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Trying out Avalanche for the first time.....

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@revisesociology
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Following my disillusionment with the Polygon Network I've shifted some of my funds from there to Avalanche.

Avalanche is a Layer 1 blockchain which offers all the usual promises of security, scalability and speed, and in all three respects it's at least as good as what I see as its main competitor Solana, with the added advantage that Avalanche works with MetaMask (Solana has its own wallets), but with higher fees, although they are still cheap, coming in at well under $0.10 per transaction.

According to DEFI Lama there is currently $8.5 billion dollars locked in Avalanche platforms, some of which you will recognise such as Aave and Autofarm - it's relatively easy for existing DEFI projects to add an Avalanche option, another strength of this chain as I see it....

All in all it was very easy to get set up with Avalanche, it simply involved:

  1. Adding the network to MetaMask
  2. Buying some AVAX on Binance and to fund transaction fees.
  3. Swapping some funds over from Polygon using AnySwap
  4. Doing a bit of research on the various platforms running on Avalanche
  5. Making my first deposit....

And that was that.

Setting up Avalanche on MetaMask

It is very easy to get set up with Avalanche as it operates via MetaMask.

In fact adding the chain details to MetaMask was done automatically with just a few clicks for me when I was exploring one of the platforms that runs on MetaMask - I think it was Pangolin (one of the more well-known and better established, I would have done the setting up manually if it wasn't something I was already familiar with).

Swapping funds from Polygon to Avalanche using Anyswap....

I'd never used Anyswap before - it's a cross chain bridge that allows you to makes swaps of several assets between several chains - ETH/ BSC/ Polygon/ AVAX are all covered among many more.

You simply have to have funds in the account of the wallet on the chain you are swapping from and then select your token amount and hit send - they charge a 0.1% fee which I think is entirely reasonable and it took less than 10 minutes for my Polygon USDC to show up as eUSDC on Avalanche.

Nice!

Buying some AVAX on Binance

I actually did this after swapping my funds over from Polygon, at a bit of a loss of how to do anything with them once I'd got them there. Given that I've got a Binance account and that it was easy to withdraw AVAX (once bought) from Binance to the AVAX network, that's what I did, and it arrive within a few minutes.

Exploring DEFI DAPPS on Avalanche

I had a dig around the top five Dapps on Avalanche and TBH the offerings were a little disappointing - Trader Joe didn't offer the single stable coin pools I was looking for, and for those that did either the returns weren't particularly attractive (Aave), or I didn't like the look of the funny rep-token I had to swap my eUSDC for (MooUSDC on Beefy finance) or I just didn't trust Snowball, one of the faster growing dapps - I read the docs and REALLY didn't like the sound of 'emergency withdrawals' - possibly massive fees for withdrawing early?

Opting for BENQI

Anyway, I eventually opted for depositing some eUSDC with Benqi which seemed to be no nonsense approach offering an 11% return for simply staking.

On Benqi you get a limited choice of single coin options where you just stake and earn a return in both the coin (eUSDC in my case) and some Qi and Avax, which you just claim every now and then.

I also have the option to collateralise my eUSDC, but I haven't gone down that route yet.

Final Thoughts - I Rather Like Avalanche

Despite the lack of credible projects thus far built on the Avalanche Chain I'm impressed with the functionality of it based on my limited experience - fast transaction times, low fees, easy to bridge to.

And something else that attracts me is the capped number of AVAX tokens, which I find appealing.

I have a little USDC left over from what I bridged from Polygon, I MIGHT just pick up some AVAX with that!?!

Avalanche: Find out More

You can explore the Avalanche Ecosystem here if you're interested.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta