June 2021 – adamprescott.net

Viperswap Hits $10 Million TVL in 17 Days

Wait, but is that good? Let’s compare.

VenomDAO announced Viperswap’s launch on March 8. Four days later, on March 12, it had reached $1 million in total value locked (TVL). Two days later, its TVL doubled to $2.2 million, and one week after that, it had doubled again to $4.3 million.

Then, three days after that, on March 24–a mere seventeen days after its launch — Viperswap reached $10 million in TVL.

That’s quite an achievement, but how does it stack up against its predecessors? Let’s make some comparisons against today’s top 5 DEXes, as ranked by DeFi Pulse:

At the top of the list is SushiSwap, which started on September 4, 2020, and exploded to $1.15 billion in TVL on September 9, 2020. This was largely due to a notable migration of assets from Uniswap. The migration may warrant an asterisk on the milestone, but it’s pretty incredible, nonetheless. 5 days.
Uniswap launched on November 2, 2018, and it took them until May 11, 2019 to reach $10 million in TVL. 190 days.
It took Curve Finance from February 10, 2020 until April 23, 2020 to accomplish the feat. 73 days.
Balancer launched on February 28, 2020 and hit the mark on June 1, 2020. 94 days.
Rounding out the top 5 is Bancor, which began on August 17, 2017 and passed $10 million 112 days later on December 7, 2017.

Reaching $10 million in TVL in just 17 days is pretty remarkable, especially when you compare it against the others listed above. Viperswap’s rise came about quietly, too, without much advertising beyond a handful of tweets from the community. It’s not slowing down, either, having already gained another 30% since hitting the $10M milestone yesterday. It could be halfway to $100M by this time next week!

This article’s focus has been total value locked, but the growth of Viperswap’s native token value and market cap has been equally impressive. The token began at $0.005 and has grown to just shy of $1, pushing the total market cap near $150 million.

I’ve written about Viperswap a couple of times now, and I maintain that if you try it yourself, it will re-write your expectations for blockchain apps. Harmony is so fast and cheap, and you can try Viperswap with less than $10 and see real earnings accumulate in real-time. It’s incredible.

The future for Harmony is bright, and Viperswap has the opportunity to play a central role. Harmony had its own news this week, launching a Binance Smart Chain bridge in addition to its existing Ethereum bridge. With that news, they explained that you couldn’t do a direct passthrough of tokens, for example, to send USDT from Ethereum straight to BSC. Instead, there will be separate ethUSDT and bscUSDT tokens. If/when Viperswap adds liquidity to facilitate this swap, it will be an easy, negligible-fee, non-issue to do the extra swap to make it happen.

I can’t wait to see what comes next from the Harmony and VenomDAO teams!

This story was originally published on This Crypto Life on March 25, 2021.

It’s Ridiculously Easy to Stake Cardano (ADA) With Guarda Wallet

Click button, make money

A brief history of staking for the uninitiated

You’ve all heard about “mining” as it pertains to Bitcoin and Ethereum, right? Mining is necessary because these are proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains, and they require a lot of computing power to do all the verifications and validations to make it all work. The main complaints against PoW are that it’s slow because of the computing and expensive because of the computing fees.

The fees are a big problem, and that’s why Ethereum 2.0 is important — it represents the Ethereum network’s move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. It’s also one of the main reasons why there’s so much excitement for “next-generation” networks, and perhaps none have more hype than Cardano.

Proof-of-stake means that instead of having miners competing and racing to find the next block in the blockchain, validators are randomly assigned to do it. To be a validator, you must “stake” collateral. Rewards granted to miners for discovering a blockchain block are instead given to the selected validator for doing its job.

That brings us to the point of this story. Not everybody wants to be a validator, but you can delegate your tokens to a validator and earn a share of the rewards. There are many ways to do this, but perhaps the easiest is to do it through a wallet provider, like Guarda. I’ll show you just how easy it is to stake Cardano using Guarda’s wallet in this story.

This tutorial assumes you have a Guarda wallet and that you’ve transferred ADA into it. Signing up for Guarda is pretty easy; go to guarda.com and follow the prompts. I purchased some ADA from CoinEx (note: referral link) and transferred it to my Guarda wallet, but there are many ways to do it.

