Cryptocurrency is still in a very experimental phase, but most cryptocurrencies out there seem aimed at a serious, large-scale technical problem (not to mention the get-rich-quick schemes). We're helping people create currencies for interesting things they actually want to try using now.
So far, we've seen some cool use cases. To name a few: A gaming streamer is rewarding his most loyal viewers with tokens they can redeem for shoutouts or merchandise. A hip hop website is giving tokens to content curators and using them for giveaways. A few Discord channels have created tokens to use as a form of upvotes in their communities (and we think this could be cool for subreddits too).
We also provide tools for managing and tracking the token you make. This is free, but we plan to make money by charging for advanced features in the future. Right now on Hexel, you can do the following:
1.) Mint tokens and airdrop them to anyone with an Ethereum address
2.) Share a public page for your token, with information and a UI for sending that token to others
3.) Explore other tokens created on Hexel, subscribe to the ones you like, and request tokens from the creator
4.) Message your token's subscribers with updates or info about things you're doing with your token
5.) View a feed of payments made using your token
Although the ICO bandwagon and hype have left many people feeling cynical about cryptocurrencies (we feel that way ourselves), we're optimistic that there are many more potential applications and cool use cases out there. Our goal is to widen the space, make it interesting again, and make other use cases easy to explore. We'd love for anyone to poke holes in the use cases you see on the site, and even better would be feedback on use cases were you think this could be really useful. Thanks so much for any ideas you have!
Thanks! John & Marcus
Also, your comment reminds me somewhat of the infamous Hacker News comment when Dropbox posted ("everything you want to do can be done simply with rsync"). Sure, perhaps it's simple for tech folks that know how to build a database and a website that lets you mint and share tokens. But what if you are a popular Youtube vlogger? You either don't know how to do that, don't have time to, or don't want to spend the money. But perhaps you'd use this service, quickly mint tokens, give them away to users, and invent interesting use cases for them.
Personally, I love this idea and think it has great potential. Will anything useful come of it? Who knows -- it's early days. I think the most interesting use cases, if they exist, haven't been thought of yet. I look forward to seeing what people do with it.
- Is the idea interesting ? Yes possibly. The idea of making it easy to create tokens is interesting. I can see twitch streamers giving away tokens to their subscribers / viewers.
- Does it need to be on blockchain ? For all the use cases described, the answer according to me is no. It is easier to simply have a frontend through which users can interact vs maintaining a wallet, installing metamask, etc. This is going in the direction opposite of the Dropbox example - making things harder for users.
“Let me compare bitcoin / blockchain doubters to all doubters of some successful technology“. The fact that there were naysayers for some successful tech does not prove that there being naysayers for bitcoin/blockchain means that it will be a success.
Your reply is identical to every scammer and crooked shyster in the crypto space. YCombinator is damaging it’s brand associating with scams.
The sooner this blockchain nonsense crashes, the better...
This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.
For bonus point sight the backups with a PGP key and issue sha-256 checksums of your database (itself already containing previous checksums) this way you can call it a blockchain and get all the hype for free.
I don't say that the blockchain is useless, but it's hard to come up with use cases where it's clearly superior than databases.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdlnBsw1iRAks1F2pD6...
A similar initiative is POA Network, which has US public notaries acting as trusted validators for an Ethereum sidechain:
One more question: since these tokens are created on ETH, does this mean for each transaction related to a token, I will need to pay gas each time I want to transact?
What's the actual difference between this and an Ethereum token? Except you don't need to pay for the Google Sheet, of course.
www.dotcomco.in
Some of the in-house community cryptocoins I made as a portfolio of examples include:
www.ycco.in - distributed karma for HN community (still up)
www.instagramco.in and www.facebookco.in - distributed likes
Of course I didn’t make it to front page of HN and got no traction. As I have more than a few cryptocoin/blockchain themed domains I began tozenizing the domain ownership rights to try to sell with the pre-made community cryptocoin, my experience is there seems to be more interest in these domains than the community coins.
When I launched bitcoin wasn’t worth what it is today...that said what would you pay for your own community cryptocoin anyway?
Edit:
> We've submitted your transaction to the network. This usually takes about 2 minutes to confirm.
30 minutes later...
Edit 2:
One email to the Hexel support team later and lo, my token is live: https://www.onhexel.com/token/e4a37f4f-3a26-4ae3-a8b2-c932aa...
5/7 would recommend
Edit: transaction time depends on the gas price, email me at support@onhexel.com and I can make sure that things go smoothly!
https://www.onhexel.com/token/bb571299-e19a-4671-9036-7b3e73...
