Hi Sam, thanks for your notes.
My main concern/feedback to Alpaca UX is mainly point 1 (hence the attached screenshot). When putting yourself in the shoes of non-crypto native investor/user who wants to gain additional returns on their capital through passive strategies, there is no reliable way to figure out the proper investment pool/vault/strategy within 5-10 minutes at Alpaca.
I understand your reference to stock market, but crypto is different. People may go to Robinhood app and invest in Coca-Cola stock because they drink cola every day and trust the brand/history. Crypto investors on the other hand, likely didn't touch 95% of the protocols/coins that are featured as investment pools. During the first app visit, have very little idea about what's behind any pool, and if they're given just APY % and leverage numbers, they can be mislead into investing into something they may not want / fully understand the risks of.
Your automated vaults are great, but even there you have a lot of choice (of currently 7 vaults), which one is for me? Do I simply look at the APY % as logic behind neutral strategies are kind of the same?
Speaking of giving an accurate overview of risks/performance: on Automated Vault details page, you give a detailed breakdown of the backtest stats (Sharpe ratio, MDD, etc.), but don't give the same overview of the actual performance. This can be misleading. Why the user Ctrl+F "drawdown" and finds backtested stats on the page, they may think this is real-time performance data.
Just saying there are many things to improve if we want to get to the broader user adoption. And thanks for the note about the deposit/withdrawal fee, it is an important aspect indeed.
So far, you did a good job on those vaults. If they do what they say they do, it's quite impressive (haven't tested them yet). Do they also support external integrations via API? We may want to integrate them into One Click's UI and attract additional liquidity for you. If you're open to developers building on top of Alpaca, drop me an email at max @oneclick.fi
