalties, and reputational damage. Maintaining the in-house expertise to stay compliant alone often costs more than a Cryptio subscription.

Cryptio solves this by directly embedding regulatory logic into its platform, aligning with Big4-audited frameworks and continuously updating to meet global compliance standards. Partnered directly with Big4 auditors, Cryptio delivers regulatory-grade accuracy that in-house teams can rarely achieve.

5.  Massive scale & constant change

The crypto ecosystem is vast—and expanding rapidly. Self-built systems must support existing complexity while continuously adapting to the rapid growth of blockchains, tokens, and DeFi protocols.

Common scaling challenges:

• Growing blockchain landscape → Large amount of blockchains today, with new ones launching constantly. Each integration requires ongoing engineering effort to remain competitive.
• Token explosion → millions of assets exist across L1s and L2s, and new tokens are created daily—maintaining full coverage requires significant resources.
• DeFi and exchange complexity → Staking, bridging, swaps, and NFT transactions all require specialised accounting logic. Without proper handling, financial reports become incomplete or inaccurate.

How Cryptio solves this:

• Cryptio connects to 65+ chains today and continuously expands integrations to support new chains, token standards, and protocols as they emerge.
• Automates asset tracking  across 500,000+ L1 and L2 assets—eliminating manual maintenance.
• Ensures DeFi & exchange readiness with pre-built accounting logic for staking, liquidity pools, and complex transactions.

Self-built solutions struggle to keep up with crypto’s pace, while Cryptio evolves with the industry—ensuring ongoing accuracy and full market coverage.

The reality of edge cases: why self-building becomes unmanageable

Even if a company builds a technically functional system, real-world operational edge-cases often cripple usability. 

Alongside previously mentioned issues like timestamp mismatches and UTXO vs. account model complications, other offenders include:

Data inconsistencies across sources: 

• Different blockchains, exchanges, and protocols store and structure transaction data in wildly different ways. A one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work—every integration requires custom logic.

Bridging, wrapping, & complex transaction flows:

• Wrapped assets, LP pool participation, minting/burning tokens—each must be accounted for properly or reports will be completely inaccurate.

Precision & decimal place errors:

• Different exchanges use slightly different decimal place rounding, creating discrepancies that accumulate over thousands of transactions.

Spam token removal:

• Many wallets and custodians receive airdropped spam tokens that clutter transaction histories. Without automated detection and filtering, these tokens can disrupt accounting workflows and create unnecessary reconciliation issues.

Illiquid & delisted asset pricing:

• For small-cap tokens, pricing can be highly volatile, unreliable, or even unavailable. Some assets have a principal market that sets a price, but when liquidity dries up or trading halts, valuation becomes unclear. Self-built systems often struggle to handle these fluctuations correctly.

Multi entity and multi inventory accounting:

• Many systems can’t accurately track corporate vs. customer funds in omnibus wallet structures, making cost basis and other calculations unreliable leading to reporting inaccuracies and audit failures.  Tracking this manually is impossible at scale.
  
  

Cryptio has spent 7+ years encountering and solving these challenges across 400+ clients, refining a flexible, scalable system that accounts for every edge case that can’t be matched without significant in the field experience.

Why self building rarely makes sense

Even if a company overcomes the technical and regulatory hurdles, the cost and time investment often spiral out of control.

Let's consider a few different scenarios, their outcomes and approximate costs.

Self-build (5% replication of Cryptio's capabilities)

• Implementation cost: ~$500k, ~6+ months
  • Team: ~2 devs, limited infra, minimal PM & compliance.
  • Ongoing: ~$200k/year for hosting, part-time maintenance, and basic support.
• Outcome: A bare-bones tool for one or two simple use cases, outgrown quickly and with little scalability or regulatory compliance.
  
  

Self-build (50% replication)

• Implementation cost: $2M–$4M, 18–24+ months
  • Team: Several devs, data engineers, full-time compliance, $300–$400k in cloud costs.
  • Ongoing: ~$750k/year for dev salaries, infrastructure, and evolving compliance.
• Outcome: Covers several major use cases, but still lacks scalability, broad chain and integration coverage, and strongly inbuilt compliance tooling.
  
  

Cryptio SaaS

• Implementation cost: Typically $30k-50k, live in weeks to ~3 months
  • Includes: Platform configuration, training, expert support.
  • Ongoing: Subscription-based (tiered by usage), with automatic updates and minimal internal dev overhead.
• Outcome: Audit-ready, full regulatory coverage, and built for high-volume scalability over all major chains, exchanges and DeFi integrations- without the massive engineering burden.

Whether you’re building a rudimentary 5% solution or a more comprehensive 50% version, the time, cost, and risk can quickly escalate. Meanwhile, Cryptio provides a ready-made, constantly updated back-office at a fraction of the in-house cost—letting you hit the market faster and scale confidently as regulations and transaction volumes evolve.

Cryptio's solution

Cryptio has built a best-in-class, scalable, and regulatory-compliant back-office solution, trusted by over 400+ clients, such as Uniswap, Gemini, Circle (USDC), Chivo (govt. El Salvador) and 1Inch —eliminating the need for self-building.

Bedrock: the institutional-grade back-office for crypto:

• On-chain data layer: Direct indexing from self-run nodes on 65+ chains.
• Enterprise reconciliation: 1B+ transactions reconciled across 100M+ wallets monthly.
• Regulatory & compliance readiness: 50+ built-in IFRS, GAAP, MiCA, VARA compliant reporting templates, seamless ERP integrations, segregation of funds management in omnibus wallet structures.
• Internal controls: Framework built with Big4 auditors for financial-grade accuracy. SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliant.
• Data integrity checks: Balance sanity checks with live blockchain balances for complete peace of mind.

Unlike self-built systems that degrade over time, Cryptio’s infrastructure is continuously upgraded, ensuring it scales with industry changes and stays compliant with evolving regulations.

The logical choice

The choice becomes clear when you compare the options side by side.

Self-building comes with the risks of failed reconciliation, compliance gaps, and performance issues—challenges that lead to costly delays and missed audit deadlines.

Meanwhile, enterprises leveraging ready-made solutions such as Cryptio are scaling faster and capturing market share before self-built systems even go live.

Schedule a demo today.