I Swapped My First Crypto

It's a hot Sunday afternoon and I just got back from church. It has been an eventful day so far and I hope you guys are making the most out of it. So yesterday I swapped my first crypto and it was an experience I will not forget for a long time. I would like to share this story with you so that you can learn one or two things from it.

I am venturing into decentralized finance and currently taking a class on it. So in the class we are about to start the practical where we are going to learn how to swap and trade coins and tokens on Decentralized Exchanges. We were told to get BNB (smart chain) for the DeFi as we were going to be working with the Binance Blockchain. The tutor said that we should get $5 worth of BNB for the practical but I budgeted around $7 for it.

He said that we can buy the coins from him but I didn't want to because his rates were too high and I didn't have enough fiat money with me. My portfolio mainly contains Bitcoin Cash. I decided that I will get the coins myself from a vendor.

I contacted a friend to link me up with a crypto vendor that he trust and he sent me a contact. I didn't message the person straight away as I was contemplating whether to buy the coin or not. "Maybe I should just wait until the market is stable", I said to myself. But I knew deep down that it was now or never who knows if the market will deep any further. I was not willing to take that risk.

I chatted the person up and said that I wanted to swap some coins. He said okay and told me his transaction fee which was $0.7. I thought that was on the high side and said that I will get back to him. I them thought to myself that can't I do this without the services of a middleman. I chatted one of my friends and asked him if I could swap coins on Binance and he said yet, to which I transferred some BCH to my Binance wallet.

I had to wait for the transaction to be confirmed by multiple miners before I could swap the coins to BNB. Not the Smart chain one but the other one. The charged around $0.2 for this and when the swapping was completed I transferred it to my personal wallet. Before this I didn't know which wallet address I should use to withdraw. I was confused about the Blockchain of the BNB and I did not want to send it to the wrong wallet address if not I will lose it forever.

I wanted to send it to my smart chain address but thank God I asked a friend and he told me that if I did that I will be sending it to the wrong address. After sending it I went to my wallet to swap the BNB to Smart chain because that is what I need. I couldn't believe my eyes when they charged me $1.42 for the swap. I was really angry. Isn't that too much? I told a friend and he said that it is even small compared to other transactions. I was like wow!

So that's the story of my first cryptocurrency swap and I would say that it was a sweet-and-sour experience. Kindly tell me how yours was in the comment section.

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