Today's experiment made me hate ETH as a layer 1 once more. Why, you may ask? Because Ethereum as a Layer 1, in terms of fees, totally sucks. All that I had to do today was to send 1 ETH and some USDC from the Kucoin exchange to the Ethereum blockchain, provide some liquidity to ACROSS Bridge and then stake the LP to get some ACX rewards. Quite easy, you may think? 10 minutes, right? 

In a perfect world, maybe, but Ethereum at the moment is a bit congested, and the fees are a little higher than usual. I wonder, who is congesting the ETH blockchain, as most of the upgrades lately were meant to reduce the fees and increase the speed. Even the next upgrade, Shappella, is trying to do the same thing. Well, let's see how that went down:

Kucoin exchange - I send 1 ETH to its native blockchain for $11. Then I send some 700 USDC for a 25 USDC fee. Retrospectively, I could exchange it for ETH and send all of it at once, then exchange it back into USDC, for an estimate of $7 (USDC approval)+$13 (the exchange) = $20, saving $5. But then, looking back, everyone is a prophet. I claimed my rewards in ACX, for two months of staking 3000 USDC, and I paid $4 in fees, receiving $304. I proceeded to stake the 1 ETH, with the following fees: $7 for approval of the token, $13 for providing ETH liquidity, and an additional $6 for staking the LP for ACX rewards. On Uniswap, I exchanged ACX for USDC, with $6 approval and $3 fee. Then I provided USDC liquidity, for a $9 approval fee, $8 for transaction and another $7 for staking the LP. Mission accomplished!

Adding all the numbers, my little adventure cost me $99 in total, which is the equivalent of the 20 days of ACX rewards for me at the current level. It is quite shameful for the ETH blockchain, and it is not right that you start to make a profit only from day 21 if you include the fees paid to provide liquidity. $99 in fees to stake a bit over $3000, is this even fair? Other than that, I claimed $304, so overall I had a $200+ profit for 2 months. The good part is that using Across is a decent choice, it being the fastest and cheapest bridge that I ever used, even if at the moment they only got Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon and zkSynk Era. I am quite active on Discord, assisting the UMA and ACROSS teams, check them in there if you want to learn a bit more, and if you like to spot hidden gems long before they become well known. (This is one of my well-guarded secrets). 

The good news, is that ACX rewards for providing liquidity increase with time, with a maximum reward after 90 days, I believe, correct me if I am wrong. So, even if the ETH pool rewards is only 4.64% for now, combined with the ACROSS native token, it will go up to 24.63% after 3 months. Same for USDC, the pool reward is only 1.70%, but combined with the ACX rewards, it will go up to 31% after 3 months of staking, so, being a HODLer is paying off, in the end. You can also go a bit further, staking the ACX tokens you get as a reward, for a 'mere' 8.16%. If you think they will do well long term. Or at least until the highs of the next bull market. 

As opposed to this, I can talk about FORE Protocol, an app where you can create, predict, and validate any market on any real-world event. You can make the market, and find out what other people think about it, you can predict, or validate markets, using a special NFT. All three options are valuable ways to bring a profit to the house. 

The users that create prediction markets are called Creators, and they receive 0.5% of the total market size. The participants who take a position in any market on the protocol are called players, and they get the odds for the specific prediction market engaged. And finally, the one that I am willing to try soon, is the users responsible for validating a market's outcome, called analysts. They are rewarded a share of 2% of the market size for accurate validation, proportional to the “power” of their Analyst NFT (which increases with consecutive accurate validations). For the last one, you need to mint or buy a FORE's NFT, costing 1000 FORE to power it up. 

The funny part, of why I use this as a counter-example, is that the average transaction fee on Arbitrum is currently standing at $0.368 per transaction. This means that for a similar number of transactions with my first ETH blockchain example (creating a prediction market, participating in 2 markets, and checking to mint a Fore NFT, the total cost was $3.78, which is more or less almost 30 times lower than the Mainnet. And yes, watching my record, you may guess why I want to validate on Fore Protocol, instead of just participating, as my future reading skills are not current. If you want some free $FORE to start your adventure, check their Zealy campaign, and you may just get it, by being in the top leaderboard. 

It is late now, so I may stop my ranting, and get something to eat. Have a perfect day and see you soon!

G.

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Upland - real-life virtual land) and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.