Gemini is Growing With Me!

When I first looked into Gemini many years ago, I have to be honest, their trading platform was really difficult to use. The ability to transfer funds to and from my bank account was there, and that part was super simple, but the rest of their platform needed work, or I needed the education to understand how to use it. Either way, I wrote off the platform for a few years and just recently got back into it. I’m very happy that I came back and pleased to see their progress on many fronts.

The fundamental reason I chose Gemini then and continue to choose this exchange over others now is the same— lastability. I believe they have what it takes to get through the next few years of financial turmoil and gel with the industry’s not yet codified legislation.

When I returned, it was interesting that their trading platform was cleaned up quite a bit to look more like the other exchanges. Additionally, Gemini passes with flying colors regarding reliability, legality, consistency, and safety.

The fact that Gemini operates out of NYC and has had no noticeable system issues lets me know that they are okay with the regulators. In fact, my sources say Gemini, as a company, is working with regulators to sculpt proper regulations.

In short, I see Gemini as a safe exchange and a place for people who want to get into crypto slowly. Personally, I have invested more into the markets these past few months and all into my Gemini account. Unlike before, when I bought whatever I wanted whenever I thought about it, I have a plan this time!

Funding the Gemini account

The logistics are simple. Connecting your bank to Gemini is the same process as connecting your bank to a Credit Card to pay via ACH. Once you verify your bank account, you’ll be able to do free 5-business-day ACH transfers. Gemini provides a credit in the amount of USD that you are transferring, so I was able to use my deposit right away, even before it was cleared. I just couldn’t withdraw it until it cleared. Makes sense.

The dynamics of moving money are fascinating.  It’s so practical to most of us that no one realizes that when you pay a bill with a check, you are touching a complex system of pre-determined fates for each transaction type. ACH is a critical technology that connects the back ends of US banking accounts to automate wire transfer steps and save on the hassle. Gemini and many other crypto platforms offer ACH deposits and withdrawals because they have already been accepted into the financial ecosystem. With that being said, this time around, I want to start a crypto savings account and invest in some more altcoins, but not just any altcoins. This time, I have a plan.

Most of my investment goes into a crypto savings account, and the rest is toward my investment plan. I also made a rule that if I sell something large, I’ll put at least 30% of the profits into a stable coin account somewhere and not touch it until tax season. As a result, I have other stable coins to store. This situation has forced me to hold stable coins in volume for the first time, and it’s had me thinking that I needed to do some research to figure out which stable coin is best.

I’ve settled on GUSD for now because the savings APY is high, it’s super convenient, and it has an instant transfer back and forth between my Gemini trading account and the Gemini Grow application.

Before I get into this, what is GUSD?

In a world where stable coins are dying, it’s important to pick a stable coin that is audited regularly, backed correctly, reliable, future-proof, and easy to use.  Plus, it must have a decent APY. GUSD fits the mold in all cases.

GUSD is a stable coin that Gemini created and is backed at least 1:1 with US dollars. Within the Gemini trading interface, it’s super easy to swap GUSD for US dollars and vice versa. It’s not a market like some other stable coins, so there is no loss when changing back and forth. GUSD on Gemini is the easiest way to earn a gain on stable coins.

I did get an airdrop that was substantial and sold some of that for a gain. As planned, I transferred 30% to GUSD and put it into the Gemini Grow platform to hold aside for taxes at year’s end. It’s essential to plan for tax expenses all year because if and when the next bull run starts, I may only have a limited window of opportunity to perform the initial trades needed for my plan. Therefore, I need to be ready to go anytime, as the crypto markets don’t sleep.

You may be wondering about the process of switching that GUSD back to US dollars. Honestly, it would only take moments to convert it back to USD and transfer it into my bank account. The only thing is that because the US Dollar still settles in 3-5 business days, I need to wait for a while for any ACH transfers to clear. But, to me, having GUSD is the same as having USD. It is like a money market with rules on how quickly it takes to get a withdrawal.

Either way, Gemini assists the process by immediately giving a USD credit for the amount of my deposit. I swapped most of this money for GUSD and staked it into Gemini Grow.

If I ever want to get dollars back, I’d unstake GUSD, exchange it for US Dollars, and initiate a 3-5 business day ACH transfer back to my US dollar savings account. It’s that simple!

Gemini Grow

Gemini Grow has easy staking for many assets, and it’s really simple to navigate. Though, the hidden reason I like this platform so much is that they settle their interest nightly.  Each night they pay me a small fraction of all the coins I keep in it, and the next day that small fraction is used in the calculation to generate the next small fraction, and so on. This process assures me of exponential coin quantity growth on all of my staked assets. 

Since GUSD = USD, I can be certain my USD from my savings account is also growing exponentially. For me, Gemini Grow makes sense because there is hardly any risk, and I can easily access my USD anytime. Since I believe Gemini will be here forever within the industry, and I trust that Gemini won’t ever steal or cause me to lose my crypto otherwise, I think I can rely on them to hold my crypto for the next year or so.

