I was approached by with an opportunity to try out a new exchange and earn some crypto, if I made an article about it.
Money for trying out a new platform seems cool, but I am generally against this type of marketing. I am always skeptical and tend to want to chose what tools I use myself by doing research and feeling informed about my choice.
With this dive in I'll also try to expand into exchanges as well as crypto coins. Let's take a look and see if this exchange is worth our time!
Founding & history
Hodlnaut opened its digital doors in 2019, the idea behind the platform started brewing in the mind of Jun Tao back in 2015. He was doing some trading with Bitcoin on a few exchanges in Japan, his withdrawal came with a hefty 55% tax, as you can probably guess, he wasn't a big fan. Few years later he met Simon Lee through a mutual friend, they talked together and started the Hodlnaut project to help investors get better returns on their crypto through offering various loans.
Depositors started coming to Hodlnaut and making their initial investments in April 2019, Hodlnaut started giving out loans and gaining interest for themselves and the depositors. After a stable first year, the platform ramped up its growth by starting to bring in new hires to help expansion. At the end of 2020, they have managed to grow to 10 employees.
2021 starts off strong, Hodlnaut confirmed that they have 106 million dollars in various assets. The company started picking up speed, they doubled their team, hit 5.000 active users, launch their token swap and manage to double their managed assets to 234 million. The most recent changes the platform introduced was the ability to buy asset coverage, allowing your deposited crypto to be insured along with reducing withdrawal fees. This seems very promising!
Functions & listings
The listings that Hodlnaut has is very slim. That is reasonable as they aren't an exchange, they're a DEX that offers external crypto loans and pays back that interest to liquidity providers, aka you and me. There are the classic BTC & ETH, along with three stablecoins: DAI, USDC & USDT. Depositing and holding these coins here automatically earns you APR/APY interest. BTC & ETH see up to 7.5% while the stablecoins see up towards 12.7% APY. These rates are extremely good, but sadly you aren't always getting the full %. It depends on how much return Hodlnaut is getting for their interest at any given time, they share this amongst crypto providers.
Also, you can choose to get rewards in a different crypto than what you are holding. I would recommend against doing this as with some testing it seems to yield lower percentage. Their percent is tiered which means that the more crypto you deposit the lower your return is, this harms long-term users but promote newer users to join in and get a good return, and with fresh new platforms more new users is key.
They also host an internal swap function. This is the best swapping function I've seen, near instant and free. Sadly it's limited to the coins in your account and the withdrawal fee won't allow you to cheat the system by using Hodlnaut simply for their superb swap. Speaking of withdrawal fee, they have that hovering around $10, they have said they would address this and adjust it downwards, one would imagine once they start getting more revenue this would be an option.
Security & utility
Standard and important security features are here along with a withdrawal whitelist functions. Always enable 2FA, this keeps your accounts safe even if someone gets access to your password. That is fairly basic, are the income & keys safe? The company is using Fireblock's multi-party computation wallet, this wallet automatically collects and sends the private keys over to Hodlnaut's central cold wallet, avoiding the vulnerability of hot wallets altogether. The funds are, however, still kept in a central body, not your keys, not your coins, so there is always some risk. The loans they provide is also only targeted at institutions and companies, which carry less risk than loans to consumers.
Utility wise the platform is very straight forward. You deposit crypto to your address, it automatically starts gathering interest and compounds it for you in the desired crypto. The swap requires no gas or hassle, simply press two buttons and your coins are swapped, yet again, it automatically gathers interest straight away. All of this is clean, it can't really be improved upon without adding new features, which is in the works.
Conclusion
I was, and still am, kind of put off by how new the company is. Sadly in the crypto sphere, most companies and cryptos are. Their track record and roadmap have been really good so far however, and they are adding features which focuses on their users. I am very pleasantly surprised by Hodlnaut, they have managed to pop up on my radar and I'll keep an eye on them.
If you want to try Hodlnaut & support Publish0x, sign up here!
Pros
- High interest rates
- Amazing internal swap system
- High compound rate (weekly)
- High level of security
Cons
- No option to buy or sell crypto
- Interest rates are not fixed and can fluctuate
- Fairly new
- Crypto insurance carries a fee