We know that HN tends to be divided on cryptocurrency-related topics, with some people interested and involved and others skeptical or critical. Obviously we find ourselves in the prior camp, but we also completely agree that the cyclical excessive hype and outright scams are a problem, which is why we're slowly moving toward compliant forms of co-custody that offer all the protections of traditional finance like transaction forgiveness, fraud prevention, and more.
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. 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.
We’ve spent the last couple years building a secure and compliant suite of tools for our clients to invest in digital assets and automatically rebalance their crypto portfolio wherever they hold currency. The SEC examined us as recently as the end of April and we've addressed all the deficiencies they brought to our attention, which gives us confidence even despite their recent actions against Coinbase and Binance. While currently we’re Cefi only for management, you can still monitor and respond to movements in your on-chain holdings on any exchange you’ve connected to Hedgehog.
Part of our security investment was transitioning from Heroku and third-party services to an AWS-only stack, secured within our own VPCs, and rebuilding our API key management system to take advantage of HSMs and multiple layers of encryption keys. We also rebuilt the most security-sensitive bits of our app in Rust to take advantage of all the static analysis tools.
Unique to us, 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 any supported currency, including US dollars, whenever you like. We’re even in the process of developing self-custody and co-custody solutions, but in the meantime, we've integrated with Gemini for secure custody. Separately managed accounts are logistically important, because it helps us to comply with the SEC’s Custody Rule, while also preventing the securitization of the underlying assets, which are currently treated as commodities by US regulators–although the SEC wants to change that.
We would love for any of you to try out our app which can be found in both the Google Play Store and App Store. We know the onboarding process can be tedious but much of it is required for us to be compliant with our SEC registration. The app asks you to subscribe for $6/month or $60/year, but the first two weeks are free. We would love to hear from any and all of you, especially regarding our onboarding flow in the app and how intuitive or confusing you might find different parts of the UI/UX. We can most easily be reached at our Discord link below or through email at support@hedgehog.app.
[App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hedgehog-crypto/id1616233484)
[Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.hedgehog.a...)
[Discord](https://discord.gg/MgnHHvCNX2)
*Being a SEC registered firm does not imply a certain level of skill or training.