I have confidence that I have picked a great company, too.  Peter McCormack speaks highly of Gemini, and I now understand what he means about it being easy to navigate for beginners.

Gemini makes saving things easy with its simple interface. They have a single button on their app and website that says “earn” by various coins. The “pop-up” explains you can buy or transfer coins into the grow account, and that night it starts making new crypto.

Besides putting a small amount of my savings into Gemini Grow, I also invested new dollars into new crypto. This time my strategy has changed. Before, I would buy the least expensive thing and hope it increased in value. So, as I bought low, I stacked in Gemini Grow. For two months, I’d run through the process of pushing coins into the proper grow account. It was kinda fun because I could do it on my iPad.

Some of my USD sits there now as GUSD earning 5%+ APY. But I got tired of receiving a few pennies each month in my savings, and I’d much rather receive a few pennies each day. Many of my other coins are sitting, earning from 0.45% APY up to 7%.

I can’t say enough kind words about Gemini Grow. It really does take the annoyance out of staking. For those who don’t know what staking is, it’s like having a savings account for a particular coin. So, say I’m staking LRC— it means that I have an account with only LRC that earns new LRC tokens at a particular annualized rate (APY).

APY’s can be tricky to understand, but the Gemini Grow interface makes it easy. Take this LRC (Loopring) example.

Here you can see that the total amount of LRC deposited is 630.60063359. Over the lifetime of this account, I have earned 1.3825696 LRC, which at this point, is worth $0.36. Every month hereafter, I can expect to earn one more LRC. Notice that the APY is calculated on the total number of LRC tokens, not the USD value. This separation isimportant.

You might think that’s not a great return, but I’m not planning on selling this for a few years unless it shoots through the roof. Either way, I’d be selling the newly generated LRC for more US dollars later; therefore, the dollar value isn’t something I care much about now since I know the quantity of LRC will only be growing.

It all goes back to my plan, goals, and time-based objectives. My investment into LRC was recently upped, but only because it was a really inexpensive coin, and if it rises even a bit, I’ll get to enjoy that gain 630 times over.

Once I bought the new LRC, I clicked “Earn” and transferred it into the Gemini Earn LRC account. The next day I received my first interest payment. This perk was an eye-opener for me because this Gemini Grow platform allows for proper compounding, which is where you get your gains.

I thought to myself: Why don’t I use Gemini Grow as a consolidation platform for my crypto that is still all over the place?  I’ll spare you those details, but here I am on the other side of a massive amount of work that consumed two months of my life. Looking through my Gemini Grow platform, I’m happy with the results. Now, I must sit and wait for these coins to move into my take-profit windows and sell them according to my plan.

Easy right? 

We’ll see!

Making time-based investment decisions

There’s a basic rule of investing— know your exit plan before you have an entry plan. In other words, have a plan that includes the future before you buy anything as an investment. I mean that sincerely. For example, I have a price where I will sell Bitcoin, and I don’t know when it will come, but my time-based investment into Bitcoin included knowing when I would sell. Other plans for assets include selling after a certain period— some in 2 years, one next month, and one in 5 years. And then, some of my investment plans are to keep coins with a low buy-in forever since they are used for gas on networks.

In the future, I wish to have a diverse crypto portfolio worth a lot more US dollars than now, for sure. But, in general, I just want to own assets that are gaining in worth worldwide. I keep a certain amount of dollars around for living and a stack of dollars for those unforeseen circumstances. Still, crypto trading opened me up to the world of other currencies.

You see, Bitcoin isn’t only worth something in US dollars. It’s also worth something in YEN, British Pounds, and nearly every other fiat currency. So by investing in Bitcoin and many of the other cryptos, I’m hedging myself against a failure of any of those currencies. With crypto, I’m holding something that sits in between all the fiat currencies and doesn’t care if I sell it for Euros and move to Europe to enjoy spending those euros or sell it to pounds and buy back for a gain. All of these options are open to a crypto trader. It’s as if the forex market had a baby and called it crypto.

My goal with this investment round was to sift through the 300+ assets I had accumulated and grade them. I wanted to focus on the ones more likely to receive gains on the next bull run— whenever that may be. And yes, I needed to add to my collection because I hadn’t yet bought some coins I wanted.

I looked carefully at my different cryptocurrencies, their price history, and what I paid for them.  Those assets that are down quite a bit have a lot of room to move before they hit a new high.  This means that IF the utility or goal of the crypto is clear, concise, and easy to understand, there would be a future for these coins, and they would last until the next bull market. Additionally, by default, they should move in an upward price trajectory allowing me to sell some or all and make gains. Or, that’s the idea, at least.

I was methodical in this investment round, and as a result, some of my recent investment orders are still on the books waiting patiently. It has taken a very long time and many thousands of trades in which I’m not yet fully deployed, though I’m close enough to call it.  I’m trying a few different things this time, and I’m hoping to track the successes and failures a little closer.

