In my short time as a cryptonerd, I've come to acknowledge two realities. First, my funds almost always enter via a centralized exchange. And second, whatever next coin I want will inevitably only be available on a different exchange than the available funds to buy them with.
My solution to the coins-I-want-aren’t-on-my-exchange problem has been to sign up with multiple exchanges and deposit more funds to buy the new coins. This was possible in the past because I was transitioning from 100% money in banks and looking to slowly moving assets into cryptocurrency, anyway. In a way, it helped me by giving me an excuse to put more funds into cryptocurrencies!
More exchanges, more problems
I'm getting to the point where I don't have more assets I want to move, though, and "just deposit more" is becoming an increasingly less desirable option. So, what can I do?
The first thing I did was to transfer BTC between exchanges. It's the currency of the future, right? And all the exchanges have it? Feels like a no-brainer.
...Right?
Well, this is where we hit cryptocurrency's biggest problem: fees. To send $15 of Bitcoin, I need to pay almost $2 fees. That's a 13% tax to send money to yourself!
This is where the miracle of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) comes into play. Want to guess how much it costs to send $15 using BCH? It's about 0.00000226, which is roughly $0.001.
The other beautiful thing about BCH is that it's everywhere you want to be. At the time of writing, it's the 11th largest coin by market cap. That means you can convert or trade any currency on any exchange to BCH and send it to any other exchange where it can then be converted or traded for another currency.
How about an example?
Here’s the specific task I needed to do yesterday. I had about $300 of The Graph (GRT) on Coinbase that I wished to convert to Cordana (ADA). I used Coinbase to convert the GRT to BCH, which cost me nothing. Then I sent it to my Uphold wallet, which again cost me nothing — a fraction of a cent. And finally, I converted the BCH to ADA in Uphold, which basically cost me nothing.
This entire cross-exchange coin swap was basically free, all because of Bitcoin Cash.
Compare this to doing the same operation on, say, Uniswap, where you could easily pay more than $15 in fees to exchange $15 in tokens. (Which I have regrettably done!)
I'm still pretty new to Bitcoin Cash, and I'm not sold on it as a long-term investment growth opportunity--but I can say this: it handles the job of low-fee fund transfers remarkably well. It makes moving funds between exchanges completely painless, which improves accessibility to many cryptocurrencies.
It's certainly looking like BCH will be my go-to for fund transfers, and I'll also be keeping an eye on its longer-term potential as a result!
I'm looking for feedback! What other day-to-day applications have you found for Bitcoin Cash? Is there another coin that's even better than BCH for exchange-to-exchange transfer? Let me know by leaving a comment below!
Lead image by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
This article was originally published on This Crypto Life on March 7, 2021.
Thank you so much. I wish I discovered this sooner but it's never too late. My fee was way higher for a smaller amount, newbie mistake. Have a nice day!