Today I want to write about my experience moving assets from the WAX chain to CUB Finance. How hard could it be, right? Well, it was much more complicated than I imagined. I made a ton of mistakes, but I got there in the end! Hopefully this post will help others learn.
The Goal - from WAX to DEC
I was fortunate enough to start mining in Alien Worlds relatively early on, and was able to make quite a bit of money when the prices spiked in April (thank you to whoever bought my Large Capacitor for $180). I think the Alien Worlds ecosystem will continue to expand, but with prices elevated, I judged that my money would be better invested elsewhere for the time being, where it may see more price appreciation. I've been a steady Splinterlands player since January, and I decided that my best bet was to stash my funds in a combination of land plots, Untamed packs (soon to sell out!), and to dip my toe into the world of CUB finance. Being a Splinterlands player, I though I would put a few dollars into the BUSD/DEC liquidity pool get a sense for how DEFI works.
But, how to get the WAX to DEC? And ideally also get some BUSD for the liquidity pool? I have a Hive account (of course), a Metamask wallet, and a few BTC satoshi floating around in an exchange. Importantly, I did not have any BNB on the smart chain.
3 Paths Forward
I initially looked into 3 potential paths to get my WAX into DEC:
1. Buy Splinterlands Assets using WAX, then transfer in using the Splinterlands WAX bridge
The advantage of this is that it is the most direct path. I could in theory buy Splinterlands cards, plots, and packs on Atomic Market using my WAX. I could then transfer them into the Splinterlands game and sell the excess for DEC on Peak Monsters. Then, I could use the DEC to buy any additional plots and packs, or transfer it onto the Binance Smart Chain for CUB DEFI.
The problem with this pathway, though, is that the prices on WAX are inflated. For example, the cheapest land plot is priced at $20.49 on the WAX chain. I could buy the same plot for $20 directly in Splinterlands. Trying to sell it on the HIVE market would net me less than $20. Similarly, the cheapest Untamed pack is selling for $2.06, a premium to the $2 single price pack, and is selling for only $1.76. So this pathway would work, but is inefficient; I calculated 85.4% efficiency, or 14.6% transaction fees. I decided to keep looking.
2. Convert the WAX to BTC, then transfer the BTC to the HIVE chain
The second path that I explored was to use BTC, the cryptocurrency that I am most familiar with, to make this transaction. Specifically, the path would be to send my WAX to an exchange (I use kucoin), trade the WAX for BTC, send the BTC to my Hive chain to receive SWAP.BTC, trade the SWAP.BTC to SWAP.HIVE, trade the SWAP.HIVE to DEC, and then transfer the DEC into Splinterlands.
I'm familiar with each of these steps, and so comfortable with this pathway. However, this is a lot of transactions, and each has a fee associated with it. The biggest killer is the 0.0005 BTC to transfer out of KuCoin - this is around $28 at today's prices, which is over 10% of my stash. This wouldn't be as big of a problem with a larger transfer, so I will consider this pathway for future transactions, if I have a larger transfer to make at once. But for this size range, the total efficiency is 83.7%, which is actually worse than the WAX pathway. I have assumed no premium on the trades on KuCoin, since liquidity is very good on that platform - they do charge a 0.1% transaction fee on trades.
3a. Utilize the Binance Smart Chain (How I Thought It Would Work)
Which brings me to the 3rd pathway - utilizing the Binance Smart Chain to eventually transfer DEC into the game via the Splinterlands/Binance Smart Chain bridge. I have never used the Binance Smart Chain, so was worried that I would somehow screw something up (spoiler alert: I did). The pathway I wanted to use would be to transfer WAXP to KuCoin, trade the WAXP for USDT, trade the USDT for BNB, then transfer the BNB into my MetaMask wallet. From there, the BNB could be converted to BUSD using CUB Finance, and then from BUSD to DEC (and then transfer into the game). A long pathway, but one that should be relatively low fee, I calculated a theoretical 96.0% efficiency, mainly due to lower withdrawal fees from BNB on KuCoin, as well as low transaction fees on the Binance Smart Chain.
I decided to pursue this pathway. To prepare, I added the Binance Smart Chain to my Metamask wallet using the instructions from this post by @diegoz
However, I ran into a problem halfway through this pathway. Namely, the BNB that I traded for on KuCoin is apparently the one on the Binance Chain (BC), and not the one on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The coins are interchangeable, but not the same. And I couldn't send my BNB from KuCoin to my Smart-chain enabled MetaMask Wallet. For more on this very confusing topic I recommend this post written by Debbie Chia on Exodus.
3b. Utilize the Binance Smart Chain - 2nd Try
So now what - I had my coins in BNB on KuCoin, but had no way to transfer them out. I briefly considered reversing my steps to get my WAX back, but decided to press on. Surely there must be a currency on KuCoin that I can successfully transfer out. I decided to try the PancakeSwap coin (CAKE), since I knew that it was on the binance smart chain, and should work with my MetaMask wallet. So, I traded my BNB for USDT, then from USDT to CAKE. Alright, time to get it off the KuCoin platform. At this point I thought that the transaction pathway would look like this:
OK, so a bit more complicated, a few more transactions than I needed to make, but fees are low, no big deal, right. So did this work? No, it did not. I got my CAKE off of KuCoin without any issues. But when I went to swap it to BNB using PancakeSwap, I was told that I didn't have sufficient BNB balance to make the swap. That's right - you need to own BNB in order to trade for BNB. So now I had managed to strand my Alien World WAX in CAKE with no way to get it off! Maybe I should have kept the Large Capacitor after all!
3c. Utilize the Binance Smart Chain - 3rd Time's The Charm?
It was at this point that I did a little Googling and came across this very helpful Reddit thread explaining how Trust Wallet could be used to transfer BNB on the Binance Chain to BNB on the Smart Chain. The problem, of course, is that now all of my funding was tied up in CAKE, which I couldn't move. So now I had to bring external funding into this mess - needless to say I was not happy at this point. Nonetheless, I created a Trust Wallet Account and sent a small amount of Bitcoin to it. Now I thought that the overall transaction would look like:
So did it work? NO it didn't. Trustwallet would not allow me to exchange my Bitcoin for BNB. At this point I am more than frustrated. I fumed for a bit, and then figured out what I had to do to finally finish the transaction.
3d. Utilize the Binance Smart Chain - 4th try - Success!!
To recap, I now had most of my Alien World earnings trapped in my MetaMask wallet in CAKE. I also had $47 of Bitcoin in my TrustWallet, but no way to turn it into BNB. So, time to use KuCoin one more time. Now this transaction looks like:
And, finally IT WORKED!! I ended up with my DEC in CUB finance, ready to send into Splinterlands.
Conclusions
So, obviously, this was a complete mess. It took a grand total of 16 transactions to move my WAX into DEC. Moving forward, I'll be able to do it much more easily, especially since I'll have BNB on the Smart Chain to use for transaction fees. Still, a few takeaways from this adventure:
- Even with user error, the total transaction fees ended up at 92.8%, better than either of the other 2 options. It is kind of amazing that the fees ended up being so low, and really shows the power of the Binance smart chain. Imagine if I were using Ether and paying those gas fees!
- This type of thing has to be slowing user adoption of crypto applications. There is so much more room to grow if the user experience can be streamlined.
- There are lots of different ways to do the same thing - I'm sure that someone will comment and tell me a much simpler way to get this transaction done, but at least the round-about way got there in the end.
- I'm very happy that I was experimenting with profits from other blockchain projects - and not in a very large amount. This whole thing would have been very stressful if there were more money at stake.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments! Anyone know an easier way to get this done? I know somebody is going to show me how in like 3 steps!