Can you tell us who you are, what your background is, and what led you to build in Web3?
I’m Esko, Co-Founder and CEO of Hedgehog Protocol. I’ve been in Web3 for about five years now, working across different parts of the ecosystem. Before starting Hedgehog, I was part of the team at Prosper, a prediction market platform that was acquired by Animoca Brands in 2021. That experience gave me a front-row seat to how fast things move in this space and the kind of infrastructure gaps that still need solving.
What problem does your dApp solve, and who is it built for?
Hedgehog is building infrastructure that lets us create markets for any kind of on-chain expense. This means users can now trade and hedge their transaction costs instead of just accepting them passively. We’re giving people a way to take a position on things like gas fees and other blockchain expenses. The protocol is built for businesses that want to manage cost volatility, traders looking for new markets, and degens who want to speculate on on-chain activity.
How has your product evolved since you started to built it, and which milestones you are most proud of?
We’ve always been laser-focuses on the modularity of our infrastructure, allowing any market to be built on top of a synthetic blockspace. We’ve started focusing on the base fee market, and since then we’ve been collecting feedback and demand from users and we’ve already have several different markets lined up, like a FeeM auction market, MEV priority fees market, funding rates, bitcoin transaction fees, etc. We’re most proud of this vision that we had at the beginning of making our stack super modular and composable, and it turns out that the market demand is exactly like we predicted.
What infrastructure or technical bottlenecks have you had to overcome while building?
Several. One of the biggest ones was trying to get a custom oracle built for our first market. We reached out to providers like Chainlink and Redstone, but it wasn’t possible within our timeline or use case, so we ended up building our own oracle from scratch. Another big one came from changes in Telegram’s blockchain policy, which forced us to rethink the logic behind our miniapp. There have been plenty of smaller roadblocks aswell..
Have you come across tools like dRPC that aggregate RPC access across multiple chains? What would make a solution like that valuable or relevant for your team
Yes, since we need to fetch on-chain cost data across multiple chains, a solution like dRPC is perfect for us.
