Disclaimer: This is not financial advise and I am no financial advisor, anyone saying I am giving financial advise in the comments section is telling lies. All I am doing is writing my thoughts and views, and experience so contact a licensed financial advisor for any financial advise.
DeFi can be daunting and scary
I know it is for me I was always afraid that I will make a mistake and lose my hard earned Crypto.
Surely enough I have made a few mistakes and lost some Crypto in the process, however this is part of the learning process.
Luckily smartBCH is more forgiving then Ethereum as at least the amount you pay as fees for transaction is significantly low.
Unlike Ethereum where (depending on the timing) can cost you about $124 worth of ETH to run a simple smart contract. I know cause I was minting one of my blockchain domain NFT and that was the required fees for running that transaction, needless to say I didn't go through with it, for the simple reason that I am broke and don't have enough ETH.
Intro
smartBCH is a side chain on the BitcoinCash (BCH) blockchain that run smart functionality similar to Ethereum.
Since I didn't have much experience with DeFi I turn to the web for instructions and luckily there are some great articles here on read.cash that have helped me.
Particularly by @carisdaneym2 and @MoreGainStrategies
Since they have covered many of the basic things on how to get started from setting up the network in Metamask to getting the smart bch token to pay for fees to interacting with the DeFi dApps.
Here are some great articles by @carisdaneym2 that have helped me:
Here is the @MoreGainStrategies article that I referred for Metamask Android App:
Things I have learnt
While the guides above are great there are still some issues that I have faced for which I didn't find any answers to and had to experiment myself to learn them the hard way.
Setting up Metamask
Setting up Metamask was very straight forward and the guides above do a great job of explaining how to do it for both desktop and phone.
The difference between setting up on either is has to do with how you interact with it.
On desktop you download an extension for your existing browser, Chrome, Chromium or Brave.
But on phone you download an app with a built-in browser, which is the reason I choose to do it on the phone as I like to keep browsers seperate.
Getting the SEP20 BCH
In order to run the smartBCH you need to pay the Gas fees in form of BCH, but this is not or regular BCH that you may get from read.cash tips, but a SEP20 token BCH.
Currently, since the network is so new there are limited resources. Therefore, as far as I know you can only convert your BCH (mainnet) to BCH (SEP20) through Coinflex
My referral link: coinflex.com/user-console/register?shareAccountId=W4W87aHD
(support appreciated)
The guides above explain how to deposit BCH (mainnet) and withdraw BCH (SEP20) to your metamask.
However a few pointers and tips from me:
You need to register with coinflex.com to use it, but you can easily do that with either your metamask or your e-mail. I choose to do it through e-mail since I wanted to keeps things separate.
You have a limit of $10,000 USD if you don't do any KYC, if you are planning on not doing any KYC then be advise that is a lifetime limited so please insure that you only transfer less than $10,000 USD as that is the withdrawal limit (source)
Before transferring your BCH to coinflex be advise that it will not let you withdraw untll and unless you set up a 2 factor authentication (2FA), you can set up Google Authenticator but you need to make sure you have that device and keep it safe.
When depositing BCH (mainnet) do make sure you select BCH in the tab and only deposit the regular BCH and when withdrawing BCH (SEP20) make sure you select SEP20. For any deposit or withdraw you need to make sure you select the right tab, one great way to insure this is by saving the Address Management option on coinflex, through which you can save the address with a name as well as set the type. So if you save a address as SEP20 address it will be available in dropdown option only under the SPE20 tab.
After you have submitted the withdrawal request it could take some time for the funds to go through and appear in your metamask. If you have done everything right and selected the right tab, then just be patient it could take from anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
After you set up smartBCH in your Metamask then that address will function as your smartBCH address which looks like an Ethereum address since it is integrated on Metamask, for example my smartBCH address is 0x2FeE594DeF96d1b20e88B026b6bF72eea201e45A
Feel free to send me any tokens if you want, sure can use some.
Don't forget to set your gas price to 1.05 in edit gas fee option as it could run you into high fees.
Interacting with dApps may require multiple sets from exchanging tokens to providing liquidity to setting pool and you would need to pay fees for ever transaction, so do keep that in mind and keep an eye on the fees you are paying. Keep a pen and paper and right down the transaction to see how much the transaction has cst you in order to calculate you breakeven point for profits.
DeFi can be Fun
When you get the hang of it, it can be quite fun.
Just make sure that when you are just starting out and learning all these things, start with a small amount that you are willing to loss. As this is the investment for your learning the DeFi journey.
Another thing is to learn the concept of DeFi either through written articles or YouTube videos.
One of the best ways to learn is to see someone else do it, like I learnt that in order to stake on a pool you not only need to the two pair of token that the pool is for, but also you need to put equal amount of both token in pair to the liquidity.
It might be a noob thing but we all are noobs at one point
This I learnt from watching the below given YouTube video, do note that the guy in the video is doing the transaction on Binance Smart Chain rather than the smartBCH chain.
Still it is a good video to understand the BenSwap
Conclusion
The motivation for me to try the smartBCH is firstly that it it BitcoinCash and I am a big fan of BitcoinCash and love the community.
Secondly I always wanted to learn and use DeFi but Ethereum was too risky and expensive to do, smartBCH has made it possible for me to finally dabble in it.
I encourage everyone to at least learn about the smartBCH and understand it, at the very least it will help you appreciate the BitcoinCash and the community as well as the CryptoVerse even more.
Nicely explained, i enjoyed reading.. Thanks for sharing.