...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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
I had no rhyme or reason for determining that cutoff point.