Greetings human! In case you forgot, this is Taylor, fellow human and CEO of Hedgehog, your go-to solution for figuring out how much your crypto holdings are worth 1) on any given day, 2) when added all together. Hedgehog uses API permissions or OAuth to securely sync your wallets and exchange accounts. You can even place trades on your favorite crypto exchange directly through Hedgehog!

In the nearish future we’re going to launch Best Price Trading, leveraging Hedgehog’s partnership with up-and-coming stealth exchange Hopscotch, which happens to be run by my brother Morgan. Naturally, Hedgehog cofounders Colton and Jason are also brothers.

Tldr: Double the brothers, double the… innovation? Brotherhood squared! Science!

You will hear a lot more about Best Price Trading when it’s ready and live in a few months. Same goes for the mobile app, in fact. We’re aiming for late summer, cross your fingers! Lemme tell you, creating functional and effective software is difficult. But for you, beloved users, we’ll shoot for the moon! Or hey, maybe Mars 🌌

Anyway… There’s a Ledger Nano S giveaway at the end of every newsletter. Reply to the question prompt, and you might be rewarded 👉😎👉

Can a decentralized autonomous organization, AKA DAO, run on Bitcoin? Sure, why not, that’s what multisig wallets are for (among other things). Usually DAOs are anchored to Ethereum or one of its dizzyingly many offshoots and sidechains, but that’s not required. Good ol’ Grandaddy Bitcoin is always there for you.

According to crypto advocate Leigh Cuen, the essential ingredients of a Bitcoin DAO are simple and accessible:

To start a DAO you’ll need:

• Laptop or phone (to use wallet software like Electrum or BlueWallet or Gnosis Safe)
• Google docs
• Email
• Social media accounts like Instagram or Twitter
• $100 worth of digital assets to test wallets and start the fund
• Notebook for writing down private keys

Leigh and her community created a proof-of-concept Bitcoin DAO that ended up raising money to help a South African student go deeper into the open-source crypto sphere.

Tldr: *insert DJ hype effect!* Descendants gon' be down with tha DAO baby! Get that legacy on lock, fam! Multigenerational multisig, ayyyyy! *plays hype effect again*

…*sigh*

I want to show you another cool community project, this time from the Zcash universe. Quick refresher: Zcash is a privacy coin focused on eliminating nonconsensual financial surveillance (which is the majority, since people who spy on you don’t tend to ask first). When Hedgehog employee Sonya worked at the Zcash Foundation, a couple of years ago, she curated “A Cypherpunk Privacy Reading List,” all about why privacy is considered an essential human right.

The project I’m highlighting today is called Free2Z, created by Skylar Saveland. It takes that philosophy of privacy to the max. Free2Z is like if crowdfunding services such as GoFundMe or Patreon allowed completely anonymous users to make or receive donations. The Free2Z docs page explains the details; here is the basic idea: “Free2z has no way to identify you or monitor who is sending what funds to whom.”

Anyone even slightly creative can imagine how ultra-private crowdfunding might be abused. Free2Z doesn’t have an official content policy, as far as I could tell, but since Skylar controls the website, presumably he would remove any page with illegal-to-host content. The Zcash blockchain itself, of course, is uncensorable.

Luckily, based on the exploration page, shady content ain’t a big problem for the current Free2Z community. People are crowdfunding wholesome ventures like sound engineering, and also non-sound engineering: “I want to be able to interact with the Zcash blockchain using one of my favorite languages, Python. How to communicate with the Zcash blockchain was not obvious to me for a few years! So, hopefully this will help someone else get started!” Aww, very sweet 💖

Tldr: Python. What a beautiful programming language. Love me some Python.

The Hedgeblog is hoppin’, per usual:

  • How to get a job in crypto right now: “For recruiters to believe that you really are interested in the crypto sphere, you need to participate in the ecosystem. To do this, you can join decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), mint tokens or NFTs, or find your own way of being a part of the crypto craze.”

Tldr: Sonya, who I mentioned earlier, is Hedgehog’s content and community lead. She said to tell you that it doesn’t matter if you’re not technically savvy, you can still make valuable contributions to a crypto company / community / project. “I regularly have no idea what is happening,” Sonya claims. Hmm, why did I hire her again? Well, maybe because she admits when she doesn’t know what the heck is going on 😅

  • Is it a big deal that high-profile DeFi developer Andre Cronje got bad enough burnout to ragequit the industry? Will he be back? Dun dun dun…

Tldr: “Find out next week, on Dragon Ball Z!”

Tldr: That song. What a banger.

Tldr: It’s me, actually. I will personally fight Ethereum. *pulls on boxing gloves, grabs pool-noodle sword*

Giveaway question of the week: Last time I asked about your jobs, and y’all are employed in many different ways across the entire economy, which is pretty cool. Now I want you to tell me about your hobbies! What do you do for fun? Reply to this email with your answer and you might be the lucky winner of a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet.

Mars needs shareholders,

— Taylor

🌌 Note: My understanding is that Elon Musk acquiring Twitter means that anyone with an account gets to go to Mars within the next decade. But what if only shareholders can fit on the rocket? Hmm, that’s okay actually, ‘cause I’m not sure how I would run Hedgehog from Mars…

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