Last week, I got one of the biggest surprises of my Crypto life and it is all thanks to an Airdrop I participated in in 2018. I had been nagging to a couple of friends how I had lost the backup phrases to some of my old wallets from 2017, recounting the coins I had in them and how much they are worth in today's market. If you don’t know how that feels, wait till you send BTC to an ETH wallet, then you understand that feeling of despair and hopelessness.
I had been complaining for a while, oblivious of the fact that I had some nice shiny Lend token sitting in my Eido wallet. Truth be told, I cant recall exactly how I got this Lend token, but I just know I had them and they were worth around $7 as at the time they hit my wallet. (For clarity sake, I got 87 Lend tokens) So I didn’t know what to do with them then, because they were almost worthless, so I just forgot about them.
Now, Imagine my surprise when I re-downloaded Eido out of curiosity to see what I might still have there, typed in my Phrases and saw $322 staring at me. #Mindblown. I started fiddling with my phone in haste, trying to scroll to the bottom of the wallet to see which token exactly had that value attached to it and behold, it was the once worth-less Lend.
Well, I came to understand that Lend as a project had been migrated to another project Aave and to sell or trade my Lend, I would have to Migrate it. The developers were giving 1 Aave for every 100 Lend tokens and I had 87, so I was expecting something like 0.87 Aave, which was 13 Lends short of 1 whole Aave (1 Aave = $365 as at last week, before the market dipped).
I started researching how I was going to migrate and eventually sell my Lend. I talked to my brother and he advised I look for Aave's developing team on twitter or Telegram and chat them up and see what they say. It sounded so straightforward, but believe me, it wasn’t because I rigmaroled a bit, trying to get Aave's developing team. Finally I stumbled upon their site and finally figured the way to Migrate it and I said fuck it, no need talking to any developing team, I can just do this myself - this wasn’t straight forward at all either.
Now to the crux of the matter and the main point of my article; first of all, to initiate migration, I connected my eido to the Migration page, and they required I had at least 0.05242 ETH for gas fee. Blimey! That’s almost $100 and I am trying to migrate token worth around $323? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
I signalled back to my brother, told him what was happening and he concurred with me that the gas fee was absolute madness. He suggested I tried later in the night or wait till weekend since ETH transaction fees are usually low in the nights and during the weekends.
Ladies and gents, that was how I sat on my computer for 3 days, monitoring gas fee, waiting for when it would reduce reasonably so I could engage, but it never did. The lowest it went was 0.035 ETH which was still high when you consider the worth of the transaction in question.
I understand that gas fees could be manually tweaked to accommodate whatever you are willing to spend in gas fees but the catch is, it takes longer than normal for such tweaked transactions to go through and having assumed it was going to be a day tops, I was willing to wait rather than pay such ridiculous amounts in gas.
My plan was to wait till the gas fee drops to 0.035 ETH again, because I didnt engage migration the last time it went that low, then I tweak to 0.027 and hopefully the migration goes through. Here I was seriously banking on hope, far too much for my liking.
I was running out of patience fast because I had been trying to migrate my tokens for 3 days and counting and there seemed no cheap solution in sight. So I asked a vendor friend of mine to send 0.027 ETH to my Eido so I could tweak and initiate Migration from the Aave migration page. He told me to wait so he could check price and transfer fees. Soon enough he got back to me and to send 0.027 ETH to my wallet, he had to pay a transaction fee of 0.008 ETH, so in other words, what would be hitting my wallet would be 0.019 ETH. Sigh
So to get 0.027 ETH in my wallet, I had to pay for 0.035 ETH and 0.008 would be deducted as charges. Well, since I had already set things in motion, I went ahead with this quotation.
Finally I got 0.027 Eth in my eido wallet, which had cost me around $67, transaction fees included. At this point, the migration fee on Aave website has risen back to 0.042 Eth but since my plans were to tweak the fees, I didnt care.
I finally intitated migration with a tweaked gas fee but the migration just wouldnt go through, I wasnt even getting any actionable response from the page.
I grew so firsutrated that I felt like smashing something, because I had been doing this thing for almost 5 days and I sincerely couldnt give a situation report if someone had asked for it. I was just stuck on one particular page and the Aave site kept refreshing gas fees for me up and down.
At this point I had enough, I saw a message Icon by the left hand side of the page I was at, and it finally dawned on me that I clicking that Icon was the first thing I should have done before I even bought Ethereum for gas. I had been stubborn and desperate and I felt like a blind man going on a walk on his own in the streets of New York. Hahahahaha. I have never been to the US by the way.
I wrote to the responder on the message Icon and few minutes later, Pablo (Heavens bless him) responded and gave me all the information I needed. As a matter of fact, he directed me away from their site, Aave, if I wanted to make a quicker migration, free of charges. Really?
It turned out, I could have just sent my Lend to Binance and with one click, converted to Aave in 10 seconds, without any migration fees. Oh dear! Plus, Pablo said while Migrating tokens, that I shouldnt tweak the gas fee at all, which is why it never did go through.
So in trying to migrate through Aave Migration portal, I paid a price of around $30, that is for sending 0.027 Eth (cost 0.008 Eth) to my Eido and transferring out my 87 lend to Binance (cost 0.0048 Eth) and also sending back the remaining Ethereum I ended up not using to my Binance (cost 0.00256). Which brings my total expenses in gas fees to 0.15 Eth worth approximately $30. For something I eventually did for free on Binance, these expenses were a bitter pill to swallow.
This wasnt the crypto we were promised, crypt was supposed to make things easier. In fact, if in the early days of crypto adoption Ethereum fees were this high, Nocoiners and crypto critics would have been presented with a rope to hang Crypto by Ethereum and if the fees of gas was this high back in the day, then Ethereum as a project might not have seen $1,700 in price. Do you still wonder why every new project is switching over to the Binance network and why BNB as a project is on the rise? What the hell has happened to Ethereum? Why does it cost so much for coins under their network to interact with every other coin?
By the way, I converted my Lend to Aave on Binance and it was as easy as ctrl + C to ctrl+ V. It was that quick, that fast and effortless. I got 0.87 trade-able, withdraw-able Aave worth $322 in my Binance wallet