Ever since I joined Publish0x I've been interested in Harvest Finance, but I've been hesitant to try it out. In the beginning the reason for hesitation is that I didn't want to invest in Ethereum or erc-20 tokens out of concern over high gas fees. After the past few months, as I've learned more cryptocurrency and specifically about the energy impact proof of work coins have on the climate, my concern transferred from high gas fees to just general stress and anxiety about the earth becoming inhabitable for humans (isn't that some fun anxiety?). As a result, even though I had read about Harvest Finance and it seemed like a good idea, I never took the plunge and put any money into it.
So a few weeks ago when I read that Harvest Finance had Binance farms, I was suddenly interested. After looking through the available farms on Harvest, I decided to buy some Egg-BNB and Egg-BUSD LP tokens from Goose Finance (or rather, some fractional amounts of LP tokens) so I could test Harvest Finance out to see if I'd like to invest more money into its system.
What's The Process to Farm on Binance Smart Chain on Harvest Finance?
First up, if you want to get involved in the Binance farms you need BNB. Not normal BNB though. You need BNB Smart Chain. I had BNB in my Binance account, but in order to start farming I needed to withdraw from Binance and deposit in my Trust wallet. Then I needed to swap it for smart chain. So I made a withdrawal from Binance and paid the fee of .005 BNB to make the withdrawal. Then I swapped it in Trust Wallet from BNB to BNB Smart Chain (which is just called Smart Chain in the trust wallet). I think I paid like $0.55 USD to do that swap (which I'm uncertain how much BNB that was, but you pay with BNB).
Converting your BNB to BNB Smart Chain is just the first step. If you want to farm on Harvest Finance you have to purchase LP tokens from another defi or finance site to farm. This might sound confusing, and it was super confusing to me. I was hoping to be able to just throw money into Harvest Finance and let it go to work. Thankfully Harvest Finance has a link in each one of their farms called Vault Details. If you tap that, it'll tell you how you can purchase LP tokens and it'll include links that'll take you to the sites to purchase the tokens.
So I tapped the link for Goose Finance, went to their site and discovered that in order to get the Egg-BNB LP tokens I wanted that I first needed to swap some of my BNB for Egg. So I went to trade in their dropdown menu and selected exchange and swapped about half of my BNB for Egg. Then I swapped about a quarter of my remaining BNB for BUSD, because I wanted to try both the Egg-BNB farm and the Egg-BUSD farm (keeping aside like $20 in BNB Smart Chain for fees down the road). I had to pay a fee each time I did a swap, but it was just about $0.55 USD each time (this is paid with BNB Smart Chain, so don't max out your BNB Smart Chain in any swap or in providing liquidity because then you won't have the ability to pay for all the smart contracts required to make the farming happen down the line).
After I had BNB, Egg, and BUSD in my wallet, I had to use them to supply liquidity to the liquidity pools to get LP tokens. On the Transfer page on Goose Finance, there's a Swap, Liquidity, and Bridge option. I tapped from Swap to Liquidity and chose to add liquidity. This brings up a page that looks similar to the swap page, except instead of selecting two coins and seeing how much you'll get of a second coin in return for a first, it just asks how much of each coin you want to provide to the liquidity pool. I chose BUSD and Egg and hit max on BUSD (since I knew I had more Egg than BUSD). Once both token amounts are selected you tap the Approve button to approve using your coins for this. You pay about $0.13 to do this. After that, you hit the Supply button which enables you to supply the two tokens to the liquidity pool. You pay about $0.55 to do this. Then the LP tokens should appear in your wallet.
Once the LP Tokens are in your wallet, navigate to Harvest Finance. You'll find there's a button to connect your wallet. By default it'll show you Ethereum Mainnet farms. Under that button you can select either Ethereum Mainnnet or Binance Smart Chain. Tap Binance Smart Chain and then tap to connect your wallet (if you just tap connect wallet and you have BNB Smart Chain in your wallet but no Ethereum, then it'll bring you to the Binance Smart Chain farms, so don't fret if you rushed in and just smashed that Connect Wallet button).
Once you've opened the Binance Smart Chain Wallet part of the site, navigate down to where the LP tokens are that you want to Farm and select that asset. If your wallet is connected then when you open the asset listing on Harvest Finance it'll show you how much of that unstaked asset you have in your wallet. If you want to farm all of the LP tokens you have on Harvest hit the Max button and then hit the deposit button (you'll pay like $0.55 USD with your BNB smart chain to make this happen). You'll start earning bFarm almost immediately (though in very small amounts at first).
You'll notice some of the farms have an APY that's rather high, but the payout in bFarm might not seem equivalent at first. What's going on there is Harvest is using the payout that your LP token farming pays you and they're buying more of the LP tokens with that payout and then allowing you to collect bFarm rewards for that increased amount. Your amount of LP tokens that you staked remain the same while your balance grows, but the longer they're in the Harvest Finance the more LP tokens they represent in the Harvest system and the higher the payout in bFarm is for you. Once you have a lot of bFarm accumulated, you can claim your rewards (you'll have to pay another $0.55 USD in Binance Smart Chain to do this).
After claiming your bFarm rewards this is where things get tricky for me again. Once you have bFarm you need to convert it to Farm or iFarm. Which means bridging it back to Ethereum. For me that means holding onto my bFarm until Ethereum switches over to Proof of Stake, because I don't want to pay high gas fees and I'm still unhappy with Proof of Work coins and the environmental impact.
How Has My Farming Gone with Goose on Harvest?
I put a ridiculously small amount of Egg-BUSD LP Tokens and Egg-BNB LP tokens into Harvest finance to check out how the system works. So, my paltry 1.017 Egg-BUSD LP is now 1.22975 LP on Harvest after about two weeks and I've gained a little over .0008 bFarm. My .269 Egg-BNB LP is now .31522 and I've gained about .0061 bFarm (but you'll notice the bFarm is less in the screenshot and that's because I claimed rewards to see what that process was like a few days ago for the sake of writing something useful). Harvest recommends claiming rewards once a week so you can bridge to Farm and put your rewards to work making you more money. Obviously with the paltry amount of money I put into the system that's not a good idea at this point as I'd pay more to claim my rewards and bridge them to Farm than I've made so far. With a lot more money invested though that would make sense.
Conclusion
Overall I'm really impressed with the Harvest system. If I was doing this on my own I'd be paying $.55 fees on Goose Finance every time I wanted to harvest and then more fees to swap those rewards for other coins that I could use to provide more liquidity which would also cause more fees. Harvest just handles all of that so you don't have to think about it and you don't end up with 30 smart contract execution notifications on your phone every day. Harvest takes a ton of hassle out of Yield Farming and saves you from paying all those transaction fees (which when comparing Binance Smart Chain to Ethereum Mainnet might not seem like much but it still adds up over time). I really like the Harvest Finance system and will probably be moving all my eligible LP tokens over to them in the near future so that I don't have to think about all of this anymore.
This article was first published on my Publish0x blog as part of the #BinanceFARMer writing contest.
Thanks for reading. I am a full time wedding photographer with Van Elk & Co who also makes a comedy podcast about running a wedding photography business called the Wedding Photo Hangover.
