[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Hedgehog (YC S21) - Cryptocurrency Portfo...
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Launch HN: Hedgehog (YC S21) - Cryptocurrency Portfolio Manager
Hey HN! We're Taylor, Colton, and Jason, the founders of Hedgehog
(https://hedgehog.app). We're building a portfolio manager to help
you learn about, keep track of, and trade cryptocurrency in one
place. We track 2000+ actively traded currencies across 550+
wallets, aggregate data from 20 different providers, and support
trading on 130+ exchanges. This helps users make informed choices
about investments and find the best prices across exchanges, with
price differences as high as 0.5%. We also combine live usage data
with detailed research on how each coin works, so you can see for
yourself why a coin could be valuable--or not. We know that HN
tends to be divided on cryptocurrency-related topics, with some
people interested and involved and others skeptical or critical.
Obviously we find ourselves in the prior camp, but we also
completely agree that the excessive hype and outright scams are a
problem. Somebody has already created a scam token with our name on
it! As early team members at Acorns (the mobile app that invests
your spare change), we helped simplify traditional investing and
hope to bring that same level of transparency, clarity, and rigor
to cryptocurrency. We first got into this space in 2017. We were
running a small consulting agency when three of our clients broke
their contracts in the same month: one went bankrupt, one got sued
by an ex-partner, and one was based in Alabama and decided that
because we were in California they simply didn't have to pay us. We
lost $30k that month. That's when we learned about Ethereum and
smart contracts, and a light bulb went off. Price and volatility
aside, if we simply could have used a smart contract where money is
automatically deposited upon project completion, we would have
ensured payment. But getting into cryptocurrency is complicated,
painful, and it leaves new users particularly vulnerable. Taylor
once spent $20k worth of ETH on fees, simply because of a bad
interface. Add in secret keys and exchange hacks and you quickly
find yourself in chaos. And yet, over half of cryptocurrency owners
report that it was their very first investment, ever--and their
most commonly used tracking tool is Excel. That's why we built
Hedgehog, to give you fine-tuned control over your portfolio: our
average client trades on at least 3 exchange accounts and
automatically syncs balances across more than 10 different wallets.
You can also group your assets into stacks like "Banking" or
"Ethereum Tokens", apply investing strategies, and even set up a
rebalance calculator to help you distribute your funds based on
live metrics like market cap, daily active addresses, or
transaction volume. We're already helping individuals and
investment firms manage $40 million in cryptocurrency, and we are
acquiring the necessary financial licenses to offer a custodial
wallet that connects users directly with the best price. You will
no longer need to connect your own exchanges and wallets, we'll
manage multiple currencies across multiple exchanges for you. This
allows us to earn revenue by making our own markets and keeping
some of the difference between prices offered by buyers and
sellers. Love it or hate it, the fact that there's over $48
trillion in annual cryptocurrency exchange volume at this point
makes it unlikely to go away, and there's a ton of work to be done
in wrangling it into some sort of level playing field that makes
sense to people. We'd love to hear what you think, even if it's
just "this market shouldn't exist in the first place." If you're
active in cryptocurrency (or want to be), we'd love to have you as
a user and are dying to ship features you want. Please try us out
at https://hedgehog.app! Happy to answer any questions and hear
your feedback in the comments!
Author : cadillion
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-06-18 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
| MadsRC wrote:
| I'll definitely be checking this one out!
|
| One thing I'm curious about: Will you be looking adding
| functionality that allows tracking of tokens that are staked
| using various DeFi services?
|
| All the other portfolio trackers loose track of your coins the
| minute you add them to a pool. With so many DeFi services around,
| it's easy to loose track of where one put ones tokens.
| colbycornish wrote:
| Absolutely. We're trying to sketch out the solution to that
| right now. It's kinda complicated, but from a high-level it
| seems to require either tracking on-chain address contracts or
| case-by-case api integrations. DeFi connections are one of the
| our most requested features, and honestly we want to keep track
| of our own holdings there as well
| spinax wrote:
| Why have you hijacked my rightmouseclick on the homepage when I
| want to open the Privacy link (or apparently any other link in
| the footer) in another window? Why are you breaking simple,
| established HTML paradigms for opening and clicking links and
| ruining basic established usage patterns?
| colbycornish wrote:
| Hey spinax! I'm actually not sure what you mean, and nearly
| positive all those links are just standard buttons. Can you
| give me any more detail on the kind of behavior are you seeing?
|
| *edit: This is definitely not intentional, and sounds like a
| bug.
| jadillionaire wrote:
| I see the issue. Right clicking on the links in the footer
| acts as a left click and redirects you immediately rather
| than staying on the page and listing options for how to
| handle the link. We'll work to fix this immediately!
| colbycornish wrote:
| Oh weird. What browser is were you able to reproduce it on?
