What I Did Over the Holiday Weekend

Like everyone else in the USA, I watched fireworks on the Fourth of July. But celebrating our country’s independence wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I took the holiday downtime as an opportunity to catch up on my consolidation and staking process.

I took the time to scour all my accounts and noticed that there were many assets where I had only a little bit on several platforms. This expanse doesn’t make it easy to stake or even understand what assets I have, so I decided to try and consolidate a bit. 

A Few Examples

KAI

With my KAI, I could easily consolidate as the Kardiachain is its own network without crazy fees. I created a proper wallet and backed up the mnemonic phrase in my vault with all my others, making my KAI safe and sound.  I went to stake on the KaiDex, and I only found Liquidity Staking with two assets. This result was not what I was looking for— so I’ll just leave the KAI there and research more later.  It’s not very much, but it seems happy where it is now.

AMP

I haven’t done the deep dive into AMP yet, but I do know that it’s an integral part of the Flexa network, and that’s something I believe in.  Either way, I collected all my AMP and pushed it to the Flexa network staking app here.

Amazingly, you can ride on top of the ETH network, but it doesn’t cost a fortune to stake.  You can even stake into other assets and gain rewards based on other assets’ price movement, though I don’t yet know how this works. I put some of my AMP into a few places, and I’ll need to come back in a bit and see what’s working. Then I’ll move things around accordingly.

I have no idea yet what this SPEDN is, but it seems cool enough to put a little AMP into for later.  I believe it can eventually be a wallet powered by AMP and Flexa.

I like AMP so much because it’s currently super inexpensive to buy at about 1 cent, but its upwards movement took it to 12 cents last bull run.  I expect it will survive this bear market, and I can snap up more and stake it, building my quantities passively and massively.  I should hopefully be able to maintain a significant gain as the number of assets is what I’m compounding, and with each AMP token, I realize the same gain no matter if I earned it staking or not.

Ultimately, staking large quantities helps reduce the cost per coin for purchase and lowers the threshold to realize gains.  Plus, it seems I get to play with a new app once I’m set with this staking parade.

KMD

KMD also has its own network; however, I affordably consolidated all the KMD I own into my Atomic Wallet and staked it there without much fuss. The process was the same with my ZIL, TRX, and XTZ: I transferred it all to my Atomic Wallet account without friction and loss, as I will earn back the paid fees in a few days.

Regarding ERC-20 Ethereum assets, the process was less straightforward as the cost to withdraw from exchanges like Kucoin is often far greater than the balance removed. I want to share a creative strategy to consolidate and properly stake those assets that circumvented this problem.

Arbitrage for Combination

Each asset listed on multiple exchanges has unique price movement on every exchange. Similarly, each exchange has its own client base with individual interests and dislikes.  This individuality creates moments whereby one exchange may have the same asset for sale at a higher or lower price than another exchange. This is called a price arbitrage.  There is also a time arbitrage since, over time, holding an asset leads to price changes.

Arbitrage is important in such a diverse marketplace like crypto as it keeps assets moving in tandem.  Large companies use large amounts of liquidity to prop up each marketplace and account for the price movements.  I got to thinking, could I use this as a way to move assets from one exchange to another?

The problem I needed to overcome was the annoying withdrawal fees from exchanges.  While some assets like ALGO generally have low withdrawal fees, ERC-20 assets cost upwards of $30 to withdraw, and in my case, with $20 of an asset on one exchange and $30 on another— what’s the point?

Anyhow, I found their final resting spots by scouring the earn platforms and staking contracts available from folks like Gemini and Kucoin. Once I identified where an asset was going to end up, I analyzed the markets that had a portion of my holdings and the exchanges I would send them to. One weird thing is Gemini has only ERC-20 tokens, so if I had wanted to transfer some out, I’d have no real way to marry them with the other native tokens. It became evident that Gemini might be best to stake or sell the assets, depending on the percentages for staking in their earn platform. So, I put in sell orders for my assets’ exit exchanges and buy orders for just a little less stable currency on the transfer locations.

For example, I sold 10 LINK on one exchange for approximately 64 USDT and bought 10LINK on another for 63 USDT.  I could have been creative and tried to make a gain, but I really just wanted to cover the exchange fees.  Once both sides are done, I’ll have moved the assets over to where they should be staked without paying a crazy withdrawal fee.

