AMA Recap
For those who couldn’t make it to our AMA on September 16th, here’s a recap–or listen to the audio recording here👇
Groot
Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for listening in today! I am your AMA host Groot and today I’ll be chatting with Hedgehog founder, George Yu. George, do you want to say hello?
George Yu
Hi everyone, I’m George, founder of Hedgehog. Thanks for joining us all today, really excited to share the product and more about it with you guys.
Groot
Yes, and I’m sure everyone here is really excited to hear from you. We received a lot of questions from the audience ahead of time. Unfortunately, we probably don’t have enough time to cover every single question, but we’re going to answer as many as we can. So today, we’re going to start first with some of the questions we received via the Google form and then we’ll open up the floor to live questions from everyone that’s attending. For the live questions portion, please put your questions in the ama-live-questions channel. We’re going to leave that channel open throughout the AMA and we’ll answer as many as we can during the live portion.
And, as some of you may know, we’re also doing a raffle during today’s AMA. We’ll do the raffle drawing for the $50 of $SOL at the end, so be sure to stick around. And with that, let’s go ahead and get started!
Groot
So George, Hedgehog Markets made a pretty big splash this year and it sounds like we’re approaching the moment that we’ve all been waiting for: when is mainnet launch?
George Yu
Yeah, so super excited to announce that Hedgehog will launch on mainnet next week! Our team has been heads down designing, building, and preparing the product to ship and it’s been a monumental effort from everyone. Couldn’t be more excited to release it to all you guys. Want to give a big shoutout to everyone on the team, especially our engineers, for pushing this through. And stay tuned on Twitter and on Discord–we’ll be sending out more info about exact dates as we approach.
Groot
That’s incredible! Super, super exciting moment for the team. So you guys recently shared some information, but could you maybe share with our audience today what we can expect from mainnet?
George Yu
Yeah, so we have a Medium article up about this–if you haven’t had a chance to take a look, please take a look–it’s got all the info that I’m going to describe right here. We’re launching on mainnet with No-Loss Competitions, which enable users to win real money without risking their own. So for mainnet, we’re planning to launch a couple competitions in which users have a chance to win up to $100k in prizes. Our No-Loss Competitions are a unique take on the prediction markets structure, both in and outside of crypto. We decided to go with a parimutuel structure for this (testing things out, seeing how that works), rather than the more common automated market maker or order book-based prediction market structures. We’ll start with sports, in particular NFL and EPL (English Premier League), and crypto markets for our first set of competitions.
Groot
Wow, first, I think it’s really interesting that you guys are exploring these new types of structures and bringing this very innovative type of product to the prediction markets space! And another cool part of this for the community is that it’s a pretty large prize pool that you guys are offering for these No-Loss Competitions.
So why did Hedgehog decide to launch with the No-Loss Competition structure vs the AMM or order book-based prediction markets?
George Yu
We wanted to ship a product that felt approachable and inclusive and really easy for users to get started with. We thought No-Loss made a lot of sense because it provides a low-risk way for users to not only experience prediction markets and how they work, but also still have the chance to win significant monetary prizes. We’ve also noticed a lot of interest in gamified experiences and this is something we’ve really been thinking deeply about. We believe that both crypto native and non-crypto native users will enjoy this new kind of competition structure as a fun alternative to experience prediction markets.
Groot
I see. I mean, it would be really great to see prediction markets become more mainstream and gain more adoption. So, you mentioned that hedgehog published that Medium article recently on the competitions that you’re launching with–why did you decide to start with markets in sports and crypto specifically?
George Yu
We’re starting with markets that we’ve traditionally seen prediction market users have interest in. This has typically been politics, sports, financial markets. We’ve also received lots of requests from our community for these types of markets in our Discord suggest-markets channel (where users can send in requests that they’d like to see and also submit to the pinned form). The team reviews all your feedback, suggestions, and we try to do our best to take them all into account. We’d really like to see how the community responds to this set of competitions and we will plan to expand our range of topics as we move forward, depending on community feedback. So if you have any ideas, any requests, you know, we’d love to hear them. Please go to the suggest-markets channel and submit them there.
Groot
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think we’ve seen a lot of interest in, like you mentioned, politics, sports, crypto. What about eSports? Do you think Hedgehog would support prediction markets for the eSports ecosystem?
George Yu
Yeah, so we think eSports is a really interesting vertical to look into and we definitely plan to include them in our product, especially once we understand a bit more of the infrastructure required there.
