Ever since I did my first transaction on the Harmony blockchain, I've been in love. It's incredibly fast, and the fees are negligible--even cheaper than Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
So, when the Harmony team tweeted about a new project, Viperswap, I was excited to try it out. Much like with Harmony itself, I loved it right from the beginning.
As I talk about it with friends, I'm often asked how to get started. I figured I'd throw together a quick how-to for all of you out there, and that's the purpose of this post.
Let's start with some quick facts about Viperswap:
Viperswap is a Uniswap clone on the Harmony blockchain
It launched on March 8, 2021
In 20 days, it has achieved a $250 million market cap, $20 million TVL, and its native token, VIPER, has reached $1.50
The launch included 4 weeks of decreasing bonus rewards for providing liquidity, with the final week beginning tomorrow, i.e., last week to earn bonus VIPER
Configure MetaMask for Harmony
The first thing you'll need to do is configure MetaMask to work with Harmony mainnet. This is done easily enough by following Harmony's instructions here.
Move funds into your wallet
Option 1: Send from an exchange
This is what I did initially. All of my ONE was held at Binance US, and they support withdrawal to a ONE wallet address. Without much thinking, it all just worked out, easy-peasy.
Option 2: Use the Harmony bridge
If you don't have ONE, your exchange can't withdraw to a ONE address, or you're starting with a different currency, have no fear. Harmony has a bridge that will allow you to transfer assets from either Ethereum or BSC. If going this route, I highly recommend BSC if you can since the fees will be significantly lower.
Regardless of what asset you're starting with, I suggest converting to BUSD for this method. Do this however you please through your favorite CEX or DEX, and head to the Harmony bridge. Again, use MetaMask with your Ethereum or BSC wallet to transfer the BUSD. You'll have to pay fees to the chain to move the assets, but then you'll be into the virtually fee-free world of Harmony.
Do some Viperswappin'
Now that you have some assets on Harmony--presumably ONE or BUSD--you can head over to Viperswap. Use the Swap utility to convert your ONE or BUSD to the token you wish.
To take advantage of this final week of bonus rewards, I suggest converting half of your tokens to ONE and half to VIPER. Be sure to save a small amount of ONE to pay transaction fees; the fees are small (typically less than $0.01), but they still exist. Then, add equal amounts of ONE & VIPER to the ONE-VIPER liquidity pool in the Pool utility. The final step is to stake the resulting Venom LP token using the Staking utility. You'll see VIPER rewards begin to accumulate in real-time once this is done.
Conclusion
It's still early days for Harmony and even earlier for Viperswap/VenomDAO. I've watched Viperswap grow for these past 3 weeks, and it's been very impressive. The VIPER token has grown from $0.005 to more than $1.70 at present, and the market cap & TVL have been doubling every several days. The VenomDAO team is already eyeing a sister project, Cobraswap, on BSC, and they're adding new liquidity pools rapidly.
Paired with Harmony's Ethereum and BSC bridges, Viperswap has immediate, valuable utility as a way to facilitate moves from Ethereum blockchain to Binance Smart Chain by way of Harmy through its ethBUSD-bscBUSD liquidity pool.
I encourage everybody to give Viperswap a test run. There's basically no minimum once you've got funds on Harmony; I've added as little as $2 to a liquidity pool and staked it, and it earned 1 VIPER in a day. It's pretty amazing. Even if you don't end up using the project long-term, it's worth it just for the experience!
This article was originally published on Publish0x on March 28, 2021.