Let’s stake some ADA!

Just a heads-up: this is going to be a short tutorial because it’s so easy. Begin by logging into your Guarda wallet and finding your Cardano wallet. Your balance should be visible, along with a Staking link below it.

When you click the Staking link, it expands to show a staking region. This is where you’ll see & claim rewards and stake/unstake. Click the Stake button to open a new Staking tab in the wallet.

Be sure to read the fine print. The approximate yield is 5%. Okay, that’s pretty good. Your funds will not be frozen and will remain free to move. Wait, what? The funds are still in my wallet, and I can move them. That’s downright awesome. Staking will be applied from the next epoch. The reward will begin to accrue from the 3rd epoch after staking. This means that it’s gonna take a minute before you start to earn rewards. You’ll see later in this story that the wallet view will show “round” information, which I believe represents these epochs.

Because it wouldn’t make sense to do anything less, the deposit amount defaults to the maximum and is read-only. Go ahead and click Next.

You’re presented with a confirmation screen. Note that I have to pay a network fee, so for small amounts — like the $50 I’m working with — it may not make sense. That’s 5%; it will take a full year of staking to earn that back! But, we’re in it for the science, right? So, onward we go. Click the Confirm button.

That’s it — done! The Staking link below your balance in the wallet list will now show additional details. Recall that in the staking details noted above, rewards will begin to accrue in the 3rd epoch after staking, and the epochs are about 5 days each.

Conclusion

Guarda makes staking Cardano and a handful of other tokens really easy. You maintain control of your tokens while you stake, and you begin earning rewards for many of them instantly. Cardano takes a few rounds before you start earning, but the process is completely painless.

Cardano is just starting to take off. It’s expected to launch support for smart contracts soon with its Goguen release, and many, many projects are being developed. There’s so much excitement for Cardano, and it will most certainly see a lot of growth in the future — so it’s a great token to hold onto for the long run. And, if you’re going to hang onto it, you might as well stake it and earn the additional rewards.

As a final note, I’m not affiliated with Guarda in any way. I first used it to stake Harmony ONE tokens and later staked Cosmos ATOM tokens, too. I’ve had great experiences with Guarda and will certainly move other tokens there for staking in the future.

This story was originally published on This Crypto Life on March 25, 2021.

Harmony Launches Binance Smart Chain Bridge

A guided look at Harmony’s Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain bridges

Harmony protocol announced yesterday that they’d expanded their bridge to support Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in addition to Ethereum, which was already supported.

This is great news for two reasons. First and most obviously, it provides another on & off ramps to BSC, which has a vast ecosystem of dApps. Second, it provides me, a user in the United States, with a bridge from Ethereum to BSC.

You see, the Binance Bridge isn’t available to US users. There’s no great way for me to get funds onto BSC other than by going through Binance US.

I’ll explore both the existing Ethereum bridge and the new Binance Smart Chain bridge in this story.

The Ethereum bridge

A bonus third-and-more-personal reason to be excited is that it won’t cost me $20 to try it out #TheFeesAreTooDamnHigh. I haven’t played with Harmony’s Ethereum bridge because I don’t have any “real business,” and it’s simply too expensive to use just for tryin’ it out.

To that end, I won’t complete a transaction, but let’s at least take a look at the experience.

To use the Ethereum bridge, browse to https://bridge.harmony.one and select ETH > ONE. Connect your Ethereum wallet via MetaMask, and you’re ready to go.

Let’s say I want to move 500 REEF tokens from my Ethereum wallet onto the Harmony chain. REEF isn’t one of the pre-configured tokens, so we select ERC20 and enter a custom address. When the Change token button is pressed, the token is recognized, and the prompts & available quantity will be changed & populated accordingly.

Specify the amount to transfer and ONE wallet address, then click Continue. Since I’m using the same wallet on Harmony, I can conveniently use the Use my address link button to populate my address.

Next, you’ll be prompted to approve the amount. I won’t lie — I don’t quite understand this step. It tells me that the minimum is my transaction amount, but I can specify a larger amount to save on approval later. Perhaps to cover additional gas fees? (If you know, please help me understand by leaving a comment!)

