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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 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 https://hedgehog.app! Happy to answer any questions and hear your feedback in the comments!
- narush 5y agoCongrats 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 5y agoThanks @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!