Farming comes to Centralised Exchanges
As a relatively risk averse type of person, I've not really chased after any of the DeFi farming rewards that have hyped up the various blockchains over the last month. Sure, I've used and taken part in liquidity provision (and some swaps...) in the past couple of years.... but that was long before farming governance tokens became a crazy pursuit for the get-rich-quick crowd.
Let me just say that if you are racing around trying to get the best yields on a governance token of questionable worth and hope to get out before the rest of the internet bails... well, you are just likely putting your initial capital at risk, which is going to be a potentially greater loss than farming yield profits. Plus, if you can't really read the smart contracts, then you are trusting protocols that don't have more than a few days of reputation and exposure to the wild wild internet.
Still, I have used Compound and Uniswap quite heavily in the past, and so I was able to collect the COMP and UNI tokens that came from being a user of those platforms. However, I wasn't doing anything special to claim them... I was already sitting in liquidity pools, and just stayed there. So, nothing out of the ordinary and nothing new... plus, those are some of the few projects that I would trust in that particular space at the moment.
So, in the spirit of doing nothing more than I'm already doing.... it appears that two new opportunities to farm tokens have come up on two platforms that I already use quite frequently! These are the centralised exchanges: Binance and Crypto.com.
Binance has recently updated their Launchpool offering to give users a 30 farming period by staking BNB and BUSD (and sometimes another coin, so far SXP and BAND have appeared as alternative options). Over the 30 days, stakers will share in the farming drop in proportion to their staked coins.
Most of these coins I had in the Flexible staking product anyway (where previously, they were earning some small amounts of interest and with the old version of the Launchpool were earning some WING and BEL). I figured that I may as well just shift them to the flexible staking options on Launchpool anyway. The savings interest on the tokens weren't huge anyway, and who knows which one of the Launchpool tokens might get a lucky run. I count on none of them... but if you are lucky, you are lucky!
The critical part for me is the fact that the staked Launchpool tokens can be unstaked in any amount at any time. So, the similar rules as the Flexible Savings products. Plus, as far as I understand, they still count towards any other events and promotions which require you to have a certain amount of BNB to take part (such as the Community Votes for Listing).
So, no drastic changes to my existing behaviour and a chance to mine black sheep tokens that might or might not be worth anything!
Meanwhile, Crypto.com has also been busy forming a centralised version of farming, but with already known tokens that they have listed on their exchange. So, a bit less of a unknown shot in the dark... but with farming on tokens that are already familiar.
The biggest gripe that I have with the Crypto.com is the way that they have fragmented their products and platform to require multiple stakings of their platform token (CRO) to take advantage of each product. Worse still, those stakes tend to be locked for quite a long time (on the order of 6 months) instead of being flexible!
I really wish that it was all tied into a single platform with a single staking point. However, I get that they are trying to bolster the use case of their CRO token... but it does come across quite ham-fisted.
So, I was quite happy when their second farming product (not the DeFi one...) was launched and linked directly on their exchange. So, no new app, no new platform and most critically,no new locked staking pool.
This version of farming is called Supercharger, and it has slightly confusing rules when you first look at it. However, in the end it is quite a simple idea. There are two 30 day periods, Charging and Reward.
During the Charging period of a particular product, you lock up CRO in a flexible stake over 30 days. I did double check this, and it is definitely flexible, you can withdraw at any time. During this period, your proportion of the whole staking period will be calculated. Adding and Withdrawing stake can be done throughout the Charging period.
During the Reward period, you are drip fed the corresponding reward (the first product is 500,000 USD in UNI tokens) over the 30 day reward period. So, if your Charging corresponded to 10% of the total Charging amount contributed by all users, you would receive 10% of the rewards over the second 30 days.
So, I tend to have a bit of CRO sitting around to fund my VISA card or gift cards... and occasionally to take part in the 50% Syndicate discount events on the Crypto.com exchange. So, whilst the CRO is just sitting around... I may as well just park it in the Supercharger product. After all, it isn't really doing much else!
So, again, minimal effort and deviation from existing habits and usage. This time, a known protocol token is up for grabs. Can't complain!
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