The Story of Blockpit: Building the Regulatory Infrastructure for Crypto’s Future

It started in a cellar in Austria, with a Bitcoin mining rig and a software engineer’s curiosity. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Blockpit CEO Florian Wimmer shared how his journey from crypto enthusiast to infrastructure builder began not with a grand vision, but with a personal tax headache.

From Mining to Managing Chaos

“I can’t help myself. I have tried out everything,” Florian explains. “I started actually like mining in my seller bitcoin back then. Then Ethereum came around and bought in there and suddenly I had like 20 exchange accounts because some coins that came out were not on that exchange that I was.”

As his crypto portfolio grew, so did the complexity. “I think 70 different depots and accounts and of course, like non standardized data not really readable from the blockchain either,” Florian recalls. With about 20,000 transactions per year, manual tracking became impossible.

The Perfect Storm of Experience

Florian’s background created a unique perspective on the problem. As a software engineer working at KPMG in Austria – one of the first countries to implement specific crypto tax laws – he understood both the technical and regulatory challenges. “It’s kind of the holy trinity of working at an audit firm, being in crypto and having a software development background and then living in a quite heavily regulated country,” he notes.

From Hobby to Business

What began as a personal solution soon caught others’ attention. “We started out as a hobby,” Florian shares. “It was not a business in the beginning, so the MVP was just built for ourselves. And friends started like, I need that as well, I need that as well… Like, okay, I can’t do it for free. I need to charge money now.”

Starting in Austria proved to be a strategic advantage. “Austria is like a great pilot country. It’s kind of like the smaller Germany, like a 10th of like, traction, but you’re really close,” Florian explains. This allowed them to test and refine their solution before expanding to larger markets.

Evolution, Not Pivot

The company’s transformation from consumer tax tool to infrastructure provider wasn’t a sudden pivot but a natural evolution. “The business itself changed a lot over the years,” Florian notes. Building the tax product required creating extensive infrastructure – from exchange data crawling to price standardization and asset classification. This infrastructure became valuable in its own right.

Navigating Market Cycles

Launching in 2017 meant facing crypto’s notorious volatility early on. “218, 19 was the first bear market, so we just went out with the product in 18 and then everything crashed and so did our attraction and our hopes of becoming rich quickly,” Florian recalls. But these challenging periods proved valuable, allowing the team to focus on building rather than chasing market hype.

The Future: Building the Standard

Looking ahead, Blockpit’s vision extends far beyond tax reporting. “What we’re really wanting to build and what’s like the big North Side is like a standard, a reporting standard for on chain and off chain data,” Florian explains. The goal is to become “somewhere in the back end, nobody knows that it’s Blockpit but participating in every single transaction that’s done.”

With new regulations coming into effect through 2026, including global OECD standards for crypto reporting, Blockpit is positioning itself to be as fundamental to crypto as SAP is to traditional finance. It’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest opportunities in emerging technologies aren’t in consumer applications, but in building the invisible infrastructure that makes everything else possible.