How Awaken Tax Reduced Data Vendor Risk With Zerion API

Crypto tax software depends on complete transaction data. Swaps, bridges, DeFi deposits, NFT trades, staking rewards, and everything else onchain must resolve into clear records.

Most tax platforms do not build and maintain every indexer themselves. They buy data from specialist providers. That makes the data vendor one of the largest dependencies in the product. And it creates a problem when a provider exits the business.

Awaken Tax had already lived through that problem. When another provider began winding down its developer API, the team rotated through several providers before finding Zerion API as the reliable partner that could handle its production traffic. 

What is Awaken Tax?

Awaken Tax is a crypto tax platform founded in 2022. Its founder-led team builds for people whose activity extends beyond centralized exchanges into DeFi, NFTs, staking, bridging, and other onchain transactions.

That makes data depth central to the product. A missing transaction can lead to an inaccurate report and financial consequences for users.

Most users come from December through April and then disappear during the summer. Awaken needs infrastructure that can handle this peak while keeping costs manageable.

The challenge: two vendors and no room for failure

Awaken used two providers to power one product surface: 

• A well-known DeFi portfolio tracker with a developer API supplied DeFi positions coverage,
• A general-purpose multichain data API handled transactions and balances.

For a small team, that meant two contracts, two schemas, two integrations, and two sets of failure modes. Provider differences had to be reconciled before wallet activity became a usable tax record.

Awaken had previously relied on a single data vendor that later exited the business. If a provider disappears during filing season, users may be unable to complete their returns.

The economics added pressure without making this a price comparison. Awaken paid a five-figure annual data bill to support features it made available to users for free. 

The team needed a data stack that justified that commitment through coverage, maintainability, and continuity.

The solution: test Zerion API, then address the business risk

The founder first wanted to know whether Zerion would still be in the data business two years later.

He also needed to judge quality against a provider already running in production. Awaken requested additional test credits and received a temporary tier that same evening.

The team then sent three weeks of production traffic to Zerion API alongside the existing setup. Awaken compared the APIs against its own wallets, transaction patterns, and protocol mix. This proved the data quality and scalability. 

Awaken Tax decided to move all volumes to Zerion API. 

Three factors supported the decision:

• Coverage across protocols and chains: one API for the wallet data Awaken needs to interpret complex onchain activity.
• Pre-parsed, normalized data: fewer provider-specific schemas for a small engineering team to reconcile and maintain.
• Responsive support: fast access to the team during testing and migration, when edge cases matter most.

During legal review, Awaken requested a vendor-continuity guarantee. Zerion gladly provided the custom contract with a clause that satisfied that.

For a team that had already lost a provider, the clause made the contract a form of insurance. It addressed a key business risk that no technical test could solve.

Zerion also structured the plan around Awaken's seasonality. An annual pool of requests lets the team use less capacity in July and more in March against the same commitment. This avoids pushing a seasonal product into a fixed monthly plan. 

“We’d already had a data provider shut down. So continuity was something we needed addressed in the contract. Zerion was happy to accommodate that. And running Zerion alongside our existing stack for three weeks gave us confidence that the API could handle real production traffic. ” — Andrew Duca, founder, Awaken Tax.

Build crypto accounting products on Zerion API

Teams building crypto tax and accounting products need more than a set of endpoints. 

They need data infrastructure that can cover complex onchain activity, fit usage patterns, and remain dependable during critical periods. 

Create a free Zerion API key, review the migration overview, or use the Zerion API quickstart to test the API with your own wallet data.