Hello Splinterlands Fam!
Following up from the most recent SPL townhall I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences in regard to bringing in fiat currency into Splinterlands (for US users).
@yabapmatt made a suggestion for bringing fiat into the game, which was different than my usual process, so I thought I'd give it a try!
To paraphrase, his suggestion was to buy USDC via coinbase, send it to a wallet like coinbase extension or metamask, and then use the Terrablock feature within the Splinterlands website to buy SPS/DEC.
At first it made a lot of sense since there is no fee when buying USDC via coinbase, but unfortunately, in my case, the next few steps was filled with fees that were higher than my usual route for bringing fiat into the game.
Long story shot, I wasn't able to get the USDC from my coinbase wallet converted to SPS/DEC via terrablock because I did not have any ETH in my coinbase wallet to cover the gas fees (silly of me, I know), but while coinbase wallet says you can use some of the USDC to cover the gas fee, it would not let me because "there was no ETH to cover the swap from USDC to ETH"...It really made no sense since the extension said I would be able to use some USDC to cover the swap. It just put me in that weird loop every time I tried. For context I was just trying to buy $100 DEC for this test, so I had $100 in USDC which I though would be plenty to cover the swap fee and transaction fee.
Could this have been a me problem? Almost certainly, and it's not like I lost my USDC or anything, I just couldn't get the Terrablock process to work even when I did eventually push some ETH to my coinbase wallet from another wallet.
It brings me to my main point of my post though, which is sharing what I think is the best way to bring fiat (smaller amounts like $100-$200) into the game in case anyone else was having a similar experience with the Terrablock process :)
Believe it or not, I've found that Paypal actually is a great tool for bringing in fiat into hive/splinterlands! Historically I did use coinbase to buy litecoin, and using $200 as example, I'd usually get $197.01 worth of LTC and pay a $2.99 fee. From there, I'd just use Hive Engine or Tribaldex to "deposit" that LTC for swap.LTC and then again use Hive Engine or Beeswap to go from swap.LTC to SPS or DEC with really minimal slippage and fees (much lower than the ETH gas fees).
Now...in comes Paypal, I found that they actually have a slightly lower fee than coinbase for this amount ($200)
And if you check there "transaction fee" structure, it seems like a $200 transaction may be a good bang for your buck since it's just a flat $2.49 instead of a %!
That's it though, I just wanted to share my experience and what I think the easiest way to get smaller amounts of fiat (USD) into the game, and save folks from variable ETH gas fees and other third parties. No knock on @yabapmatt since I'm sure he doesn't worry about ETH gas too much ;) and understands these things way more than me.
I hope others find this helpful, and let me know if you do something different! I'd also be happy to go into more detail about getting the LTC into Hive Engine or Tribaldex and making the swap to DEC/SPS from there and ultimately to in-game. Let me know!
Peace and Love,
Suales