The Animal Farm - My First Attempt at Yield Farming

So Yield Farming is something I've really wanted to do since almost first getting into crypto back in November of last year.  I've waiting this long because it is somewhat intimidating and I wanted to get more familiar with crypto basics first.  I've done some mining, earned some crypto, and opened a few exchange accounts to purchase crypto and transfer it to various platforms.  I've even started a little lending of crypto to build my confidence.

I'm using crypto as a way to build passive income and that is why yield farming is so attractive.  Essentially you are staking your crypto and in exchange you get interest or more crypto.

Yesterday was the day I was ready to get started so I decided I was going to try a relatively new Yield Farm - The Animal Farm.  This is a new platform just launched on February 3rd so I figured I could get in early and not lag everyone else.  It operates on the Binance Smart Chain protocol offering two unique deflationary tokens - PIGS (which gives you share and ownership of the farm) and DOGS (which are meant to accumulate liquidity).  Forex SharkSifu, who is the developer of DRIP protocol, launched the platform to capture the financial power of its users and reward them through yield farms and other lending protocols.

Of course, like anything else crypto, there are so many steps just to get started but I was excited and determined to start this new venture...

First, since this was built on the back of Binance, I needed to set up my Metamask to work on the Binance Smart Chain Network.  Thank you YouTube.  Then I needed to set up to receive the coins I wanted so I added BUSD to get started along with the PIG and DOG tokens used on The Animal Farm.  I also needed to set up BNB to pay for transaction fees.  None of this was too bad but I was already five steps in, no turning back now.

Next, I had to actually get some BNB and BUSD into Metamask so I decided to buy BUSD on crypto.com.  Well, there is no way to buy BUSD with your Fiat so I had to first buy USDT and then use that to buy BUSD.  Crypto loves adding all these extra little steps.  Next, I purchased some BNB to pay for eventual transaction fees.  Now all I had to do was transfer the coins from crypto.com to Metamask so I set up an external wallet and bam!  No so fast, "Whitelisted Address Too Recent" - you have to wait 24 hours before you can transfer money to the new address...  Gotta love dealing with crypto and I guess I'll just have to wait to start farming.

Fast forward to today.  On my second attempt I tried to move BUSD to Metamask and ran into the same problem as yesterday.  The wallet was whitelisted.  Guess I have to set up the external wallet for each coin - ugh.  Fortunately I was able to move the BNB over to Metamask since I set up that wallet (even though it has the exact same address) so at least we could get started.  Working with BNB, I was going to focus on the DOGS/WBNB farm so clicking on the farm details I then clicked on Get DOGS/WBNB which opened up PancakeSwap for me.  Not so fast, the SSL handshake failed on the first attempt but it did go through the second time.  

I hit max BNB sure I was about to make things happen yet it was not allowing to get DOGS because you don't want liquidity at this point, you just have to buy the dogs.  So I went to the PancakeSwap exchange and bought some DOGS with a bit less than half my BNB to pair the two coins together.  After enabling the farm contract I was ready to put my tokens to work.  Confidently, I hit the Stake LP button and then I got the "no tokens to stake" message.  The next step, I guess, was to get DOGS/WBNB LP tokens so back to PancakeSwap - at least I had done this step before.  Attempt after attempt I got the old SSL handshake failed once again.  

I couldn't find a good explanation of this step on YouTube for the Animal Farm but created an LP token on Pancake Swap anyways.  It still didn't seem to work but I fiddled with it for a bit and eventually was able to stake the tokens.  I have to say, going through this many non-intuitive steps is a huge problem if crypto ever wants mass adoption.  I realize that Yield Farming is a bit deeper than just buying and selling crypto, but this wasn't the first time I found a process in crypto way too complicated.  Excited, I got on a call to explain that I was Yield Farming to my non-crypto brother and he thought I was speaking another language and was totally put off by the amount of steps to make this happen.  He isn't wrong...

All that said, I'm excited to bee off and running with The Animal Farm and tomorrow will bring in my BUSD and start another farming project.  I can harvest some PIGS now every four hours (I'll probably do it less than that if there are fees, that was another common theme throughout this process - little fees every step).  I'm sure to those of you who have done Yield Farming before this all sounds so simple.  But never having used Metamask, PancakeSwap and The Animal Farm before all presented some unique challenges.  Because The Animal Farm is less than a week old, the amount of useful information out there is limited.

If you are interested in giving this platform a try please click on the referral links above.  If you are new to Yield Farming and want to give it a go I'm happy to help, just give me a few days to set up my second farm, harvest some PIGS and play with the platform a bit more.  Just leave a message below and I'm happy to help.  I'm sure there are many way more experienced than me out there, but sometimes it helps to have someone who understands exactly what you are going through to walk you step-by-step rather than skip a step here or there because it is all so familiar.

Yield Farms are high risk / high reward and have a high probability of losing your money, which is something I am prepared to do with what I've put in.  Please make sure you do your due diligence and only put in what you can lose.  I will share my results in a later article and thanks for sharing in the journey.