| I couldn't reproduce it on Mac/Brave. Right click worked as
| expected for me :/
| jadillionaire wrote:
| In Chrome on windows
| waterside81 wrote:
| I'm on FF 89 on macOS and see the same thing. I right-
| click a footer link and it takes me to the link while
| briefly seeing the context menu.
| ksvarma wrote:
| Hi Taylor, Colton and Jason: Great launch and wish you the best.
| Few issues with login and registration, hope they cleared out. I
| always thought about a gateway tool or a manager like this
| without worrying about multiple logins and apps.
|
| Question: Are you also thinking about adding tax related insights
| when you pull portfolio?
| colbycornish wrote:
| Thanks! Appreciate it. We've had a couple issues related to the
| cache recently, but I've been re-doing the registration / login
| flow as well.
|
| In terms of taxes: Absolutely! We've actually been really
| excited about that side of things for a while, specifically in
| relation to specific identification tax analysis. What that
| basically means is that if you bought Bitcoin: (a) in 2017 at
| $20k (b) in March at $60k (c) and then a few weeks ago at $35k
|
| If you were to sell BTC today at $38k, you should be able to
| say "Hey! I want to sell the BTC I bought in lot (b), but not
| the ones from (a) or (c)" since that's technically sell at a
| loss. The trick to this is that you have to make that
| designation within 10 days of selling, so the tax feature has
| to actually be integrated into the trading platform itself.
|
| There are a bunch of things we need to do before we can
| effectively launch that feature, but it gets me excited every
| time someone asks.
| [deleted]
| bibz38 wrote:
| Did you guys bootstrap ? Or did received venture capital?
| centralboy wrote:
| So this is basically a centralized broker just like we have in
| traditional finance? I guess one difference is that users still
| have DMA since exchange accounts are just linked.
|
| > This allows us to earn revenue by making our own markets and
| keeping some of the difference between prices offered by buyers
| and sellers.
|
| In other words, you route orders and users get worse prices
| because you MM yourself, also like traditional finance. It's a
| good business model for you but as a user I'd rather see
| transparency and a move towards DeFi where everyone is guaranteed
| the same execution.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| DeFi is flawed though isn't it? People are just front running
| the execution of DeFi orders to make money.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Most traders don't need to worry about the fractions of a
| percent that can be taken by frontrunners.
| cadillion wrote:
| The same can be said of centralized finance! Front-running is
| illegal and occasionally gets punished, but it still occurs
| all the time.
|
| No system is perfect, and one should look at the trade-offs
| one incurs by operating under any given set of rules. We
| believe that a more diverse ecosystem contributes to a
| stronger financial system and a more resilient society,
| whether centralized or decentralized.
| centralboy wrote:
| It's more complex than that. There is front-running and back-
| running in DeFi, but it applies only to certain types of
| transactions. There also exist solutions to prevent most of
| it.
|
| Regardless of front-running, you still get transparency. It's
| one thing to be front-run and know about it, but another
| thing to submit your orders to a black box where a company
| extracts arbitrary value from them and you don't know what
| goes on inside.
| cadillion wrote:
| Very true, completely agreed!
| cadillion wrote:
| To a large extent, yes. We like to say that cryptocurrency is
| like international waters: if you have your own boat and some
| know-how you can easily get out there and do whatever you like.
| But not everyone knows how to sail! There's still a lot of need
| for barges and cruise liners to help average people get from
| port to port.
|
| For us, we want to help people who don't really understand
| private and public keys to get out and take advantage of the
| new paradigms being built in cryptocurrency. And for people who
| do understand these things, we're happy to be a gateway to take
| advantage of the centralized infrastructure and put everything
| back in your control on your own hardware wallet.
|
| As for being a market maker, our goal is to guarantee best
| execution anywhere. This requires some fancy footwork on our
| end, but even after we take the spread, we want to offer you a
| price as good or better than you can find on any other
| exchange, net of fees. And that includes DEXs! We will make all
| these prices transparent so you can see the Hedgehog price as
| well as whatever Uniswap, 1Inch, or Matic are offering.
| vmception wrote:
| It's about time there are brokers in the crypto space.
|
| Almost all the exchanges are copy and paste jobs provided by an
| exchange vendor, and they all have code to be brokers and route
| to external order books, all via REST and FIX but just choose
| not to.
| archerabi wrote:
| For portfolio tracking, does this support defi and eth layer 2 ?
| Like uniswap, matic etc ?
| jadillionaire wrote:
| we do not support plugging into dexs yet but it is a focus. For
| now though, you can plug in any of your public addresses and we
| we will check block explorers to display the balance recorded
| on the blockchian or you can manually enter your balances.
