This week has been crazy on LeoFinance! I think I have read more posts than ever before, most of them dealing with the release of CubFinance, its accompanying CUB token, and the incredible DeFi possibilities it opens up. At first I expected the CUB airdrop to happen at the same time CubFinance went live, but since that wasn't the case, I just kicked back and read up on it, getting prepared and trying to learn as much as I could beforehand. I wasn't in a rush to buy CUBs before the airdrop, even though that would have gotten me some mind-blowing returns early on.
At first, it was CubFinance's own docs that I went through a few times, whereby I should give props to whomever wrote it: it's super clear, and easily understandable. Not having any CUBs on my hands, I could only follow the steps conceptually, still they made sense. Following that, there were numerous posts on LeoFinance giving bits of pieces of explanations, shedding more and more light onto what I knew was going to be a confusing ride in the DeFi space, at least at first. Now, looking back at my own experience, I must say it was not nearly as complicated as I had feared... It only came with a few minor challenges. So time to share my story in yet another CUB post. Hopefully readers aren't all cubbed out by now.
First Things First: Be Prepared!
Even before receiving my CUB, I knew I was going to need my Metamask Wallet. That part wasn't new to me, as I had used it on my first DeFi journey to enter the WLEO-ETH pool on Uniswap. However, I realized that since CUB was all about connecting to the Binance Smart Chain, I would need to connect my Metamask to it. This post by @jaraumoses turned out to be super helpful for it. The steps are simple, intuitive, and very straight forward.
The other thing I knew I would need, since virtually everyone was either complaining about it, or reiterating its importance, was having some BNB to pay for all the transactions. This part I was not too concerned with, as I knew I had a quarter of BNB in my Exodus Wallet. Living in Mexico, I wasn't even sure if the same restrictions applied here, as in the US... but since I didn't have to bother with buying it, I was just chilling. (My mistake, as it turned out later...)
Claiming CUB and Wrapping LEO
And then, one day, suddenly I noticed some CUBs in my Hive Engine. The Airdrop has landed!!! Immediately I knew, I had to get it out of there. By the way, do you still have CUB in your HiveEngine? Get it out of there quickly, or else it'll vanish into thin air in something like a week, or so. The good news is, claiming your CUB is super easy. Just go to this link and follow the intuitive steps, laid out in this tutorial.
If you received CUB in the airdrop it's probably because you are a LEO holder. And in that case, chances are you have some spare LEO lying around. If you want to use it on one of the DeFi farms, you need to wrap it. Unlike WLEO, which is made for the Etherium blockchain, you have to wrap them for the Binance Smart Chain, into something called bLEO. The process is just as easy and straight forward as claiming your CUB. Just go to this link and follow the intuitive steps, laid out in this tutorial.
With all this done, your CUB, bLEO, and BNB should appear in your Metamask wallet, and you should be ready to belly-splash into the most popular liquidity pools, or retreat for some quiet time into one of the dens, from where you tend to emerge more numerously than when you entered. It's only natural. ;-)
Expect the Unexpected!
For me, the BNB still didn't appear on Metamask! Bummer, but I didn't mind. After all, liquidity pools are there to exchange tokens, so I could pick some up right on CubFinance, right? Wrong! Even though the transaction fees (a.k.a GAS fees - quite aptly named, right?) are only around 10-20 cents per transaction, without it you can't go anywhere! This may be the most frustrating step for anyone: getting your hands on some BNB. Fortunately, there are lots of good folks on LeoFinance who are happy to send you some spare BNB change, especially if you send them back some equivalent HIVE or LEO in return. But I wanted to use my own BNB (damit)!
The problem was, my BNB on Exodus was on the Binance Chain, not the Binance Smart Chain (a huge difference, as I found out). When I tried to send it to the BSC address, Exodus was decent enough to tell me the address was not supported, so I didn't lose it all unrecoverably. The solution was simply to make a cross-chain transaction, detailed in this amazingly helpful post by @dagger212. Following it I managed to get my BNB onto Metamask, where it proudly appeared next to my bLEO and my CUB. Finally I could put them to work on CubFinance.
Farms and Dens and Lots of In-and-Out
Ready to get wet from liquidity, I had 31 CUB (worth around $150), 200 bLEO (roughly $200), and 0.25 BNB (about $70). I know, the prices may have changed since then, but I actually like the $420 USD in total. Let's see how much I can get it to grow...
Since the GAS fees are generally low, I didn't mind experimenting around. In the end I may have performed like twenty transactions (including approving contracts, providing liquidity, and such preliminary steps), while paying less than five bucks worth of BNB in total. Totally unheard of on Uniswap!
Also, I didn't have many of the coins needed to make a matching pair, except for the ones I listed. And in order to get into the most lucrative CUB-BUSD pool, I needed to match my CUB with this US Dollar stable coin on Binance. So I went ahead and swapped some: half of my CUB, to be exact. At first I thought about jumping into the CUB-BNB pool as well, but then I would have left my bLEO unused. Instead, I entered the bLEO-BNB pool, and put some CUB and even some leftover BUSD in their respective dens. Even so, most of my bLEO is still waiting for more CUB to be added to the pool.
But Wait!
Why should I wait? I was thinking. I'm using liquidity pools, after all, so swapping coins back and forth is what this is really about. So why should I not exchange some of my bLEO for BNB? The latter I'll be needing anyway for GAS fees, right? And so I did. Less than ten minutes later, I had all my initial money spread out in two farms and two dens. I can still come back and change them around later.
This neat summary, by the way, can be found here, you only need to add the MasterChef Address: 0x227e79C83065edB8B954848c46ca50b96CB33E16 I found this in this post by @finguru.
I have to admit, as carefully I have planned out the necessary steps for being able to use CUB, when it came to picking the right pools and allocating funds into them I was pretty much winging it. That's okay, though. That was just about 24 hours ago, and since then I am 2.5 CUBs richer. I know, these crazy numbers won't keep up, in fact, even now they are a lot lower than only a couple of days ago, but that was to be expected.