Groot
That’s awesome to hear. And outside of users suggesting markets in Discord, if they have ideas for markets that they’d like to see can they create markets themselves directly?
George Yu
The future goal of this is to have a completely decentralized platform where users can submit any form of markets they like, directly on top of the program. As of right now, we’re creating the markets internally to create a bit more of a curated experience. But, as I mentioned earlier, we always consider community input when doing so. If you want to suggest any markets, feel free to suggest them in the suggest-markets channel, but eventually (in the future) we do plan to allow for anyone to submit a market on anything they would like.
Groot
That’s awesome. I think that would be really cool to be able to have a group of people in our community that are really excited about all these different topics–who are probably following those specific areas very closely–to be able to create markets. Until then, other than suggesting markets, how would you recommend community members get involved with Hedgehog and the project?
George Yu
So there’s a couple different ways, the first is obviously by using the platform. We’d love to know what you like about the product, definitely what you don’t like, any suggestions that you have. We have forms pinned in the platform-feedback channel in Discord, so if you have any suggestions in terms of just user experience or anything like that feel free to send it across there. The second thing that you can do is be active in Discord and on Twitter. We have a community of over 10,000 members on Discord right now and a great team of Hedgebassadors that help us stay engaged–you can find them on Discord with the Hedgebassador tag if you’re interested in learning more. We also post announcements, polls, contests on Twitter, so definitely engage in those if you find those topics interesting. Also, if you’re interested in working on the project, if you’re a dev, a product manager, designer, etc. feel free to reach out to kyled in Discord and give him a shout there. We’re definitely interested in hearing from community members that are interested in working with us in a more personal manner.
Groot
Wow, that’s awesome! So there’s a lot of different ways for people to get involved here. Just curious, if they’re interested in the project and particularly interested in the nuts and bolts of the platform, is Hedgehog open-source? And is there a public GitHub that people can go to to take a look?
George Yu
Yeah, so the long-term vision here, as I mentioned, is to be eventually completely decentralized. Right now, our primary focus is getting the scaffolding all there–user growth, building the best possible product and platform that we can before we move into decentralization. So as the platform grows, we will do that once it’s in a more stable place. We do plan to open-source the code in GitHub, but right now we need to stay a little bit more agile. So definitely in the future, that’s in the roadmap, but there’s a lot of changes going on right now.
Groot
Got it, makes sense. Good stuff. Okay, so now we’re going to move into some rapid-fire questions to try and cover as much ground as possible during this AMA.
The first rapid-fire question I have for you is: many projects have issues with UI/UX, which deters new users. How do you plan to combat this?
George Yu
UI/UX is something that we’ve always been thinking deeply about and it’s really driven a lot of our core product decisions. One of the big reasons that we decided to build on Solana is we actually hacked together a prototype on ETH before we started building and we just found that the user experience was just not great, especially for someone coming from outside of crypto. We thought Solana provided faster transaction times and low fees and that was critical to providing a great user experience. We’re also releasing a completely new UI with the mainnet launch that is more suited to our No-Loss Competition structure and we think it’ll really provide an enhanced user experience. We’d love to hear community feedback once it launches–anything that you like, anything that you don’t like, how we can improve–always love to hear that.
Groot
I’m so excited to see the new UI! Luckily, we don’t have too much longer to wait since we’ll be able to see it next week. What are some advantages and differences between Hedgehog and other prediction market projects?
George Yu
I think the core for any great project is a great team. Our engineers, devs, product designers, product managers have done a great job at coming together to build this product and get it ready for launch. Our No-Loss Competition structure, we think, is a really unique take on prediction markets that we haven’t seen offered in the space before. So we’d really love to hear everyone’s opinions once you try it; how you like it in comparison to a more standard structure, what you like, what you don’t like. Let us know what you think.
Groot
Awesome. General theme is we love user feedback!
So we’ve also received a lot of questions about Hedgehog NFTs and collectibles–could you comment on this?
George Yu
Yeah. So even before NFTs really took off here, we had been really thinking about gamification and the gamification of the prediction experience; how to add exciting aspects like this into our platform so that users find it fun to make predictions and find it fun to use this platform. We’re really looking into this, trying to see if there are ways to integrate this in a way that makes sense. Definitely stay tuned and when we have something that makes sense and that the community will find exciting we’ll definitely release news.
Groot
Awesome. Well, we will be eagerly awaiting that. What is the name of your icon’s hedgehog?
George Yu
He doesn’t have a name yet! So actually, we might ask our community to help us pick this out, so also stay tuned here.
