Tropical journey in SmartBCH

Wednesday, 22nd of December 2021

How did my Tropical journey started? First time I heard about it was from Mrs FATCAT or Adrian rather. I was chatting with him in November about his other project, when he shared the news about the new dex on SmartBCH. Its name was Tropical Finance.

You know what was my first thought?

‘What an unfortunate selection of the name!’

The memory of BeachSwap was still very clear in my mind, even though I didn’t invest any of my money in this scam. Tropical Finance with lovely beaches and tropical vibe looked lovely, but the bitter memory was all I could think of when I first saw it. Looks like the majority of SmartBCH community thought exactly the same as me. As soon as the news spread in Telegram groups, the Tropical Finance was attacked left right and centre. I won’t mention any names, but there was a huge drama going on for a few days.

I can’t say I was much worried, but the whole thing left a bitter taste in my mouth. On one side everyone says we need new people coming to SmartBCH from other chains etc, yet when newcomers arrive, everyone wants to bite them to death and call them outsiders to say the least.

Me? If you read any of my articles you’ll know that I’m not all that technical about all the new projects. I just follow my witchy guts when investing and so far the only time I lost (on paper at least) was when I got FOMO’d by reading other people’s advice.

The same was in this case. I joined all the AMA’s by Tropical Finance dex team and at first I was a bit shy to ask questions, but whatever I asked was met with respect and my questions were always answered in a polite and welcoming way. Before I knew it, I became friends with the team and also a moderator in their channel. I was taken by their friendliness, hard work and transparency and I invested 25% of my portfolio in the presale of Daiquiri.

The presale that was conducted through BPAD on the 9th of December and it has reached the hard cap of 225BCH in mere 30 minutes. The only presale I participated that was hosted on AMA - SO much fun!

Tropical Finance Team

Domenico or @ thedragster in TG is from Italy and he is the main developer in the Tropical team. Any technical question you have - he’s your men.

Giro or @ girolamomarotte is also Italian. He is role is Business Manager.

Goran or @ dobartim is Marketing Manager. He is Serbian, living in Macedonia. He is the funniest of them all and always cheers everyone up with funny memes.

Adrian - @ MrsBurger lives in Germany and he is NFT designer. He is also the creator of $FATCAT token and Fatcat NFT series which is still available for minting.

Then there is Blake, Flysky and myself who are the moderators in the Tropical Finance Telegram channel.

BTW - Blake posted an awesome video about farming in SmartBCH:

Launch Day 14th of December 2021

I would lie if I said the launch went all smooth! And I’m not a liar, so I will tell you how it went.

Days before the launch the team was testing everything on the testnet. We had countless video calls to assure everything works.

On the day of the launch we were able to claim Daiquiri tokens from BPAD around an hour before the dex launch. This gave me plenty of time to send all the tokens to my friends I was buying them with. We were all excited and ready. AMA started just before 6pm UTC and we started the countdown. I staked my Daiquiri immediately and was super happy to be one of the first.

Then glitches started to happen. People were reporting errors and AMA was disconnected. Instead we connected through moderator chat to discuss the issue. Tropical Chat was heating up, as more people started to doubt the team again.

At that time I was visiting my friend, who coincidentally is also Italian. In the heat of a moment Giro and Dom started to talk in Italian and my friend was translating everything they said to me. This only reassured me that the team is honest. They were worrying about other people calling them scammers, while they’re doing their best. Dom made a typo when adding total supply of Daiquiri and if you know anything about programming you will know that one typo can be detrimental to the whole code and this is exactly what we were witnessing on the 14th.

After the team talked it all through, we connected again on the AMA to explain the issue and reassure everyone that it will be sorted without anyone loosing their funds. 10 more minutes joke was running wildly in TF group for hours, while Dom was working on the solution.

Then the testing started. First the website was created to swap the old Daiquiri to the new one. As you can see it was already midnight UTC by then and we still had some hiccups.

At some point I was happy to have double Daiquiri amount I purchased on the presale 😅 Joking of course! The old token was not usable, so no value.

Once the claiming site was working perfectly, it was announced in Telegram that everyone could exchange their old tokens to new tokens. This kept people busy, while we were testing the new tokens staking on Tropical Finance dex. Here we encountered a few hiccups too and we needed to know that everything will work smooth this time round. 0:45 am UTC we’re still testing.

I know Domenico and others were really stressed that day, but for me all this started to be entertaining. The more hiccups followed by the solution the more trust I had for the team. At some point I already wanted to go to sleep and already said goodnight, but the pets and excitement kept me awake and soon enough my staying awake was gratified, as the final tests were successful and we were ready to launch again.

Finally at 2:18am my Daiquiri was safely staked in the pool with some insane APR. Just a few minutes of this power farming grew my Daiquiri stash very fast.

Soon enough everyone was staking theirs too and the APR dropped, but hey, I love the feeling of getting up in the morning, checking my investment to see that I’ve earned almost $40 while I was sleeping. For years now I have been looking for a passive income and with SmartBCH my dream has now came true.

Of course these super APR’s won’t last forever, so it was important to get on board early to rip the biggest benefits of a new opportunity. This time it was relatively easy for me, because I trusted the team, while many people didn’t.

Did my trust pay off? It totally did. Even at the low Daiquiri price today ($0.174) my initial investment of 0.83 BCH is worth around 2 BCH.

What I gained however is not only money. I gained new experience, I gained insight into how DEXs work, and above all I gained a bunch of new friends. One of them created this cute witch sticker for me, which I now use as my profile picture on Telegram.

Icing on the cake?

After many days of hitting one wall after another, BlockNG added Daiquiri to their Beam section. This might sound like not a big deal, but if you’ve been in SmartBCH for long enough you know that Law is one of the best performing tokens. While the whole market can be red on some days, Law has a life of its own and it is pretty much always going up. If ever I sell my Law harvest one day, I can rarely buy it back at the same price again.

Although APR is not as amazing as on Tropical Finance at the time of writing this article, it is always good to mine some extra Law, as use cases for it are many.

I consider this also a win for Tropical Team. BlockNG community is big and mighty and having Daiquiri in their Beam section is HUGE in my opinion. I hope to see more cooperation across SmartBCH soon.

Until next time 💙