Click Continue again, and we get to my favorite part — the final confirmation, where we learn that it will cost $23 to transfer $20 of REEF!

That obviously doesn’t make sense, so we’ll cancel the transaction and leave our 500 REEF for another day.

The Binance Smart Chain bridge

Those fees, right? Binance Smart Chain is much better than Ethereum in this regard, so let’s attempt the same operation using Harmony’s BSC bridge. The steps are the same, except this time, we’ll click the Binance toggle and connect a BSC wallet with MetaMask.

Once again, I’ll enter the REEF contract’s custom address, and the page will update with the prompts and correct balance.

Click Continue through to the confirmation, and this time we see that the transaction fee is just $3.23 — much better!

While it’s still not ideal to pay $3 to move $20 of assets, it’s infinitely times better than paying $23 to move $20 of assets! So, this time we’ll go ahead and proceed. You know, for science.

When you click Confirm, the view expands to show a step-by-step view of the actions that must be executed. The experience is actually quite nice, and the full operation takes about 2 minutes to complete.

Once it’s done, you can easily see the new tokens in your ONE wallet by connecting the wallet to the bridge UI.

If I wanted to move the tokens back to BSC from Harmony, I repeat the steps of specifying the custom token address and clicking through to the confirmation — but we see the return trip will cost less than $1.

Conclusion

Harmony continues to impress me with its speed and low fees every time I touch it. The bridge experience is a huge step toward making cross-chain everything we might want it to be — a place where you can move tokens quickly and cheaply between blockchains. It feels less like the experience we’ve come to expect from Ethereum and more like the real-time native web app we’re accustomed to.

If you haven’t tried Harmony, give it a shot. It only costs you a couple of dollars. Once you experience how fast it is, you won’t want to go back.

Ethereum, BSC, and others aren’t going anywhere, and we’ll surely see different apps on different chains that emerge as clear leaders for their various purposes. Bridges like what Harmony has created are essential for the cross-chain ecosystem to thrive, and they show us that it doesn’t need to be hard, slow, or expensive.

Harmony is making me redefine my expectations for blockchains. The Ethereum and BSC bridges are an important step, and they work great. I can’t wait to see what comes next from Harmony!

This story was originally published on This Crypto Life on March 24, 2021.

How to Earn 17,160% APR in 2 Minutes and 55 Seconds

A Viperswap ONE-1ETH liquidity pool tutorial

The VenomDAO team just announced that they’d added APRs to their Viperswap liquidity pool UI, and they’re quite generous. Of course, it’s all very new and dropping quickly*, but the fact remains — the rates are insane right now.

*In just a few hours since announcing and sharing the screenshot, it’s already reduced to less than 14,000%. 14,000% still feels pretty okay, though, right?

The best part is that it literally takes less than 3 minutes (I used a stopwatch) to add funds to the liquidity pool, and there’s basically no minimum and near-$0 transaction fees. In this article, I’ll show you how to add liquidity with a tiny amount — just $30!

I’ve purchased ONE from Binance US, and there’s where the journey begins. We only need to do four steps:

Transfer ONE tokens to a MetaMask wallet on Harmony Mainnet
Swap half of the ONE tokens to 1ETH
Add liquidity
Stake the resulting LP tokens

Ready? Let’s go!

1. Transfer to MetaMask wallet

The first thing you need to do is add Harmony Mainnet to your MetaMask wallet. It’s easy to do by adding a Custom RPC network to MetaMask and plugging in the correct values. Follow Harmony’s documentation for this here.

The easiest way to get your ONE address is to view your MetaMask account using Harmony Explorer, which can be accessed conveniently from the MetaMask UI.

Clicking the View in Explorer link will whisk you away to Harmony Explorer, where you can click-to-copy your ONE wallet address.

Now we take that value and enter it into the exchange’s withdrawal screen, jump through the necessary confirmation hoops, and seconds later, our funds are visible in MetaMask.

2. Swap for some 1ETH

To add liquidity to Venomswap’s pool, we need to provide equal amounts of two tokens. I want to contribute to the 1ETH pool, so I’ll convert half of my ONE tokens to 1ETH. Browse to https://viper.exchange and connect your wallet (make sure you have the Harmony Mainnet network selected).

