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Comment by cadillion | Hacker News Reader

Our business model is to make markets and connect buyers with sellers. Buyers often have different prices than sellers, and when someone wants to buy for a higher price than another wants to sell, a market maker can keep the "spread" or the difference between the asking price and the bid.

We also have additional future revenue streams that we can earn through automated portfolio management fees, tax optimization, and more.

Can you clarify what you mean by motivation/support?

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On first glance I thought users can trade directly on an exchange (where you have to pay a fee for a trade) through your platform. So now users have to pay a fee to the exchange AND to you. Is that correct?

We don't charge additional fees on top of what you're already paying to place a trade on an exchange, so if you want to buy BTC on Kraken through Hedgehog, we don't take a cut of that at all.

Now I am confused.

centralboy asked: > In other words, you route orders and users get worse prices because you MM yourself, also like traditional finance. It's a good business model for you but as a user I'd rather see transparency and a move towards DeFi where everyone is guaranteed the same execution.

And you confirmed his statement. So are you charging additional fees or not?

- right now as our product is, we do not make money because we do not charge additional fees if you trade through an api on one of your exchanges. - we are currently building our own custody wallet solution partnered with other companies where (without sharing any of the secret sauce) we will be able to connect our users with best priced transactions. In this solution, we plan to keep some of the discount spread for ourselves and pass along much of it to the user.

Sorry, I was on mobile. I meant: if the business model is clear then so is the motivation and thus it will be clear what expectations for support look like. I think having a clear indicator for what Hedgehog's motivation is (i.e. the business model) would help build trust in the product.

My fear is that I'll invest time and information into the product and then support will drop out because my goals won't be in alignment with Hedgehog's goals.

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