What net worth in one currency actually means

If everything you own is in one currency, your net worth is addition. If it is not, it is a series of judgement calls that change the answer — and most apps make them silently.

Walleet's are worth stating, because the number on your dashboard is only as meaningful as the method behind it.

The number is a conversion, not a total

Say you hold €3,000, £1,400 and $4,200, and you read your net worth in dollars. That figure is not a sum of what you have. It is an estimate of what you would have if you converted everything into dollars at a particular moment, at rates nobody has offered you.

It is still the most useful single number available. But it moves for two quite different reasons — because your holdings changed, or because the exchange rate did — and a good tracker keeps those apart.

Every balance is stored in its own currency

Walleet records what you typed, in the currency you typed it in. A euro account holds euros. Conversion happens when a screen is drawn, never when a balance is saved.

The alternative — converting on the way in and storing one currency — is tempting and wrong. It bakes the rate of the day into your history permanently. Correct a rate later and every past entry stays wrong; change your display currency and you convert an already-converted number, compounding the error.

Storing what actually happened and converting on read means your history is whatever your accounts genuinely held, and the display currency is a lens over it rather than a property of it.

Rates are dated

A balance from March is converted at March's rate.

This sounds obvious and is frequently not what apps do. Converting everything at today's rate is easier — one lookup instead of one per entry — and it produces a chart that changes shape retroactively. Your net worth eighteen months ago is a historical fact. It should not move because the euro moved this morning.

Walleet keeps a dated rate for every asset it prices and looks up the rate for each entry's own date. Your chart from last year looks the same today as it did last year.

Everything is priced against one hub

Rates are stored against a single hub currency rather than as pairs. Converting euros to yen means euros to hub, hub to yen.

Storing pairs directly would need a rate for every combination — with fifty assets that is more than a thousand pairs per day, most of them never used, and every one an opportunity for two paths between the same two currencies to disagree. Going through a hub means one rate per asset per day and exactly one answer to any conversion.

The cost is a rounding step in the middle, which is invisible at any balance a person actually holds.

Two providers, because there are two kinds of asset

National currencies and crypto are priced by different sources, and a rate row records which one produced it.

That is not bookkeeping. A currency provider and a coin provider disagree about what an asset is — and one code can be both. MNT is the Mongolian tugrik and it is also Mantle, a crypto token, and they differ by roughly three orders of magnitude. An asset that is identified by its code alone cannot tell them apart, and the failure is not an error message, it is a wrong number.

Walleet identifies an asset by its code and its type. Two accounts can both read "MNT" and convert to entirely different amounts, because they are two different assets that happen to share three letters.

Precision is per asset

Currencies do not all have two decimal places. The yen has none — ¥610,000 has no cents. The Bahraini dinar has three. Bitcoin has eight, and a satoshi rendered at two decimal places is zero.

Walleet writes each asset at its own precision, taking the standard digits for national currencies and a declared precision for coins. Crypto is capped at eight decimal places, which is exact for any realistic holding and a stated limit rather than a silent truncation for tokens divisible further.

The split between what you saved and what moved

Because the rate for every date is known, a change in your total can be attributed.

If your net worth fell by $400 last month, Walleet can say how much of that was your balances going down and how much was the dollar strengthening against currencies you hold. These are unrelated events and only one is about your behaviour.

Without the split, a good month in a bad currency looks like a bad month, and you draw the wrong conclusion about your own saving.

What the number is not

Not a valuation. Nobody will give you the mid-market rate. Real conversion costs a spread and often a fee.

Not a liquidation estimate. It assumes everything converts at once at the quoted rate, which is not true of size, of illiquid assets, or of anything with a settlement period.

Not more precise than its inputs. It is built from balances you typed on days you chose. If one is a month old, the total is a month old in that part.

Not tax anything. It is not a gain, not a basis, not a realised figure.

What it is: a consistent, dated, honestly-converted estimate that means the same thing this month as it did last month. That consistency is what makes the trend worth reading, and the trend is the point.