(not a hexel coin, but another ERC20)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_currency
There's no need for a blockchain, or distributed stuff, etc. The only thing you need is to convince people to accept it. You might as well make an app that transfers balance between rows on a database. And the reason why you never heard of complementary currency before, is that it's something done "just because you can" and has no real advantages.
I understand that none of the things I said are specific to you. But am I wrong?
Unless these are not really tokens and the "user/owner" can send the tokens without a centralized permission.
But if it’s an ERC20 token, don’t we need to pay gas to use it? Or does the token run on a chain that you guys control instead of on the Ethereum blockchain?
Rather, I mean, I think that the above would be possible, but would those transactions be accepted by the rest of the network or do transactions need to be verified by more than just the one or few couple of full nodes that you run? I seem to recall something about the execution of every single smart contracts happening on all full nodes in the network but that seems strange (mainly because of how volatile any large scale network of distributed nodes will be in terms of nodes passing in and out or temporarily losing connectivity with the rest of the network) so I think I did not understand correctly how the Ethereum network really works.
Furthermore, if a full node could be run in the fashion I mentioned above then how many smart contract executions would it be able to facilitate per hour? Currently Ethereum is Proof-of-Work, so it would depend on your hashing power I guess. Perhaps the chance of finding a block is so small that you can’t realistically run the kind of node that I mentioned? And how about after they switch to Proof-of-Stake, will it be feasible then if not now? How much would you have to stake in order to be able to put through the transactions you wanted?
Also, what are the smart contracts you use or security features that you have and can it be audited or is it a trade secret ?
Have you looked at other private ledger technologies and what do you think of those ?
Right now we have a single token contract that has been audited. We also have a few other smart contracts in the works, to be used with your token.
By private ledger, do you mean private blockchains? I’ve always been less interested in those. Part of the fun in blockchains is the public nature of them, and how they enable transparency and interaction between everyone. To me, private blockchains seem like they should just be databases in most cases. But I’m not an expert in that area by any means.
Meta: This is also a very well written announcement post, IMO, and I suggest anyone looking to launch something learn from it. It starts off with the most important soundbites up front, including the rather weird sounding "it's supposed to be fun". Then it gives a bit of backstory, but most importantly, provides interesting examples that back up the weird "fun" assertion.
It ends with a pretty clear explanation of what this costs and what the business model is.
All in all, great job. Good luck!
1. What's to stop a competitor from copying your app feature for feature and implementing their own features faster than you can keep up because they're using established distributed ledger technologies instead of blockchain?
2. Are there any features you have planned that make use of the one thing that differentiates blockchains from distributed ledgers (decentralization)?
The first immediate feature of using a blockchain is that token holders do not need to worry about a private distributed ledger shutting down its service. A future feature we have planned is a developer program where anyone can submit smart contracts that do interesting things with tokens. For this to work with a distributed ledger you would need to implement your own public API for interacting with your ledger.
How long have both of you been working on this project?
What was your traction before getting into YC?
I'm most interested in the traction part since there's this misconception that YC does not accept early stage companies. It looks there are a whole lot of companies in the very early stage and I personally take that as a positive sign.
I notice that the pricing model currently only features a free option. Wondering if you might be able to tell us more about the business model long term?
Many thanks
1. Recent SEC activity: is this a threat to you? I see you have been careful to avoid fundraising in your examples, but other people here have come up with that as a use case in brainstorming.
2. Did you look at Stellar? It has none of the disadvantages of Ethereum (ie instant confirms and de minimus fees) and was in part purpose built for your kind of project. I know you both have Ethereum backgrounds but was wondering if you’d considered and ruled out alternatives.
Good luck! I’m keen to see a healthy online micropayments ecosystem so I’m supportive of your project, which could become part of that.
https://www.onhexel.com/token/9ef7aaf7-82b2-470f-a84d-e392e7...
The details around pricing + scarcity mechanics connecting to physical spaces still need to be worked out, but the idea is promising. This would be a nice abstraction once there is an API where we could hook into!
https://www.onhexel.com/token/aab493ef-dbef-4d78-bb3a-9b7927...
Jean
I think more things supporting ICO's would be great e.g. like how waves has a decentralized exchange so that when you create a token on waves you can immediately monetize it.
I suppose theres a decentralised exchange for ERC20 tokens somewhere, but something that smoothes the entire end to end ICO process would be amazing.
> I created a Hacker News token. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to send you some (for free!).
https://www.onhexel.com/token/9ef7aaf7-82b2-470f-a84d-e392e7...
Thanks!
Human greed is matched only by human gullibility.
Databases aren't trendy, but they'd solve the same problem better with less waste.