| Either way, you can track your holdings in defi on our site,
| its just a bit more manual than we would like right now
| cadillion wrote:
| We support automated balance syncing currently, but we are not
| yet able to extract locked funds on layer 2. This is an
| important feature to our users and we're working on getting it
| out ASAP!
|
| For now, our advice is to use the manual management in the
| Hedgehog wallet named after the project, or if we don't have
| the endpoint in our system yet, to record it as a Paper Wallet.
| If we don't support the wallet, let us know and we'll add it
| right away!
| SmooL wrote:
| Wow, yet another GUI for https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt. What do
| you guys do that's any different?
| cadillion wrote:
| We understand the skepticism, and we're grateful for the great
| work that the community has put into CCXT.
|
| We've added a lot of features around the GUI, including a
| portfolio builder tool that helps you create and manage your
| own index fund, as well as balance management and multi-
| exchange price comparisons.
|
| Not everyone feels comfortable in an IDE, so we want to make
| these tools easier to use for everyone!
| antibland wrote:
| On my iPhone SE (mobile Safari), elements are being truncated on
| the right side of the screen, meaning I can't view all the data.
| I'm not near a laptop right now, but I wonder if you're
| forgetting: * { box-sizing: border-box: }
| colbycornish wrote:
| Probably. I've been wondering how to test and fix this issue
| actually, since it shows up on my local devices just fine.
|
| Is that styling something that needs to applied to the entire
| page wrapper as a whole?
| m1117 wrote:
| Login page is broken.
| ismayilzadan wrote:
| Oh yea, very interesting. Keep scrolling down, it fixed itself
| on my browser. Chrome 91.
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks for the browser report! We'll be pushing a fix soon.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Bigly
| breck wrote:
| When I made my browser window larger it fixed.
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks for catching that! It looks like our service-worker is
| breaking the page while it pre-caches the app. It should revert
| to a clean page once all the files are downloaded.
|
| We're putting out a fix ASAP!
| mkgeorge7 wrote:
| Hey Taylor, Colton, and Jason.
|
| Congrats on the launch! Out of curiosity, what are the most
| popular wallets that your users are syncing with Hedgehog?
| colbycornish wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Most popular connected exchange (synced using apikeys):
|
| - Coinbase / Coinbase Pro, Binance.US / Binance, KuCoin,
| Gemini, Kraken, BitMart, Gate.io
|
| Most popular non-exchanges (which are synced using public
| addresses):
|
| - Brave Browser, Ledger Nano S, Uniswap, Exodus, Coinbase
| Wallet, Trust Wallet, Trezor One, Jaxx
|
| We have a little over 550 wallets on Hedgehog, but if you see a
| wallet missing from the site, let us know. Takes us about 10
| minutes to add a new one into the system
|
| *edit: formatting
| knownjorbist wrote:
| I'm surprised Metamask isn't in the most popular non-exchange
| wallet list!
| twodayslate wrote:
| Seems like coinstats.app is a more polished solution as a
| portfolio manager. Some of the other features could be
| interesting though.
| polynomial wrote:
| I would only note, are we now calling them portfolios, instead of
| wallets? And does this reflect a shift in the understanding of
| and narrative around crypto as less utility based, as a way of
| buying ice cream and quickly sending cash to faraway places
| (without exorbitant fees) and as more speculative, a kind of
| post-internet version of pokemon, where the utility value
| (playing the game) can be eclipsed by the notional value of some
| of the more rare cards / successful coins? Just thinking out loud
| here.
| vmception wrote:
| It's just a context.
|
| If you are self custodying you can do or call it whatever you
| want
|
| If you are not self custodying then you are limited to the
| functions provided by the custodian. If they want you to just
| invest and watch numbers move around, then its a portfolio
| keiferski wrote:
| I think it indicates more that the financial set has become
| dominant in the crypto space and coins are now increasingly
| seen as securities to hold and profit from as investments,
| rather than as a form of payment.
|
| A bit disappointing to me, honestly. I want a digital currency
| that is spendable. I'm hoping the next wave of crypto
| innovation will address this, instead of just endlessly
| catering to the finance market.
| cadillion wrote:
| Why not both? While Bitcoin was initially envisioned as a pure
| currency with some basic scripting features, the advent of the
| Initial Coin Offering (ICO) transformed cryptocurrency into an
| easy way to bootstrap speculative research projects in
| distributed compute, while simultaneously enabling new forms of
| scams.
|
| So the speculation is part and parcel to making the network
| something worth using! We use portfolios to describe
| collections of wallets because it's difficult to tell whether
| Ethereum or Cardano is going to be the winner-take-all shared
| VM in 20 years. If you want your compute cycles to hold value,
| you better choose the right one.
|
| Our philosophy is to choose the One Key Performance Indicator
| (KPI) for each cryptocurrency, and then allocate into each
| currency based on the relative performance of currencies that
| share that KPI.