Thankfully I had some spare stable coins lying around to make these moves. As a result, I made a modest gain in stable coins over the weekend and have many of these orders still queued and being adjusted to continuing market movements. Consequently, I converted that gain into staked DAI and GUSD, and I also have some USDC now.

I believe the timing of this holiday weekend afforded me the time to develop this new strategy and consolidate my assets. Ultimately, this combination of time and creativity has rewarded me with properly staked assets and increased earning power.

The UST collapse has taught me a lot, but mainly I have learned to have a stockpile of stable coins with some—but NOT all— staked.

I haven’t completed this effort because I have not sold and purchased all the assets I need to transfer, so I have to wait for the dust to settle before I finish my staking push. You might be wondering how I know what to put where; I first had to figure out what I had and where it was in my little corner of the crypto universe.

Portfolio V5— Done!

I spent about 20 hours coding over the holiday weekend and updating a new version of my portfolio manager. I had recently deleted everything because it got far too complex to maintain. As with every time I recreate my portfolio, I learned how to not do a few things in addition to making systems better.  This will mark the 5th time I emptied the trash on old code and rolled in a new blank page to build from.

For instance, I reduced the time it takes for a blank page to transform into a working portfolio by reusing winning concepts and standardizing my terminology across the entire app. Thankfully some of the platforms I work with made their interface less complex, and my tools can better scrape pages and convert balances into usable data that I can import into my system. This advantage lowers the manual entry time from 3 hours in V4 to about 1 hour a day. In most cases, I can go a few days now as I have far fewer moving parts.

I stopped all my bots last week because Kucoin’s progress was a bit of a mystery.  I couldn’t validate the claims of a percentage gain, and it was difficult for me to track so many moving parts. So I put measures in place to focus on the tracking system instead.

Revamping the tracking system became a priority when I noticed that the new Bitsgap botting system had started to short-change me when I exited a bot that had fallen out the bottom. I was perplexed to discover that the longer the bot runs, the more it sells off my base. Therefore, my best action seemed to be to stop all my bots so I could re-think.

So far, in July, the market volume seems to have picked up, so I reluctantly re-started the Bitsgap bots with small amounts. Now I’m working on clearing the exchanges for staking as that’s a much more reliable way to gain in a bear market. The Bitsgap bots I started that seem missing base appear to be the smallest in price per coin, and I suspect it’s because as you trade assets worth less than $0.00001, the quantity gets distorted because of the math of multiples.

Distortion is especially prevalent when trading against Bitcoin, which tends to move quickly, and the bot might not be able to close an order at a certain level fully. I intend on investing some time into denoting the bot trading in the BASE currency rather than the QUOTE currency and see if that fixes this issue. I’ll keep you posted.

But at this time, I can create the proper charts to guide my future crypto investments and a solid footing within this new system to ensure I can grow in quantity and value.

It’s Not All About Staking

Over time, I intend on staking as much as possible. I’m also forming a proper base in assets I wish to keep in a HODL wallet because I believe I must start pushing BTC, ETH, and other large caps into my hardware wallet. This move will allow me to distinguish between each asset’s tradable quantity and the amount I won’t touch until a certain price is reached. I haven’t used my hardware wallet in a long time because I forgot the code and went a month without being able to access it before I found the seed phrase on a random piece of paper. That wasn’t a happy moment in my life, but it prompted me to organize all my wallet mnemonic phrases into a proper safe place.

After I got into the hardware wallet and could transfer everything out, I was relieved, but this scare instilled a lack of interest in hardware wallets for quite some time. But now I have the keys stored safely, and the time is right to make some moves that properly utilize this technology.

At this point, I’m positioned to maintain access forever, and I feel that the protection a hardware wallet provides is necessary. Hardware wallets protect assets from the elements like hacking, stealing, and confiscation and also shield them from me and my emotions. It’s never good to be an emotional trader, but I’m calmed knowing I have measures in place to save my investments from my sometimes overzealous feelings.

If my feelings do take control and I contemplate disastrous actions, my HODL assets will be safe in my hardware wallet. This fortress will keep my HODL assets HODLing longer than if I had them floating around in wallets. Though the last time I looked into hardware wallet storage, it didn’t support staking, so let’s see what this round uncovers as crypto featuresets tend to change quickly.