$30 bought me 265 ONE tokens, so I’ll convert half of them to 1ETH on the Viperswap Swap page.

3. Add liquidity

After just a few seconds, the swap should complete, and you’re ready to switch to the Pool tab to add liquidity. Select the pair you’d like to provide and specify the amount. I have less 1ETH available, so I click the MAX button next to 1ETH to contribute the maximum amount. (I had trace amounts of additional 1ETH in my wallet, so I’m adding a little more than was shown previously in the swap screenshot above.)

4. Stake the LP token

Our final step is to stake the liquidity tokens we received for contributing to the ONE-1ETH pool. We do this by selecting the Staking tab and clicking the Deposit button.

Conclusion

As soon as the staking transaction is complete, you can watch your rewards begin to accumulate in real-time. For example, my $30 has earned 1.5 VIPER (about $0.30) since I’ve been writing this article.

It’s worth noting that rewards are boosted by the VenomDAO team for these first few weeks of launch, and 95% of rewards will be locked until the end of 2021, at which point they’ll gradually unlock over the course of 2022.

Still, Viperswap has been incredible, and I’m happy to sit on my VIPER tokens for these next 20 months. Since my last article, VenomDAO has hinted that a similar project will launch on Binance Smart Chain, and I’ve also seen VIPER appear as an untracked project on CoinMarketCap.

Harmony is so fast, and the transaction fees are so low. Viperswap really does a terrific job of showcasing both in addition to providing a tremendous earning opportunity during their first weeks of launch. I’m very excited to see what the future holds for both parties!

This story was originally published on This Crypto Life on March 20, 2021.

ETH2 Staking Results (1 month)

Month-by-month tracking of ETH2 staking via Ankr & providing ETH2 liquidity with SnowSwap

I staked 1 ETH with Ankr Staker on February 17, 2021, and then added the resulting aETH token to an ETH2 liquidity pool at SnowSwap. Each month, I’ll publish a short summary of rewards earned and value over time.How to Stake ETH2 and Earn Double Rewards
A tour of Ankr Staker & liquidity provider SnowSwapmedium.com

Results

Ankr Staker shows rewards earned by displaying the current value of aETH in ETH. Similarly, SnowSwap’s liquidity pool displays the number of SNOW that have been earned. Each month, I’ll record the current prices of ETH and SNOW in USD, aETH value in ETH, and the total value of assets.

|------------+-----------+-------+------------+------+-----------|
| DATE       | ETH (USD) | aETH  | SNOW (USD) | SNOW | Total     |
|------------+-----------+-------+------------+------+-----------|
| 02-17-2021 | $1,851.14 | 1.00E |         $0 |    0 | $1,851.14 |
| 03-17-2021 | $1,763.94 | 1.03E |     $47.13 | 0.50 | $1,840.42 |
|------------+-----------+-------+------------+------+-----------|

Rewards:
0.03 ETH       =  $ 58.21
0.50 SNOW      =  $ 23.57
-------------------------
               =  $ 81.78

Txn fees (est) = ($200.00)
Rewards        =  $ 81.78
--------------------------
Total ROI      = ($118.22)

Summary

After 1 month, my net loss with estimated transaction fees is ($118.22), but most of the loss is due to the decrease in the value of ETH. In that regard, the SNOW I’ve earned offset some of the losses, but I’m still at a net loss due to transaction fees.

The combined ETH and SNOW staking rewards represent a 4.6% return in one month, which is more than I could’ve earned with other staking options, but SNOW is at a low point right now — we’ll see if it can turn it around next month!

This story was originally published on Data Driven Investor on March 17, 2021.

Wait, but is that good? Let’s compare.

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Click button, make money

A brief history of staking for the uninitiated

Let’s stake some ADA!

Conclusion

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A guided look at Harmony’s Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain bridges

The Ethereum bridge

The Binance Smart Chain bridge

Conclusion

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A Viperswap ONE-1ETH liquidity pool tutorial

1. Transfer to MetaMask wallet

2. Swap for some 1ETH

3. Add liquidity

4. Stake the LP token

Conclusion

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Month-by-month tracking of ETH2 staking via Ankr & providing ETH2 liquidity with SnowSwap

Results

Summary

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