|
| For example, as a social network investor in 2004, it maybe
| wasn't obvious whether you should invest in Facebook, Myspace,
| or Friendster. But if you got a daily active user report every
| 10 minutes (like you do with Bitcoin), then maybe you could
| have moved your funds into Facebook as the users skyrocketed.
|
| So that's why we talk about portfolios, and see them as an
| important part of being a cryptocurrency user.
| hiq wrote:
| > Price and volatility aside, if we simply could have used a
| smart contract where money is automatically deposited upon
| project completion, we would have ensured payment.
|
| A smart contract doesn't allow you to do that though, so I'm not
| sure how much you thought this through, or if you're only writing
| about your initial impression and dismissing what you learned
| after (I do think you realize this, as most people do after a few
| weeks of experience with Ethereum).
|
| Either the smart contract would have automatically transferred
| money after a period of time, in which case it's basically like
| paying in advance. Or the smart contract would have received some
| external information, either from the consulting company, the
| client, a 3rd-party or a combination thereof, to decide whether
| the project has been completed or not. At that point, you're back
| to the problem you had without Ethereum.
| sausage_dog wrote:
| One way to do this is that the agency places a deposit in the
| contract, client places deposit+payment in the contract. Then
| when the job is done both parties confirm and the agency
| receives deposit+payment and the client receives their deposit.
| This way both parties are incentivized to find a mutually
| satisfying outcome.
|
| It's not ideal in terms of funds used, but it improves the
| trust situation a little bit.
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks for asking us to expand! We can always write a novel,
| but not everyone wants to read about oracles and unsolved
| problems in distributed compute.
|
| You are correct, for this smart contract to work you need
| defined rules around how the money is released should either
| party falsely claim success or failure, so you need to rely on
| automation or some third party to validate fulfillment of the
| contract. So you're back to an oracle problem, how do I know I
| can trust the validator?
|
| The nice advancement here is that anyone can be that third
| party! Your smart contract can explicitly identify a third
| party for multisig, or you can rely on a validator pool of
| mechanical turks instead of a licensed escrow agent, and
| accordingly the cost of escrow can decrease.
|
| The nice part is that this is customizable, and built into the
| very rails that move money. It's a much lower barrier to entry
| than trying to build something like that for ACH, and that's
| what excites us about cryptocurrency.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It seems to me like there is already something better than
| "smart contracts" now with the current legal and financial
| system. The current system can handle all sorts of nuance,
| edge cases, and disagreement that smart contracts can't.
| What's the Oracle for "Did you really go bankrupt?" or "Does
| the interaction between Alabama and California law
| necessitate payment in these specific conditions?"
|
| Ethereum is one of the more credible cryptocurrencies and
| yet, it is slow, throughput is woefully inadequate for scale,
| expensive to transact, and smart contracts don't really work.
| When I say "Don't really work" I mean that you can't use them
| for the things you'd want to use them for - i.e. you can't
| write an Ethereum smart contract for "If I deliver X hours of
| contracting work, meeting these specifications, then you will
| pay me Y amount by Z date automatically." If I'm wrong and
| you can do stuff like that, please point me to the solidity.
|
| I'm glad you included the line welcoming comments from those
| who feel this market shouldn't exist, otherwise I wouldn't
| have written this comment. I hate to be negative regarding a
| launch - but this feels like adding a product to the Ponzi
| Scheme Industry. Maybe it's like writing software to help
| manage slot machines, except your slot machines aren't
| regulated and you tell people they're investing rather than
| gambling.
| colbycornish wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response, and you're absolutely
| right, the current legal system is designed to handle all
| these. Right now, Oracles are also way more complex to
| build, and they can't handle the nuances of meeting X
| specification in a way that's simple and easy to do.
|
| To be clear, that doesn't mean that a simple solution will
| never be created. Obviously we think it will, but that
| doesn't mean we're right.
|
| But to address a slightly different part of your framing,
| our situation actually got more complicated when attempting
| to go the legal route. We suddenly had additional lawyer,
| collections, and time costs associated with the
| process...and we still never managed to collect. That's
| certainly an area where the current legal system fails (for
| a lot of people!).
|
| Cryptocurrencies might not be the perfect alternative, but
| they are _an_ alternative that, in our opinion, is exciting
| to explore.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Hope it works out!
| runbathtime wrote:
| Do you have money transmitter licenses in all the states? Do
| you plan on getting them?
| cadillion wrote:
| We do not currently have money transmitter licenses as we
| do not move any money for you (yet), we merely pass your
| trade requests to your exchange.
