A hop, skip, and a pump • Letter 126

Hedgehog Admin -

Good morning, hedgies, and in case you’re living or traveling abroad, good afternoon, good evening, and good night; this is Colton from Hedgehog, the smart asset manager for CeFi, DeFi, and w/eFi. That’s right, I’m coining whateverFi, because in case you’ve forgotten, our app helps you buy over 85 assets with a single deposit and automatically buys and sells on your behalf in response to market movements. Did I mention we will soon support purchasing ETFs and stock, too?

Yes indeed, big things are happening in the background, and we’ve got more to deliver before the next bull run starts in earnest. Meanwhile, our sister company Hopscotch, has been hard at work as well, with the recent launch of their smart currency conversion app. If you need to bridge funds or convert an asset to another asset in a single step, go ahead and give their app a try! Now about that bullish sentiment–

BTC in rare form

We’ve had six straight weeks of upward movement in BTC price action with the price of BTC briefly peeking above $38,000 for the first time since April last year, and outstripping its 200 week moving average by 30%. For those not in the know, Michael Saylor considers the 200 week moving average a signal of downward resistance, and we have bounced considerably in a short period of time.

Why is this happening now? Well, no one can know exactly why money moves from one hand to the other, but CoinShares is reporting that we’ve had about half a billion in inflows over the last two weeks from institutional players, and short sellers are taking the pressure off, which means that most professionals see more room for the price to grow. Who will be right in the short term? Beats the heck out of me, but I’m in this for the long haul and I wouldn’t bet against BTC on long timeframes–as the kids like to say, “We are still so early.”

ETH in demand

People often ask what utility cryptocurrencies are providing, and ETH has an easy answer for this: they’re providing compute time on one of the world’s largest share computers and block space in one of the world’s largest shared databases. It turns out this is worth a lot to people, as miners are taking home close to $10 million per day in fees as people clamor to have their transactions and smart contracts included on-chain. That’s a mainframe sharing invoice that even IBM would find attractive.

What are people using this block space for these days? Well, over the last three months, the top contracts by gas usage have been things like the Uniswap and 1inch routers, transfers of USDT and USDC, Opensea auctions, MEV bots, canonizing off-chain data with Chainlink, creating ArtBlocks, or deploying token contracts with CoinTool. We could keep going down the list, but needless to say there’s a thriving market for this scarce data throughput, and we should expect demand to increase as use-cases proliferate.

Other coin narratives

User @CryptoKoryo on X posted a dope Dune dashboard exposing the relative performance of various crypto narratives against BTC. According to their partitioning of the market, Real World Assets, Meme coins, and Liquid Staking Derivative tokens are the big winners this month, but over the course of the year distributed AI platforms have also led the pack.

Now we don’t necessarily endorse any of these groupings, but it is an interesting exercise in trying to see how trends affect the crypto market, and could be good fodder for customizing your own stacks of assets.

Hits, but quickly

I’ve been feeling a little stumped lately trying to get Hedgehog in front of the people who need it. What outlandish marketing gimmicks should we try or with what underrated communities should we be getting in touch?

Keep hedging,
— Colton