What a journey… it all started in January 2020. In the middle of that crypto craze, I remembered that I had a Keybase XLM Wallet, that had been airdropped multiple times. If you’re here and don’t know what an airdrop is, well, you’re in for a treat. Crypto is an almost endless rabbit hole, and I fell into it. Hard. None of this is financial advice, just me ranting for educational purpose (and to get things out of my overloaded brain).
I started by trying to see if I could obtain some BTC with that XLM. XLM is the ticker for Stellar, a cryptocurrency. Because I had read about Bitcoin, I wanted some. For the quick buck. Except that I had no idea how to trade. With my programming background, I managed to deal with the wallet, keep the private keys secure while connecting to XLM exchanges. Yeah, that jargon again. That’s the thing with crypto, there’s no way around a vocabulary rich in acronyms, memes and unwritten laws. Don’t worry, WAGMI. I’ll try to share what I know, but you’ll have to do the work.
First learn what the blockchain is. The school of block is really good for starters. Yeah, there are 40 chapters, but you’ll be better armed that most after that. I’m not really good at teaching but I know where to find good resources.
I signed up on a lot of CEX, Centralized Exchanges, as opposed to DEX, decentralized ones (Uniswap, Sushiswap). After having read some articles, I decided that my tokens where safer on the blockchain, on my own wallet.
I learned about liquidity providing, impermanent loss and Decentralized Finance (DeFi)… And started applying all this.
Long story short, I had to pay a lot in taxes because where I live, all crypto trades must be tracked. Basically, each trade is a capital gain or a loss, because the assets you’re trading don’t have the same value as when you acquired them.
Crypto is fun. Yup. Not the short term trading but the deep dive into the communities, the memes, the knowledge. The protocol websites are more engaging than your banking or investment site. Learning takes time, but with the right sources it goes pretty quickly. But try things by yourself, on small amounts, learn the vocabulary, and dive in.
The tech, the money lego, the ideology (make the banks pay for what they did in 2008), there’s so much more to crypto than mere speculation.
After some yield farming and a a lot of impermanent loss, I realized that to thrive in crypto you need to have a constant adaptative strategy.
Accumulate blue-chip coins, take profits when there’s a bull market, limit impermanent loss when there’s a lot of volatility. Single staking, i.e. locking a single token instead of a pair when providing liquidity is less risky but of course gives you less rewards. Same for providing liquidity with highly correlated token pairs, like stable coins (USDC-USDT, for example)
The reward token can lose its value pretty quick but always remember that gains equals unit price times quantity.
Already lost by all the jargon, huh ? Don’t worry, it comes fast. With all the links from this first post, you have a good start. Take your time before diving in, learn by reading, then doing. And DYOR, Do Your Own Research.
There’s a way to navigate the crypto space without taking inconsiderate risk. But just staking stable coins to do yield farming will bring you more rewards than your bank’s saving account.