Stealth Mode Deactivated • CEO Letter #8

Hello, it's Taylor, CEO of Hedgehog, and today I get to quote CoinDesk to describe my company: "Hedgehog Technologies, a platform that lets investors sync their cryptocurrency wallets and exchange accounts to visualize their portfolios in aggregate, has raised $1.6 million to develop a crypto robo-advisor."

That's right, no big deal or anything, but we announced our seed round from Dragonfly Capital, Y Combinator, and Baroda Ventures 💅 We raised the money in spring but didn’t get a chance to officially tell the world until now. Seriously though, thank YOU so much, because no way could we have reached this point without our awesome users!

When I say that Hedgehog has barely gotten started, I'm not kidding:

Hedgehog's robo-advisor feature will go live in the next few months, Culbertson said. [That's me!] It will assess connected accounts on the platform and make suggestions to users about how to balance their holdings and take advantage of price dips to purchase crypto at bargain levels.

"A lot of crypto platforms look at retail users as price-agnostic users," Dillion said. [Cofounder and CTO Colton, who you'll know if you hang out with us on Discord.]  "Retail flow is very wanted, because you can make a lot of money off that, especially in market making. We've taken the opposite approach — we're building a platform for retail users. We're catering to the user that's kind of disadvantaged in this environment."

Hedgehog's founders say the company’s relationship with Hopscotch, the platform's clearing partner run by Culbertson's brother Morgan, who also serves as Hedgehog's head of trading, will connect users with prices 0.5% better than what competitors offer.

Stay tuned. Watch this space! (As if I'd let you forget 😜)

Three stories that grabbed my attention recently:

"On Aug. 17, blockchain-based music streaming protocol Audius announced its partnership with TikTok to allow one-click sharing with the social network." Wow, that's actually cool as hell?! Apparently Audius uses Solana to scale: "Solana can process 50K transactions per second, which will be a necessary capability now that Audius can be integrated into a social app with 732M active users."

Tldr: TikTok will steal all your data, but they're into crypto so… yay? Audius and Solana seem chill 🤙🏼

"​​The Avalanche Foundation has announced an expansion to its newly-launched Avalanche Rush liquidity mining program to incorporate Sushi, one of the largest DeFi applications by total value locked (TVL) and trading volume. The upcoming deployment of Sushi on Avalanche will provide DeFi traders access to a new suite of products with high yield farming rewards and near-instant finality."

Wanna know how much? "The Avalanche Foundation and Sushi have each allocated up to $7.5M of liquidity mining incentives over a 3-month period. These will take the form of AVAX and SUSHI rewards, split evenly."

Tldr: Avalanche of sushi, dragon roll of pow pow.

"Cryptopunks are now fully on-chain!" Ethereum, to be specific. Nifty!

Tldr: Let's get shwifty?

Last week I asked what coins everybody was into currently. You answered! Check 'em out:

• Arweave (AR)
• Serum (SRM) — incidentally, also relies on Solana!
• Vechain (VET)
• THORChain (RUNE), with this accompanying comment: "It's cutting edge DeFi, hacked, fixed, hacked again and fixed. I think of the Wright Brothers on the beach in North Carolina. They didn't get it right the first time, but they eventually did, and we've been to the moon on their backs." I hasten to add, this is Not Investment Advice™ so your mileage may vary (pun intended).
• Lukso (LYXE)

The giveaway question this week is for you to ask me a question. Any topic, AMA. What have you been wondering? Maybe I can help clear up the mystery. (Answer not guaranteed — I'll see how many I can address in the next newsletter.) Simply respond to this email with your question and you’ll be entered to win a Ledger Nano S.

Brb, gotta FaceTime my mom,

— Taylor

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