I almost lost 300 Hive
With the recent bull run on BTC (and other crypto) I found that my value had almost doubled. I only had about $2500 USD worth of crypto on another exchange but when I saw it go to $5000 I thought what should I do with the unexpected windfall?
Of course the obvious thought is to grab the money and run.
Another obvious thought would be HODL and wait for the peak.
But I decided I would take my CRO tokens, convert them to LTC, and move over to HIVE so I could buy some more HBD and HIVE.
25 LTC coming over to the Hive infrastructure but then what? Where do I convert them over to Hive?
Well, at first I was going to use the Hive-Engine but then I have to use the buy/sell interface and take the best offer, and the next, and so on. Unfortunately it isn't a very deep system so if I wanted to move 25 LTC I was going to take a hit on the exchange rate.
So, I went over to the tribaldex liquidity pool and entered in selling 25 LTC. I was going to take about a 7% hit by hitting the pool with a large exchange. That wasn't very appealing.
A hidden way to save some money
What was my alternative? I was going to sell 1 LTC at a time and keep selling then individually until the exchange rate got bad. But here is the surprising part. When I sold them one at a time I never took a bit hit on the exchange rate!
AS A DISCLAIMER: This worked for me but your results may vary. Do your own due diligence to make sure you are getting a favorable exchange rate
Today I moved in 4 LTC and thought I would document the procedure just in case someone got a little benefit from it.
Of course I took a little bit of a hit from transfer fees so my 4 LTC turned into 3.96 LTC. The fee for transfer was fairly small. That's why I use LTC to transfer value rather than ETC or BTC which tend to have higher transaction fees.
If you look carefully you will also see that my LTC was going to convert to 902.99 HIVE and a fee of 0.85%!
Just for fun look at what the fee is if I tried to do 25 LTC (like I did yesterday!). 6.64%... OUCH
But what if I only sell 1 LTC? Then you can see that the fee becomes a much more reasonable 0.03%
At the end of the day I converted each LTC one by one. When I was finished you can see the result: I had 906.28 swap.hive instead of the 902.99 that I would have gotten if I just swapped them all at once. On 4 LTC its not huge, only 3 Hive tokens. But when was looking at exchanging 25? It was a much MUCH bigger differential (6% of 5000 Hive = 300Hive tokens)
So, for anyone moving large quantities of crypto over to Hive I would recommend NOT trying to make big transactions on the liquidity pools. Liquidity pools are great in facilitating transactions but the large transactions can really work against you.
Keeping it small and "under the radar" can really save you some money.
Just my two cents.
Hope it proves useful.