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Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

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Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#1
Hi, we're the founders of Hexel (https://www.onhexel.com), in the current YC batch. Our product lets anyone create a cryptocurrency (an ERC20 token on Ethereum). You don't sell it or do an ICO, you just create it and start using it right away. It's supposed to be fun!

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

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#2
Hi,

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.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#8
Hey I offered this exact service with:

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.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#9
Trying to actually use this reminds me of how frustrating and slow it is to actually use cryptocurrencies. Endless hoops, lots of waiting for confirmations, and that's me doing things the 'easy' way with Coinbase and MetaMask.

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

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