|
| To your point, though, we are pursuing these licenses in
| every jurisdiction where required so we can start offering
| this service. We're also registering as an investment
| adviser so we can offer financial advice. This takes time
| and a lot of capital, but we believe the end result will be
| worth it.
| runbathtime wrote:
| I'm trying to understand, by passing the trade request
| you are like a hosted wallet that you control? Instead of
| the user broadcasting a transaction, the hosted wallet
| does that? I don't understand how that isn't money
| transmission, unless the hosted wallets are actually
| multisg, because as I undertand it multisig isn't
| considered custodial.
| cadillion wrote:
| So currently we don't host any wallets. Clients open
| custodial accounts with pre-existing exchanges and then
| leave an API key for us to retrieve transaction and
| balance data. When they request a trade, we simply let
| the exchange know that the client has requested a trade,
| and we don't move any money on the client's behalf.
|
| We are currently seeking money transmitter licenses so
| that we can offer a hosted wallet of our own, where we
| hold the exchange accounts on the client's behalf, and
| act as their counterparty for every trade so they don't
| have to maintain accounts at multiple venues. This
| version of the application is not yet available.
| lucasverra wrote:
| There is also decentralized protocols for judging events like
| https://kleros.io/ (not affiliated)
| gip wrote:
| While I love the idea of JaaS (Justice As A Service) I
| suspect that in most cases the cost will make it
| unworkable. In the situation OP faced, figuring out whether
| the contract has been correctly executed and whether the
| payment should have been made would have required
| specialized knowledge as well as time to look into the
| details of the case.
| btown wrote:
| It's refreshing to hear well-thought-out responses to the
| "isn't it just escrow" question, which I admit I've asked in
| a skeptical way re: cryptocurrencies in the past! Decoupling
| oracle-ness from a need to be a legally trusted holder of
| money is indeed something that broadens/democratizes the pool
| of viable oracles.
|
| On that note, if an outstanding question is "how do we
| increase the supply (and thus decrease the price) of oracles
| beyond those who happen to know how to interact with smart
| contracts," I wonder if something like your Hedgehog tech,
| paired with standardized smart contract plugins, could make
| it possible for far more domain experts without crypto
| experience to enter and advertise themselves in the oracle
| market. Makes your system a one-stop easy-onboard volatility-
| reducing shop for the escrow problem you identified, for all
| participants in that marketplace!
| cadillion wrote:
| Wow, you hit the nail on the head! To point to our long
| term vision, cryptocurrency has the nice property of being
| data, but the double-edged feature of being money.
|
| In order to tell people how to get data from point A to
| point B you suddenly have to be a fiduciary financial
| adviser! We want to take that duty seriously and help
| people interact with the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a
| trusted adviser.
|
| If we can help you customize and interact with smart
| contracts and plug them into existing regulatory
| frameworks, then we can unlock a lot of value for everyone.
| Kiro wrote:
| > A smart contract doesn't allow you to do that though
|
| This is why smart contract is such a bad name. A lot of people
| have a complete misunderstanding of what a smart contract is.
| They think it can enforce things like a real-world contract,
| but "automatically". It's just a decentralized script and
| without real-world input through an oracle it is of course
| impossible for the contract to know whether a project is
| completed. There's nothing smart or automatic about that part.
| cadillion wrote:
| In fact, Ian Grigg's Ricardian Contract construct was
| originally created with centralized enforcement in mind. To
| him, the purpose of these contracts was to create an
| immutable record of the intent of any transaction that could
| then be followed all the way back to its inception in the
| event of a dispute.
|
| So part of the magic of the smart contract is illustrating
| intent from the beginning, and making that intent
| customizable! Oracles are still an unsolved problem, but we
| absolutely believe that reducing the barrier to entry for
| becoming or acting as an oracle will result in cost savings
| as the ecosystem matures.
| tracedddd wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. Unless it's totally virtual -
| on chain finance, gambling, etc. the contracts are only as
| good as the oracles. I guess that's why DeFi works so well.
|
| Fortunately decentralized oracles are an area of focus right
| now, but it'll be a slow process since most expansion will
| require a special integration and potentially expert oracles.
| sushid wrote:
| It seems like what they want here is an advance + escrow. If
| you're working on, say a website with xyz features, how is a
| smart contract going to evaluate whether you met or didn't meet
| the criteria?
| cadillion wrote:
| Good question, we've answered a couple times in this thread
| already, so please forgive the copypasta:
|
| You are correct, for this smart contract to work you need
| defined rules around how the money is released should either
| party falsely claim success or failure, so you need to rely
| on automation or some third party to validate fulfillment of
| the contract. So you're back to an oracle problem, how do I
| know I can trust the validator?
|
| The nice advancement here is that anyone can be that third
| party! Your smart contract can explicitly identify a third
| party for multisig, or you can rely on a validator pool of
| mechanical turks instead of a licensed escrow agent, and
| accordingly the cost of escrow can decrease.
