3 things I learned about crypto (Christmas edition)
1. NFTs are worth more to some people than I imagined
NFTs - non-fungible tokens - aka collectibles on the blockchain (think Gods Unchained, Cryptokitties, etc) - are worth more than I imagined.
In the weeks and days leading to Christmas, Binance released a series of NFTs for free to folks that completed a series of simple tasks. These included retweeting, liking, tagging friends, filling in a form, transferring some BNB to a Trust wallet - not exactly low-hanging fruit but, all the same, typical things one expects to do for crypto bounties. I managed to score two of the Binance NFTs - Ho Ho Hodl and Candy Coin. Within Trust Wallet, you’re able to open NFTs on OpenSea, which is a marketplace for NFT buyers and sellers. Convinced that these would never be of any use to me and wanting to strike while the iron was hot, I tried listing them on OpenSea. I had no idea what I was doing but the UX was reasonably intuitive and I managed to get them listed. Both items sold so quickly - Candy Coin for 0.198 ETH and Ho Ho Hodl for 0.1 ETH (I probably priced this one too cheaply judging by the speed at which it sold but I did look at recent sales prices for it and it was in line with them). Nearly 0.3 ETH for something which just cost me a bit of time. Why are people paying so much for these? Why are they desirable? I started tracking Decentraland recently - after watching Ready Player One and The OA (season 2) not that long ago my interest in virtual world sort of piqued. I am not a gamer at all but I see the appeal in owning assets in virtual worlds (I also just got The sovereign individual for Christmas and started reading it - I feel like a lot of it is going to be about the possibilities of VR!). With all that being said, I get NFTs - but I don’t get the price people are paying for Binance Christmas NFTs. Still, I’m not complaining - I’m not hodling them anymore - the people hodling them are the greater fools!
2. It’s better if you do these things whilst sober
I sold these NFTs whilst lolling about on the sofa (along with the rest of the family) in a state of comatose after Christmas Day lunch and wine. The next thing to do was to decide what to do with 0.298 ETH.
The first thing I decided was to move half of it into another wallet I use that’s associated with a MakerDAO CDP (Maker now calls CDPs ‘Vaults’) in case I need to add collateral to avoid liquidation or I want to increase leverage.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about cryptos that allow staking. This was part of the reason I first became interested in LOOM. Cosmos (ATOM) is another staking project I’ve been following recently. Another thing I like about Cosmos is that both BTC and ETH maximalists seem to have a soft-spot for it (generally-speaking) which makes it quite unique. I already knew that Binance offers 0% fees when you delegate ATOMs with them, so I decided to - send the rest of the ETH to Binance, trade the ETH for BNB (annoyingly there is no ETH - ATOM trading pair on Binance), then trade the BNB for ATOM, then send the ATOM back to the Trust wallet and use the native staking feature inside the wallet (selecting Binance to delegate to for the 0% fees). It was at the last step where I fell over. When I was staking I didn’t see the part where you select who to delegate to, so I just chose the first one on the list. When I realised this, I tried to unstake so that I could delegate to Binance but it’s stuck in the wallet as ‘pending’. I did a bit of reading about unstaking ATOMs this morning and I believe it’s because there’s a 30-day unbinding period and during this time the tokens don’t earn rewards and cannot be transferred. Anyways, I’ll try again on January 25!
PSA: Kids, this is why you should be very careful doing these things under the influence of alcohol! OR JUST DON’T DO IT AT ALL!!
3. Binance has a neat feature which allows you to offload all your tiny amounts of altcoins in one transaction
For a long time I’ve held tiny amounts of altcoins on Binance and haven’t been able to sell them because a minimum amount of tokens is required to sell them. The reason I ended up with these tiny amounts is because previously when selling them it was difficult to sell the entire amount without holding the BNB token (which allows you to sell MAX). However I discovered yesterday whilst clicking around in Binance that there’s a feature that allows you to swap all the small amounts of altcoins you have for BNB in one transaction. I didn’t care what price they sold for because I wasn’t able to sell them anyway! Thanks Binance. I feel so much better not holding tokens such as REQ or ELF anymore!
By the way, this post probably comes across as a long advertorial for Binance. It isn’t supposed to be a pro-Binance post at all! Just my two cents - they are getting very big very fast and their rapid growth is coming partly at the expense of decentralisation, which is sad.
