In the last week I have been looking into new options to buy and sell Hive. I am going to talk about a few over the next week as I compile more information on them by trying them out.
The first service I would like to share is the V4V App. This Dapp is @brianoflondon’s creation. This service bridges the Bitcoin Lightning network sidechain with Hive. Allowing a very fast way to get Hive to BTC or the other way around for small transactions. I sent around $120 through the network both ways to see how it all played out.
Honestly I have heard a lot about the lightning network, but never actually did a transaction on it before.. So I am glad I finally can say now I have sent and received lightning payments.
Using their service I first sold some Hive for lightning sats. That went really smooth, was able to receive to my aqua wallet in seconds. Usually BTC would take 30 minutes to an hour, but using the lightning network sidechain the payment is settled in seconds.
Sending the lightning to buy Hive was slightly more difficult. Maybe because the wallet I used did not calculate fees for you. So you must subtract the fee amount from what you plan on sending.. Took me a few minutes trying a couple times until I got the fees right.
One thing to note, when I sent the lightning sats to v4v. It did not show up in my wallet as sats like it did when I swapped Hive for sats to sell. Instead it just sent me the Hive of whatever the sats value are at the time. You can see below what the Peakd Hive wallet looks like after buying and selling.
Ignore the last two, those are from swaps by other services which I will discuss in a future post.
You must have a lightning compatible wallet to use this service.
Once I got the lightning sats I swapped them for BTC in the Aqua wallet.
And finally I have BTC in my wallet that was once Hive.. Very cool! Now I can HODL it in a cold wallet or sell it on an exchange.
Trying the other way around to buy Hive I was able to use the sats I just got in the previous transaction. But if you do not have any sats, you can swap for them using the Aqua wallet.
Overview:
Selling Hive for BTC: Swapping Hive to lightning sats using the v4v app > Sending lighting sats to swappable wallet for BTC > Swap to BTC
Buying Hive with BTC: Swap BTC to lightning sats > calculate fees and send to v4v app > swap to Hive or HBD
Cost me $2.34 or about 2% of the overall transaction each way.
Recommended for small amounts at the moment: $0-$250
Link to Dapp: https://v4v.app/
My transfer of around $120 was successful and a smooth process using the V4V app. For small amounts this worked great, looking at the @v4vapp wallet there is only 2357 Hive in it at the moment and 685 HBD. Probably best to not send too much through this app until there is more Hive liquidity. But doing a few hundred dollars in Hive or HBD may be okay until they add more Hive and HBD to their wallets.
Soon I will post about other services, I am still working on one of them so I was unable to make a single post talking about them all at once. But soon I will show off some other swap services that I have tried out.