|
| The nice part is that this is customizable, and built into
| the very rails that move money. It's a much lower barrier to
| entry than trying to build something like that for ACH, and
| that's what excites us about cryptocurrency.
| gnrlst wrote:
| Curious how you'll tackle the "learn" part, except for linking to
| a bunch of resources like you currently do.
| cadillion wrote:
| What would you like to see? We are always trying to make
| resources easier to digest, and scaffold the learning process
| for new users. Many people don't understand that there are many
| different kinds of cryptocurrency with different purposes, so
| we tried to include a variety of sources in the Learn section,
| and expanded on some examples through our Discover page.
|
| We also have an on-boarding flow when you login that attempts
| to give you a little more hand-holding on acquiring your first
| cryptocurrencies if you report that you don't own any, but
| we're still early in building out these features.
|
| It's a tough nut to crack, because really understanding it all
| requires knowledge of distributed systems, finance, cooperative
| game theory, and cryptography. But we're going to do our best
| to make it understandable for all.
| xyzelement wrote:
| (I am not the original poster but I run product and this
| response "triggered" me)
|
| What the poster is saying: your 'brand' is making a promise
| to help people learn, and he's pointing out that you are not
| doing that. Your response of "how would you like us to do
| that?" is not reasonable. If you are making a promise you
| need to have a plan on the "how"
|
| If your client could tell you how to educate them, they
| wouldn't need you to do that.
|
| I don't mean this to sound as critical as it may come across.
| I am not a crypto guy so it's not my place to evaluate your
| offering holistically. It may be valuable and impressive, I
| can't tell. But just pointing out that your response on this
| one issue doesn't inspire confidence if I were to judge you
| solely on this data point.
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks for the candid feedback. We are constantly
| reevaluating our educational materials based on the
| confusions that our customers have, and we find that the
| best way to generate new material is to discover where the
| confusion lies. We definitely could have phrased the
| response better.
|
| The deeper answer to the question of education is that
| we're specifically seeking licensing so that we can advise
| clients directly and execute transactions on their behalf.
| This way, we can get them to try cryptocurrency features
| and then teach them how to manage the transactions
| themselves.
|
| This means that if clients want to take advantage of
| storage coins like Filecoin, Sia, or Storj, they can send
| us a file and we can do the complicated work of managing
| the transactions. Then once they see their file replicated
| across the globe, if they see the value we can walk them
| through executing their own transaction manually.
|
| These are big dreams, but we have to take baby steps to get
| there.
| vmception wrote:
| I'm back to excel because Defi smart contracts are not tracked by
| anyone
|
| Zapper.fi is okay but only considers the most popular contracts
| where all the yield is already gone
|
| Thats a market need for me, good luck guys
| colbycornish wrote:
| We feel ya, and more in-depth Defi integration is one of our
| most requested features. What specific Defi services would be
| most helpful to you?
| vmception wrote:
| Yield farms and yield farm aggregators come and go every day.
| Even established services deploy new contracts with different
| features arbitrarily.
|
| There is no specific one.
|
| But for example I was yield farming on Quickswap 4 months ago
| and nobody had even implemented the Polygon blockchain for
| tracking any interaction. Coinstats only did it like two
| weeks ago. Its bad.
|
| I also don't reuse addresses most of the time, so other
| services have problems with tracking multiple addresses.
|
| And finally I wish any service had an offline executable,
| because to me it defeats the purpose to give an online
| service all of my addresses under a single userid to watch
| even if they do track multiple addresses.
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks @vmception. We've gotten a lot of feedback today and the
| Defi smart contract tracking seems to be the biggest pain
| point. We'll definitely be prioritizing the feature over our
| next couple sprints.
|
| Keep an eye out for updates!
| sushid wrote:
| Why are your "live" prices completely out of sync? BTC is showing
| $33K for me right now whereas it's about 20% higher than that.
| ETH is showing 2.4K whereas it's around $2.2K.
| cadillion wrote:
| It looks like our landing page ran into a caching issue, but
| the prices at https://live.hedgehog.app are up to date.
|
| We're pushing a fix ASAP!
| keiferski wrote:
| Cool product. Just one question and one suggestion:
|
| - How did you come up with the name? Any interesting stories
| there? Isaiah Berlin reference, possibly?
|
| - On an iPhone 7, the sections at the bottom are cut off. The
| graph and the image links below it trail off the page.
| jadillionaire wrote:
| - there are bear markets and bull markets and for everything in
| between there are hedgehogs poised to hog the hedges
|
| - thanks for the bug report on the iPhone 7! we'll check it out
| and get if fixed
| keiferski wrote:
| Cool, thanks!
| narush wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Woop woop.
