...I’m not sure if you actually want to have a conversation about this or not though. Clearly I would disagree, but it feels like anything I say might not matter?
Tone never comes across well via text though, so just follow up here if you want to dive into it :)
No I'm serious, happy to have a conversation and will consider your arguments.
I should point out that I also think there may be some value in cross border remittance (something like XRPs use case). I do think smart contracts are largely useless though (oracle problem mainly).
I think it's very telling that Ethereum seems to only really have been used for crypto kitties and NFTs (I think we can all agree both are stupid). On the other hand way back when I first encountered the space (2014ish I think) I succesfully (and very easily) ordered high quality class A drugs (with BTC) with really good customer service and without having to deal in person with unsavory peoples (gang adjacent etc...).
It turns out that illicit activity has dropped precipitously as a proportion of all cryptocurrency volume, and in reality proportionally less money is spent on crime with crypto than world fiat (0.34% in crypto via Chainalysis vs 2-5% in fiat via United Nations). On a pure cash basis, it's not even close ($10 billion in crypto, $1.6 - $4 trillion in fiat).
We definitely encourage you to check out our Discover page (https://live.hedgehog.app/discover), because the space has evolved a lot since 2014. From storage coins like Filecoin, Sia, and Storj; to oracles/prediction markets like Augur, Gnosis, and Chainlink; to cross-chain shims like ThorChain, Ark, or Polkadot.
We might be in the peak of inflated expectations, and the trough of disillusionment could be just ahead, but that doesn't mean that the plateau of productivity isn't right around the corner.
Here's a spin:
Until now we have never had any kind of tracking for how much money is being spent on extra-legal drugs. Now we have a way to get the data that is needed for informed policy.
Absolutely. We actually run our company on a discord with both public and private channels, just so we can strike up conversations with people.
We have three target customers: the experienced retail trader with multiple exchange accounts, the long-term hodler who’s looking for better indexing tools, and the crypto newbie who just wants to learn how to get started.
In terms of having a laser focus on a single area, honestly I both agree and disagree. Most of the unique and interesting paths we can take are based on having a wider foundational breadth of features (best price trades require multiple exchange connections, auto rebalancing requires a complete view of your portfolio, tax prep requires order management). All these things are interweaved within each other.
Totally agree that it’s a lot, but it’s also much easier to make a general product specific, than it is to make a specific product general. The tough thing is trying to strike the right balance between that foundation and really nailing a single aspect.
Right now, that single focus is custody and best price trades.
We were completely bootstrapped until a few months ago, when we closed our seed round. Raising capital in the middle of a cryptocurrency bear market is...hard, to say the least.
We basically had to convince an Investors that a) cryptocurrency was growing, b) we were growing, and c) that we were growing faster than cryptocurrency, and it took us a while to nail that pitch and messaging.
I think the key turning point came when Colton and I burned and rebuilt the deck to be a little more fun. We've been best friends and business partners for about 10 years now, and we decided to lean into that in a 'finish each other's sentences' kind of way.
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.
But it’s not just a matter of “no done yet” is it? Adding an oracle removes any “benefits” of smart contracts and puts you right back where you were with just regular contracts (but this time done badly and with bugs by incompetent bullshitters)
The fact that you justify your product with a use case which does not work and can not work is very telling. But I’m sure as a strategy it’s working very well for you.
I think it will help if I share a little more of the story.
We are not using that use case of smart contracts as justification for our product, but the excitement for the future of smart contracts and the innovations in the cryptocurrency space encouraged the founders to get involved. They started buying cryptocurrency and found a pain point in tracking and rebalancing all of their holdings using Excel which could take upwards of 30 hours a week. Making an easier solution is the justification for the start of this product
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.
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.
centralboy asked:
> 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.
And you confirmed his statement. So are you charging additional fees or not?
- right now as our product is, we do not make money because we do not charge additional fees if you trade through an api on one of your exchanges.
- we are currently building our own custody wallet solution partnered with other companies where (without sharing any of the secret sauce) we will be able to connect our users with best priced transactions. In this solution, we plan to keep some of the discount spread for ourselves and pass along much of it to the user.
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
