Welcome to Crypto's Future: Hedgehog v2 • Letter 103

Hi there, it's Colton here; CTO and registered rep at Hedgehog.app, a robo-adviser for digital assets. With a combined focus on risk management principles and growth potential, Hedgehog brings traditional financial best practices to the crypto space.

Yesterday we celebrated the official launch of our flagship product: the v2 mobile app complete with custodial advice and fiat onramp! If you didn’t create or migrate your account because we couldn’t take USD, yet, the wait is now over. You can read about some of our releases here, here, and here. Or mint the commemorative launch NFT here!

This week I wanted to share with you all of the features that we are proud of and have been working so hard on. If you haven’t already, you should get it on your phone: the app is available on Google Play and the App Store.

Hedgehog Crypto

Why did we build Hedgehog? Well, the cryptocurrency market is still quite new, and following price movements in a 24/7 market with thousands of actively traded assets can be overwhelming. I should know, as back in 2017 I used to spend hours crafting spreadsheets that pulled data from various open APIs. While 55% of cryptocurrency investors say that crypto was their first investment, two thirds of them have three or more exchange accounts in order to get access to the long tail of tokens.

There aren’t many great tools for the average investor, or even institutions, to compliantly and automatically orchestrate a complex portfolio of currencies across multiple venues. The technological, regulatory, and conceptual barriers to entry keep many prospective investors from participating. That’s part of why we write this newsletter too, to reduce that initial hurdle required to understand the ecosystem.

Hedgehog addresses these many challenges by offering curated stacks, which are baskets of cryptocurrencies carefully selected from different verticals within the crypto industry. With stacks, you can "buy the market" similar to index funds and ETFs, and automatically rebalance on a schedule of your choice, or rebalance on demand. Did I mention you can now buy stacks with USD or supported cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH, SOL, DOGE, or DOT?

When you invest in a stack, you own the assets directly, and Hedgehog simply manages the assets on your behalf. You can deposit and withdraw fiat, or move any currency in the Stack on-chain to a private wallet whenever you like. We’re even in the process of developing self-custody and co-custody solutions to support on-chain strategies, but in the meantime, we've integrated with Gemini for secure custody.

The default investment strategy of a Stack is based on market capitalization, where each cryptocurrency within the stack is ranked by its circulating supply's total value, and Hedgehog allocates the funds based on this ranking. You can also customize the allocation percentage within each stack to invest more or less in specific cryptocurrencies according to your preference.

In the future, we plan to offer additional allocation strategies, such as daily active addresses or gross transaction volume, in addition to the market cap option. Imagine if you could have invested in Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster back in 2004 and reallocated funds monthly as their Daily Active Users shifted from one platform to another–we hope to make something similar possible for crypto.

Hedgehog's automated rebalancing feature ensures that each stack remains aligned with the investor's desired allocation and market fluctuations. By rebalancing the portfolio monthly or according to the specified deposit schedule and error tolerance, Hedgehog minimizes the impact of unexpected volatility on your portfolio's balance.

I think it’s a really cool app, and I’ve given up a lot of my nighttime dreaming to make this dream a reality. But don’t take my word for it, please give it a try yourself and if you have any qualms or questions, make sure to hit me up so I can make it better.

Quick Hits

Bears get the squeeze on Bitcoins latest rally. Liquidations totalling over $36 million followed the news of some institutional announcements for Bitcoin products. Everyone loves a good number go up story. Right?

Debate on r/Cryptocurrency regarding Mastercard’s new patent application for the development of optimized Bitcoin transactions. Personally, I like to read about any story relating to mass adoption.

AI settles the age old question, ‘What came first? The Chicken or the egg.” Before you look at the answer for yourself, I would love to know what you think the correct answer is.

Giveaway

What’s a feature that you’re dying to see us produce within the cryptocurrency and web3 ecosystem? I know I just want somebody to execute yield farming and airdrop hunting for me automatically, on-chain. Answer the question of the week for a chance to win three of these prizes: