A few days ago I was out and about learning and commenting on leo finance as I've been doing recently. I came across a post called Where to Convert HIVE to Swap.Hive (or Vice Versa) by @ifarmgirl. In it she mentioned various sites to make use of to convert your hive to swap.hive. She mentioned leodex, beeswap, hivepay, all of which I am very familiar with, but among them she mentioned a service I'd never heard of before and that was the discounted Bridge by @hiveupme. @theguruasia the developer said I should share my thoughts and that's where the idea for this post came along.
One thing that attracted me to this site is the cheap transaction fees. Other swaps usually take around 0.2% in transaction fees while the Discounted Bridge as the name implies gives us a discount and takes only 0.1% in transaction fees. 0.2% isn't much in my opinion, but 0.1% is cheaper. Nothing wrong with saving a couple cents in transaction fees.
How it works
The Discounted Bridge is quite simple and easy to navigate.
Once you login everything is displayed there
No next page, no previous page or any of that. Everything you need is displayed instantly.
Before conversion you check the available liquidity on the right hand side.
Refresh to be sure everything is updated. After that you go to your left hand side and enter your username. Then you click "check balances" for your hive, hivepower, and vault (not sure what that is) to be displayed.
Now you go to the middle, and select the option you'd like to make use of. I'll be converting 2 hive to swap.hive to test the service.
As you can see, a 0.1% fee (0.002) will be deducted and I'll get 1.998 hive.
Since my browser is connected to Keychain extension, once I pressed swap a window popped up, I entered my password and approved the transaction.
I went to the left hand side and clicked check balances a couple times and In less than a minute it reflected.
Note that if there's not enough liquidity, your funds will be transferred back, and also the minimum conversion is 1 hive.
My opinion
It's a really good service with cheap transaction fees. It's easy to use and it's fast.
Though I wish it could perform more swaps other than just hive and swap.hive. It's still in its infancy I suppose, so more swaps may be integrated in the future.
Overall it's good and fast, so I'll definitely be using it for its low fees.