|
| Two questions for y'all:
|
| 1. I'm wonder what your thinking is as a new, custodial crypto
| exchange. It's not that I don't think a custodial exchange can be
| successful (see: CB), but it seems like if the whole smart
| contract thesis is right, then decentralized exchanges are gonna
| eat the world (at least: your world). If you're all-in on crypto,
| why not build something decentralized/non-custodial? Long-term,
| how do you see competition against decentralized exchanges?
|
| 2. I read your security page, but what's the real deal w/ your
| security? 2FA and all is great, but giving a service my API keys
| is, uh, terrifying / something I will pretty much never do. Does
| anyone have a background in security / have you done an audit?
| Not to be a total narc, but crypto exchanges are like, big pots
| of beautiful honey. More details on your security page would be
| nice, and for many potential users (such as myself), seem quite
| necessary - hopefully this is helpful feedback and not just a
| dunk! I might also promote security stuff to the top of the page
| / more visible, it's at least the first thing I look for on any
| crypto service.
|
| I've posted on HN about blockchain stuff before (I'm generally
| aligned on the "very interesting space, fuck scams" mentality) -
| and I can say is good luck :) Wish you all the best + looking
| forward to hearing your thoughts
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks @narush for the support and the great questions!
|
| 1. We completely believe in the DEX thesis, and we plan for our
| custodial solution to integrate with hardware wallets so that
| we can immediately return your funds to your own cold storage,
| and take advantage of DEX aggregators that already exist like
| 1Inch, Totle, or Slingshot.
|
| However, no one is aggregating the much larger (for now) pools
| of liquidity on centralized exchanges, and additionally, the
| usability story for DEXs is really tough for mainstream users.
| We want to address both of these problems by providing a
| simplified interface for interacting with smart contracts, and
| providing the best execution requirement that already exists in
| traditional finance for the world of cryptocurrency.
|
| 2. We completely understand your security concerns, and we take
| our duties here with utmost seriousness. Thanks for the
| feedback!
|
| We just brought on a dedicated security hire who contributed to
| the EMV chip standard for credit cards as well as the Global
| Platform standard for secure enclave, and he is helping us to
| ensure we have processes and procedures in place using the
| Mitre Att&ck framework. We intend to release audit details once
| they are complete.
|
| For now, we do rely on Heroku to do a lot of the heavy lifting
| on the secure server management, but we also have internal
| processes and procedures for encrypting sensitive information
| using AES-256 and reducing attack surface.
|
| Hope that answers your questions, and please tell us any
| additional concerns!
| landemva wrote:
| > "rely on Heroku to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the
| secure server management"
|
| You trust all the employees and contractors of the hosting
| firm who have the VM hypervisor login of the machines where
| your code runs.
| cadillion wrote:
| Agreed, this was a necessary step when we were a team of 3
| at the beginning of the year, and we are transitioning as
| quickly as we can to self-managed infrastructure now that
| we have additional help.
|
| If you have more concerns or recommendations, we'd love to
| hear them!
| bibz38 wrote:
| Wow ! Awesome project...
|
| 1. Can I plug in my trading bots somehow on your app ?
|
| 2. How do you guys make money basicly ? Is there a monthly
| subscritpion or fees over exchange fees ?
| aqme28 wrote:
| There are a hundred different portfolio trackers. To be honest,
| they're all a bit lacking so there's definitely room in this
| space.
|
| That said, how is this portfolio tracker better than the others?
| Also, do you support defi?
| cadillion wrote:
| A few things that we think really separate us from the rest of
| the pack:
|
| You can trade directly on any of your exchanges through the
| platform
|
| You can create your own index funds and calculate the necessary
| trades to rebalance your portfolio based on your settings
|
| We support automatic balance syncing using your public keys or
| read-only exchange api keys
|
| All the research and pricing is packaged in the same place, so
| you don't have to jump between providers
|
| We don't currently support layer 2 syncing, but we're working
| on implementing a solution ASAP as it's a commonly requested
| feature.
|
| In the future, once we have our licenses, we will also be
| introducing portfolio automation so your portfolio can track
| your index seamlessly.
|
| Are there any other features you would like to see?
| nodesocket wrote:
| Do you help and provide insight into taxes and potential tax
| savings? I recently learned that the wash rule doesn't apply
| to crypto and it's tips like that and how to effectively
| apply them that can provide immense value.
|
| Also, it doesn't look like you support BlockFi? Any plans to
| support them? Their reporting is mostly monthly pdf
| statements which I have to manually keep track of in
| spreadsheets.
|
| Wash rule example. Let's say in 2021 so far you crushed meme
| stocks and have a capital gains profit of $100k. Not so
| rockstar, you bought a large chuck of bitcoin at the top at
| $60,000. You can sell the bitcoin for a loss (wiping away the
| capital gains tax from the meme stocks) and then immediately
| buy back into Bitcoin. Yes, you pay fees or exchange premium,
| but worth it.
