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I've been using Hodlnaut for a little over a month now, and it's time to give a review of the service. It's not all glorious, but there are some shining spots with this service. Read on to learn more.
Meaning of HODL
The origin of the term is from a drunken post made in 2013 when bitcoin fell 39% during a span of 24 hours. Hodl is a misspelling of the word "hold" and has spawned numerous memes to keep us laughing since then. Hodlnaut plays on this meme by combining Hodl and Astronaut (to the moon anyone?) as their company name.
Background of Hodlnaut
Hodlnaut was founded in 2019 and is based in Singapore. Aside from sanction laws and other prohibitions, the site is generally available worldwide. It has raised about $100,000 in funding during one pre-seed funding round with Singaporean startup accelerator and venture capitalist firm Antler.
The founders include CEO Juntao Zhu and CTO Simon Lee. Together, these two previously founded the cryptocurrency trade execution platform Cypher Forge. The platform boasts $500m in held assets and 10,000+ users.
KYC
My experience with Hodlnaut began a little rough. Once you sign up, you can't explore anything, or check out the website at all without completing the KYC compliance information. The platform is insistent on it and this made me very uncomfortable. It felt like it was saying: "Give me all of your personal information, and give it now!"
Because of this, I left the site immediately. I really did want to check out the platform and see if it was worth the time and KYC demands, so I went back a second time. However, the site's demands that I provide a slew of personal information again made me uncomfortable and I left. After a few days, I decided that I would try once more. Not only did it require a photo, but a copy of a utility bill with my name on it was also required. I find this a bit excessive and intrusive but nonetheless acquiesced to the demand. My uncertainty for providing the KYC information was mainly due to the insistence that personal information is required before I could do anything (even explore) the platform.
At this point in time, no one has stolen my identity nor opened new lines of credit in my name, so I feel fairly certain that the process was legit (even though it screamed of scam).
Experience With Hodlnaut
The platform is laid out well and provides a good overall dashboard. Swapping assets is painless. Seeing pending interest payouts and what has already been paid out is straightforward. I appreciate that the main dashboard includes an account overview, an overview of the balances for all assets as well as the most recent ten transactions.
One complaint I have is the 2FA does not "remember" you for 7 days like the checkbox claims that it will. Every time I logged in I had to do 2FA, which for some people isn't a big deal, but I find annoying. I do not live on my mobile device, and I hate installing and using additional apps. Thankfully there's a Linux desktop version of Authy that works wonderfully.
Interest on a deposit of crypto is paid out once a week. My personal test of the interest payout was done on a Bitcoin deposit. The current interest rate is 7.20% APR / 7.46% APY. The interest rates have recently changed and now are provided on a tiered basis.
The "Statements" page of my account was very well designed and makes it easy to grab a record of your account. There is an affiliates portion of the site as well that offers a 10% commission for referring new customers to Hodlnaut, but I did not attempt to use this feature. I also did not try out the lending portion of the site as my portfolio is tied up in other crypto investments that I personally see as more profitable at the current time.
Withdrawal Fees
The Hodlnaut platform allows for free deposits (I wouldn't use it if it didn't) and while not having a minimum withdrawal amount it does charge a substantial withdrawal fee. At the time of writing, this withdrawal fee for BTC is 0.0004 which equates to a little over $18 USD. That's fairly hefty in my book and makes me wonder if this is where some of the money paid in interest comes from. Hard to say.
Token swaps from one asset to another on the platform are effortless and instantaneous. Converting from BTC to ETH took just a matter of seconds.
Overall
I can't say that I'm disappointed with Hodlnaut, perhaps just underwhelmed. It could simply be that I've been utilizing PancakeSwap to make 70+% interest on my investments, and so a 7.2% return seems a bit small. Still, it's better than you would do staking Cosmos, Tezos, or lending via Compound. The site works very fast, it does what it says it will do, and it does it well. In that regard, if you're looking for somewhere to earn some interest on your cryptocurrency assets, this is the place. As with any form of investment, do your research, and make sure it's right for you. If you think it's a good fit, then by all means, sign up and get started!
(as mentioned above in my review, I did not use the affiliate link feature of Hodlnaut. The final link is to support Publish0x.)
