One of the trades that I would need to do frequently is my dollar cost averaging to buy the CEL token through Uniswap. Unfortunately, my regular investments are not of high dollar amounts. Given the gas fees of Ethereum during this bull run, it is not worthwhile to attempt small transactions.
The good news is that Celsius CEO, Alex Mashinsky has indicated an interest in moving the CEL token over to Cardano ($ADA) from Ethereum ($ETH). The move would reduce transaction fees significantly. This is something that Ethereum is addressing through future updates. However, it is a problem that Cardano has likely already solved. Now it is just a matter of figuring out how to move tokens from one blockchain to another.
But, the problem goes beyond just CEL. Also hampered are USDC, DAI, and other stablecoin transactions. Moving any ERC-20 asset can get expensive. This is also something that Cardano is addressing. If you were to attempt to move a token through Cardano, you would not need a Cardano reserve to pay gas fees. Instead, you would pay the fees in the same token you are trying to transfer.
The main obstacle I see to Cardano is that there are no DeFi exchanges using ADA, yet. I am not sure how Celsius will go about converting ADA to CEL until there is some exchange somewhere able to make the exchange.
I suppose the problem is that I am impatient. The solutions to high ETH gas prices are in the works. And, there is an alternative blockchain that will have lower gas fees from the start. Yet, by the time these problems are worked out, the price of CEL could have increased dramatically. In other words, it will cost me money in fees or in lost capital gains from waiting to batch my savings for CEL buys.
I think investing in ADA preemptively may be a good move. In addition to the improvements to Ethereum underway, Cardano can offload some of the burden from Ethereum to further reduce transaction costs.
Ethereum has another problem that worries me, which is that there is no cap on the number of ETH. However, the updates coming up will introduce burning of gas fees, even if a cap is not implemented. This means that a busy network would end up burning ETH faster than it is created, potentially.
Cardano, on the other hand, has a fixed supply. For me, this is preferable. This is one criticism I have of Hive, the inflating supply. Too many Hivers are willing to sell their earnings rather than stake them for greater influence on the network. But, that's a topic for another blog post.
For now, I'm stuck accumulating ETH until I have a big enough batch to convert to CEL given the fees at the moment.