Hedgehog | Year in review (2020)

Taylor Culbertson -

Hi, I’m Taylor, one of the co-founders of Hedgehog, a cryptocurrency aggregator and portfolio manager that allows you to trade anywhere, track anything, and learn everything about blockchain.

Investing is complicated, crypto is complicated, and investing in crypto can be chaos. At Hedgehog, we want to make investing in cryptocurrencies simple. Cryptocurrency allows us to bring complicated financial tools to the everyday user, and we strive to educate, guide, and deliver on that ideal every day.

Here’s a quick recap of our 2020:

  • Expanded client assets under management to $1.42 million
  • Officially launched our Subscription Trading Product, and we’ve already processed $32k worth of trades!
  • Upgraded to a new domain, hedgehog.app
  • Integrated with Hopscotch in order to offer best-price transactions
  • Added multiple data sources and a new reconciliation process
  • Completely redesigned both the app and the landing page
  • Improved user onboarding with emphasis on varying skill levels

On behalf of our team, thank you for all your support, feedback, and insights on our product. We have some very exciting updates and features in store for 2021, and I’m more than excited to see Hedgehog evolve throughout the year.

PRODUCT LAUNCH: TRADING

After months of beta testing, we were proud to announce the official launch of our subscription trading product! This product allows users to trade on any of their exchanges through Hedgehog, with full access to all trading and transaction APIs for over 130+ supported exchanges.

To put it simply: Trade nearly any asset, anywhere, anytime.

Since coming out of beta, we’ve already processed $32,445.94 worth of trading activity.

HOPSCOTCH

Integrating with Hopscotch was one of our major goals for 2020, and we’ve been blown away by the results. Powered by Hopscotch, we can often offer a price that beats the nearest exchange by 2%.

snapshot taken on Dec 7th, 2020 at 9:36am

There’s a lot of secret sauce involved here, but we’re extremely excited to bring this product to our users in 2021. We still have a couple regulatory hurdles to overcome before we can do so.

USERS

This year, we’ve cumulatively had 5,055 users spend over 1,270 hours using the app. After creating an account, our users track an average of 13 addresses across 5 wallets, with 9 separate currencies and an average of 3 exchange connections.

In terms of user acquisition, we’ve spent almost nothing on marketing, and boast a 95% referral rate (20:1).

With the help of our summer interns Daniel Brown and Yiwen Sun, we’ve completely revamped our user flow, making improvements to registration, exchange connections, portfolio management, and more.

Adding assets to your portfolio and connecting your exchange account has never been easier.
After registering, the user now goes through a setup flow to help get them started.

We also created several videos and guides that showcase Hedgehog and help users get connect to their exchanges.

DESIGN

At the beginning of 2020, we made the decision to rebuild the entire app from the ground up. This rebuild allowed us to drastically speed up the entire site, eliminated a lot of dead code, paved the way for more robust data streams, fully prepared the code-base for an eventual mobile app, and just…made things a lot easier to design and develop.

Our coin page design has received a fresh update and we’ve added charts for a ton of data including Active Addresses, Transactions, Dev Activity, NVT ratio, and more.

Managing your portfolio is easier than ever, with an all-encompassing design update that improved both usability and page speed. After several great discussions with our beta users, asset classes have also became Stacks.

Easily manage your portfolio.
Set strategies & target allocations.

SERVER

Where once our longest running requests could take upward of 30 seconds, our maximum request time (for all BTC historical price data) is now down to 7 seconds, a 428% improvement, and 99% of all requests get answered in under 2 seconds.

We are easily handling scales of 2,700 requests per second on our most demanding APIs, and we’ve introduced clustering to enable practical and immediate horizontal scaling.

This year, we also introduced server-side rendering, content-distribution network caching, and service-worker level caching to improve initial page load speeds from 5 seconds to 0.3 seconds, a 1,666% speed up!

Additionally, the average time it until the site is fully interactive is down from 7 seconds to 2 seconds, a 350% improvement.

In total we had 99.897260273% up time, even during beta, and we expect this number only to improve.

DATA

We’ve added 150 new assets, 40 wallets, and 23k addresses to the system, bringing our totals to:

  • 2008 assets (+8.07%)
  • 526 wallets (+8.23%)
  • and 47,750 addresses (+93.17%)

In terms of coin page content, we’ve added 2.6k content panels & films 1.8k feeds, and 21k people & entities, bringing our totals to:

  • 6,175 content panels & films (+76.07%)
  • 6,238 feeds (+41.80%)
  • and 37,427 people & entities (+126.07%)

We are also tracking 22,868 unique data points and APIs from 12 different providers to fill out our coin data and ensure it’s as accurate as possible.

MARKETING

As we close on the end of the year and BTC threatens to make new all-time-highs, we are hard at work preparing all the materials we need to have a successful public launch. We are prepping all of our ad campaigns and our analytics to take maximum advantage of our press release and initial ad spend, hoping to make our debut one to remember. Keep an eye out in the industry trades for our release!

In addition to traditional social and search advertising, we’ve designed a go-to-market strategy to take advantage of these closely clustered demographics and target traders where they already hang out: trading subreddits, discord groups, telegram chats, Hacker News, Product Hunt, and other tech trades.

BUSINESS

This year we had the opportunity to meet and begin working with registered investment advisers and family offices across America to help their clients get started with cryptocurrency. We are excited to expand our offering to be more useful for professionals and novices alike.

We’ve also cemented our relationship with Hopscotch and look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration to bring simple and fast cross-chain transfers to our clients at the lowest price possible.

PARTING THOUGHTS

Of course, we can’t thank our investors and our legislators enough for supporting us through this wild year and helping us to keep the dream alive. We know it’s been a tough year for many, and we are grateful to have gotten through it a stronger company than ever.

We are still taking money in our SAFE note as we go out to seek a priced round in the new year, so if you have interest in helping us take Hedgehog to the moon, we’d love to talk.

If you’re curious about the app and you’d like a demo to help you make a decision, we’d also love to talk!

Our door is always open at info@hedgehog.app or by phone at 949.354.4184 and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Again, we cannot thank our customers, beta testers, investors, employees, collaborators, family, and friends enough for all their support.

It is an honor and a pleasure to keep building Hedgehog for you. Here’s to another year of new struggles and new successes!

best regards,

Taylor & The Hedgehog Team