Most crypto tax tools price on how much you hold: portfolio tiers, asset-value brackets, per-transaction counts that scale with your balance sheet. TrueStake bills on exactly one unit — the validator-year — and it's worth explaining why, because the unit is a statement about what you're paying for.

The unit

A validator-year is one validator, reconciled for one calendar year. Run four validators for a full year: four validator-years. Spin the fifth up on July 1: that one contributes half a validator-year, because it was only active — only generating settlement events to verify — for half the year. Exits prorate the same way, down to the day.

That's the whole model. No ETH multiplier, no portfolio percentage, no "contact us once your stake appreciates."

Why not ETH count?

Because your balance isn't our work. The work TrueStake does — ingesting your validators' activity, deriving expected income, reconciling every settlement event to the wei, maintaining the citation chain — scales with how many validators you run and how long they run. It does not scale with what ETH is worth that week.

A tool that charges on holdings has an incentive problem: your staking success raises your bill without raising the provider's cost. It also quietly couples your tooling cost to market volatility, which is exactly the kind of unpredictability you run validators to avoid. We priced the work instead.

The formal name

In TrueStake's own vocabulary, a validator-year is one kind of reconciliation unit — the countable thing the reconciliation engine verifies for you over time. At launch, with ETH validator staking only, the two terms coincide. When liquid staking support arrives, a liquid position gets its own unit on the same principle: billed on positions reconciled over time, never on the value inside them. The principle is permanent even as staking models multiply.

What it looks like in practice

Plans bucket by validator count — Solo (1–10), Operator (11–50), Fleet (51–200), with larger fleets handled directly — and historical years are bought as one-time Coverage Years, priced per validator-year actually active in that year and prorated by days. The glossary and pricing page carry the current numbers.

One unit, priced on work performed, indifferent to the ETH price chart. It's a small design decision that tells you most of what you need to know about how the rest of the product thinks.