| cadillion wrote:
| We currently don't provide these tax services but it's very
| much in the roadmap. We're already working with accountants
| to make sure that we can support specific identification at
| the point of trade so you can optimize your tax
| implications before you place your trade!
|
| We don't support automated BlockFi syncing yet, due to a
| limited API, but we're always open to intros to get them
| integrated. If you don't see them in our wallet list, let
| us know and we'll add them to the index.
|
| Regarding your wash rule example, we can take it a step
| further, eventually! Let's say you bought 1 BTC each at
| $12k in 2018, 6k in 2019, and $20k in 2021 and you wanted
| to sell 1 BTC at the top for $60k. We could help you
| specifically identify the BTC you bought at $12k so you
| could pay capital gains on a $48k gain instead of income
| tax on a $40k gain. This is uniquely possible because we
| have the full view of all your exchange venues.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Awesome stuff in the pipeline and thanks for the reply.
| I'd love for BlockFi to be supported, but unfortunately I
| don't see them opening up their entire platform via API
| anytime soon.
| sdan wrote:
| isn't this just blockfolio?
| cadillion wrote:
| Blockfolio has a subset of our functionality, but they have no
| intention to move into the advising space. Once we have our
| licenses, we plan to take full advantage of the different
| opportunities made possible by cryptocurrency and make these
| technologies more accessible to the average person.
| kaptain wrote:
| What's the business model? There's no pricing or indication of
| motivation/support.
| cadillion wrote:
| Our business model is to make markets and connect buyers with
| sellers. Buyers often have different prices than sellers, and
| when someone wants to buy for a higher price than another wants
| to sell, a market maker can keep the "spread" or the difference
| between the asking price and the bid.
|
| We also have additional future revenue streams that we can earn
| through automated portfolio management fees, tax optimization,
| and more.
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by motivation/support?
| ck_one wrote:
| On first glance I thought users can trade directly on an
| exchange (where you have to pay a fee for a trade) through
| your platform. So now users have to pay a fee to the exchange
| AND to you. Is that correct?
| colbycornish wrote:
| We don't charge additional fees on top of what you're
| already paying to place a trade on an exchange, so if you
| want to buy BTC on Kraken through Hedgehog, we don't take a
| cut of that at all.
| nathias wrote:
| nice, this looks impressive, frontend could use some work tho
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks @nathias. Please let us know if you run into any issues
| or if you have any feature requests!
| nathias wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're supporting firefox and which version,
| but on nightly for linux the register screen is wonky and
| isn't correctly full-screened.
| cadillion wrote:
| Much appreciated, we've added it to our issue tracker. Keep
| 'em coming!
| enlyth wrote:
| The homepage displays the wrong price for cryptos (says Bitcoin
| is 33k but it's above 36k)
| cadillion wrote:
| Thanks for catching that. Looks like we have a caching issue
| for the landing page, but our live prices at live.hedgehog.app
| are correct.
|
| We'll fix that ASAP!
| bromquinn wrote:
| "if we simply could have used a smart contract where money is
| automatically deposited upon project completion, we would have
| ensured payment."
|
| What? I didn't know this was currently possible. Maybe you should
| make this your product.
| cadillion wrote:
| It is possible! But everyone has to transact in cryptocurrency,
| which currently cuts out a large portion of the population due
| to usability issues.
|
| Rest assured, that the guiding light for our company is to make
| such smart contracts easier to use for everyone, and we believe
| that going the legitimate route under financial regulation is
| the right way to make that happen.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Surely the issue lies in defining and determining when the
| project is "done", something that can't be handled by any
| smart contract.
| cadillion wrote:
| Agreed, forgive me for reposting from another comment, but
| here's our perspective:
|
| You are correct, for this smart contract to work you need
| defined rules around how the money is released should
| either party falsely claim success or failure, so you need
| to rely on automation or some third party to validate
| fulfillment of the contract. So you're back to an oracle
| problem, how do I know I can trust the validator?
|
| The nice advancement here is that anyone can be that third
| party! Your smart contract can explicitly identify a third
| party for multisig, or you can rely on a validator pool of
| mechanical turks instead of a licensed escrow agent, and
| accordingly the cost of escrow can decrease.
|
| The nice part is that this is customizable, and built into
| the very rails that move money. It's a much lower barrier
| to entry than trying to build something like that for ACH,
| and that's what excites us about cryptocurrency.
| hedgehog wrote:
| My moment has arrived.
| breck wrote:
| "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing"
| cadillion wrote:
| Indeed sweet urchin, may you ever hog all the hedges!
| [deleted]
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