[Guide] How to Get Started in Binance Smart Chain with Metamask.

Hello my fellow readers, hope you're all doing fine :)

Last days have been immersed in the depths of the Binance Smart Chain rabbit hole and it has been pretty intense. Discovered another layer of tokens, functionalities and yield farming markets, increased my overall understanding about the concepts of permanent losses, Automated Market Makers (AMM's) and how (real) marketing at crypto works.

binance smart chain.png

Today I'll be sharing with you a little guide about 'How to link your metamask wallet to the Binance Smart Chain' and how to get started there.

Note that I'm connecting my metamask account which is already linked to my ledger cold wallet, from where I'm enjoying higher levels of security.

I would never advise holding large amounts of crypto in exchanges/hot wallets, so please (Black Friday is literally weeks away), get a cold wallet to manage efficiently your holdings.

If you need help to setup your ledger wallet to connect with metamask, read this article.

It's a pretty straightforward process, but If you need help anyway let me know in the comments section and I'll do my best to help :)

Guide & imgs taken from binance academy. Opinions are mine.

Metamask + Binance Smart Chain (BSC); what is the main advantage Vs Ethereum?

If you haven't gone too far from Hive, maybe this isn't as obvious as it could seem.

Ethereum gas fees (fees that you pay when you're transacting/interacting in the ethereum network) are prohibitive.

Maybe aren't at their worse point now, after all, you're paying 0,5-1$ for an average transaction, but back in July-August, I paid 30-50$ to interact with an uniswap contract.

If you're doing it a single time, you can think 'that's oke', but if you want to learn about uniswap and investigate/try things around this fees are a big punishment.

In the Binance Smart Chain doesn't happen.

Binance Smart Chain as a tool to learn how Uniswap (AMM's) works

As it is designed, BSC it's a pull-n-plug' solution for Ethereum apps which can't afford these prohibitive fees (at least while we wait for a scalable and deployed version of ETH 2.0).

Average transaction in Binance Smart Chain costs around ~0,03$

Which means you can load a wallet with 10$ worth of BNB and start swapping back and forth in their own version of Uniswap (PancakeSwap).

In my humble opinion, if you never tried uniswap before (because of fees mainly), this is a great tool to learn how impermanent losses, liquidity pools, yield farming and other 'cool' concepts works.

On the other hand, you should keep in mind that BSC is only a month old, and there's still a lot of infrastructures to be created/migrated from ETH. It's far from perfect, but it works.

Let's go with the technical setup. you'll see that it's very easy.

Configuring Metamask to connect with Binance Smart Chain

The first thing that we need is Metamask installed in our browser (obviously). If you don't have it you can download the extension in https://metamask.io/. Configure your account (ledger recommended as I pointed above).

eth mainnet.png

If you don't noticed before, Metamask has been designed to be an Ethereum app. And it is so by default, for that reason, we want to change metamask settings towards Binance Smart Chain nodes. To do that (also recommended to expand view):

We go to 'Settings'

Open 'Networks' & ''Add New''

We complete with the following details (Mainnet):

Network Name: Smart Chain

New RPC URL: https://bsc-dataseed.binance.org/

ChainID: 0x38

Symbol: BNB

Block Explorer URL: https://bscscan.com

Click the 'Save' button. Let's go back to the Main menu.
If we did everything right, we should be able to switch from BSC to ETH whenever we desire:

That's it!

leofinance divider.png

Couple of things to consider that drove me crazy the first couple of hours:

The first thing that you will notice is that balances are displayed in BNB but the token symbol is ETH. Don't panic. Remember that Metamask is an app made by and for ethereum? That's the reason.

We'll have to wait for more 'native' solutions (after all, remember that all of this is only a month old or so, patience). Note that all the other features like send or adding new/custom tokens are more or less the same... but all related to BNB :)

This one particularly drove me mad for more than an hour; your ETH wallet is the same for BSC.

With things like this one, the better is to try first with small amounts. Login to your binance account, and try to withdraw some BNB to your BSC wallet. Remember to select the correct network:

Basically, you're all set. I'll be sharing some interesting things that I found around this new layer, prefer to keep this post informative and not shill anything speculative yet.

I'll keep you updated.