Groot
Yeah, I think a lot of our community members find the hedgehog quite cute, so we’ll have to find a suitable name to match that level of cuteness.
Alright, another question is where can I report frontend bugs?
George Yu
So in Discord, if you go to the platform-feedback channel and you check the pinned messages, there is a bug form there that you can submit and that’ll go directly to us.
Groot
Awesome. Now we’ve reached the point in the AMA where we will open the floor to some live questions. Please continue submitting questions via the ama-live-questions channel and we will answer as many as we can.
One question is has Hedgehog planned to reward early users of the platform?
George Yu
Definitely, yes. We’re looking into this and looking into the right way of doing this, but that’s definitely in the cards. I can’t really say too much to it right now, but we obviously want to reward everyone that’s using our product, especially the early adopters.
Groot
Awesome, right. I remember back when hedgehog was running its devnet competition, there were some cool prizes for people that were using the platform then and we even were able to share some really cool Hedgehog collectibles at that time.
George Yu
Yep, that’s right! yeah.
Groot
Cool. Another question is which are the markets that Hedgehog focuses on the most?
George Yu
So this is something that will change–and I’m assuming this means markets that we plan to offer so let me know if this isn’t the case–but this is something that will change as we get user feedback and as we see what kind of markets work and don’t work. We want to start with the markets that we’ve seen historically drive a lot of interest in prediction markets and other markets in the past. Initially, we plan to have a big focus on sports, politics when there’s appropriate questions, but also obviously (because we are in crypto), I think there’s a lot of interest and we’ve seen on devnet a lot of interest in crypto-related markets and markets on crypto-related topics. So that’s another area that we’d like to focus on. So I guess in summary, our initial focus will be heavily on sports and crypto/crypto-related topics, but depending on suggestions that we received from users and the interest that we see in our different competitions we will adjust what we focus on moving forward.
Groot
Very cool. Some more questions from the community here: would you ever consider putting ads on Hedgehog?
George Yu
I think we can consider it, but for what we have live now it hasn’t really been something that I’ve thought of. If it’s something that detracts from user experience, then it’s ideally something I wouldn’t like to add.
Groot
Makes sense. So this focus on user experience, like you mentioned earlier, really is the foundational thread for all the product decisions at Hedgehog, which is great to see.
Some more questions here: what games of eSports will be added?
George Yu
We definitely want to take a look at games that are popular. I don’t know if you’d consider chess an eSport right now, but for example, chess has been really popular on Twitch, so adding competitions that are chess-related we think makes sense. Obviously, League of Legends is very popular, Dota, etc., etc. I think definitely we want to look to add a lot of the more popular games that have tons of users and tons of interest.
Groot
That makes a lot of sense. So I guess to everyone that’s listening and to all members of our community if there are specific areas within eSports that you’d like to see, again, please reach out to the Hedgehog team. Let them know so the team can make sure that they’re creating markets that you are interested in.
Alright, so we are kind of coming up on time shortly and we want to make sure we save enough time at the end to announce the raffle winner. Thank you, George for your time! Mainnet launch is happening next week, which is really exciting! That wraps up our questions for today. George, do you want to go ahead and announce the winner of the raffle?
George Yu
Yes, ssemres congratulations, you’ve won $50 of $SOL! Groot will DM you to coordinate how we can send that to you. Please do not send your private key or seed phrase to anyone.
Groot
Awesome. Congratulations ssemres, super exciting!
Well, that wraps up our AMA for today. Thank you again to everyone for joining us. We hope you’re as excited for next week’s mainnet launch as we are! To stay updated on all things Hedgehog, please join our Discord community (obviously you guys are here) and follow us on Twitter. We’re going to be providing more announcements and more updates as we approach mainnet launch. Thank you again, we really appreciate it and hopefully, we’ll be able to speak to you guys again soon at another AMA.
George Yu
Thank you, everyone!
About Hedgehog Markets
The mission of Hedgehog Markets is to provide direct, veritable, and open access to the wisdom of crowds. Hedgehog Markets was founded by George Yu, a former Google and Oscar Health engineer. Interested in exploring ways to better predict future events, and noticing a lack of user-friendly ways to do so, building a decentralized prediction markets platform became a natural extension of that interest. Hedgehog Markets was built alongside e^{i} Ventures (EIV), a venture studio focused on DeFi and decentralized applications. Learn more about Hedgehog at https://hedgehog.markets and on Medium.
For press inquiries, please reach out to media@hedgehog.markets
Disclaimer
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