This is all probability. The probability that BTC will go up in 1 year isn’t the same probability that it will increase over 10 years. Just the same, the probability of a random cryptocurrency going up isn’t the same as another. Oddly, everything is independent yet connected.

Massive Market Movements

Ugh, I just hate the news.  According to the news, Bitcoin is either “crashing” or “pumping.” It’s horrible or wonderful. It’s bad or good— there’s no in-between. It doesn’t matter to me anymore what is said because, by the time I read a price-based article, it’s no longer valid.  At this point, it all reminds me of groundhog day.

Every few weeks, I hear about Bitcoin needing to make a decision. Will it go up or down? The funny thing is that since everyone watches these price charts worldwide, there is some truth in the self-fulfilling prophecy that if Bitcoin goes up a lot, we get a bull run. If it goes down considerably, we continue in the bear market, just like if the overgrown squirrel sees his shadow or not. Let’s hope Bitcoin doesn’t see its shadow and we get out of this crypto winter!

Prognosticators cite why they believe one reality or the other, but I’m staying in the middle. I don’t care if things go up or down because my investment thesis is that in a year, some assets will be ready to sell at a gain.

My buying strategies

As I went through my coins, I noticed a few on my research list that I didn’t own, so yes, I bought a few more only after doing the proper research. This time I was smart buying into them and set low bids that I let fill over a few months. I coded some statistics into my portfolio app, and I could look at my bag values alongside the coin’s tokenomics. I filtered down to get a list of about a dozen assets on which I wanted to focus this investment.

I picked each coin for different reasons and built a high-cost basis in all the cases where I already owned some of the coins. These new buys at better prices will lower my overall per-coin cost to a more reasonable amount, increasing the likelihood that I will make gains when I sell.

I was looking for coins that met some (but not all) of these requirements: low total supply; a high percentage of issued tokens to total supply; a lower price per coin; an all-time-high that is many multiples away from the current price; and most importantly, each coin has to have meaning and purpose. This isn’t a philosophical debate of purpose, but in reality, this next bull run will cull the crap from the market. Many thousands of coins won’t survive the next push-up, and I assume that if some coin isn’t doing something relevant to our future, there’s no reason why it will survive the next bull run.

Some say bull markets are built on dead bodies as a way to indicate that a bull market tends to start suddenly and leave a lot of people behind without buying in. I say bull markets put the final bullet into projects that shouldn’t have existed in the first place or have come to pass for one reason or another. Sure, everything in crypto has tended to appreciate in bull runs, but those coins that retain their price appreciation post-bull are the coins I don’t want to sell completely— if that makes sense. But I’m going to let go of those with no purpose, meaning, or general function.

Back to my plan— focusing on the lowest-priced coins I wanted to buy, I started investing in them slowly, patiently, and passively. Over the past few months, using a cool, Bitsgap order type called scaled order, I bought more crypto than ever before, but I spent far less money because everything is on sale!

The buy-in price needs to be as low as you can go

I no longer just buy whatever I want. Instead, I look for deals by placing really low orders on illiquid markets. Or, most recently, I’ve been using a really cool feature on Bitsgap to scale into a position over the nights of illiquidity.

You see, just about every night, the prices go down. I’m in the Eastern time zone, and the usual daily downturn coincides with my night. You may have an altering vantage point based on your time zone, but there is typically one time of the day with lower prices than the other times. This is when my Bitsgap scaled orders kick in.

I learned that the difference between making a gain and losing is often decided based on your entry point— the average price for the crypto bag you hold per coin. The rule here is to buy low and sell high. As I look back and make my case on previously purchased usable tokens, I reflect on my entry point on those assets. I don’t see that they are trading at a loss; I only see that my first purchase into that market was at a premium.  

The assets I’m getting into have significantly lower prices, and since I’m buying more quantities now, I can lower my cost per coin quite a bit. So suddenly, a slight gain in the market gives me a modest increase on a coin that I have many multiples of and started buying several years ago; I just didn’t finish filling my bags until now. And technically, I’m not finished because if this next BTC leg is down, I’ll buy more to lower all my buy-ins again.

The Bitsgap scaled order allows me to give upper and lower bounds and funding to purchase assets in between. As prices go down, I buy more and lower my per-coin cost. Here are a few examples of this in action.

Here is a wishful scaled order

Four percent of my orders have already been filled. Say I was buying 100 coins total, that would mean I have 4 of those coins already purchased, and the remainder of my investment is locked up in potential orders that will be thrown into the market if the price reaches that point.

You don’t want to show your cards when doing orders like this, so Bitsgap keeps these orders off the books until the last minute, and it swipes in and buys down the market. I hope that an illiquid time will sell down the market to a low level and fill all my orders. These usually appear as large red candles on the price chart and indicate great buying opportunities, but they rarely come.

This is a more practical scaled order.

I’ve filled 73% of my order because I started the top of the buying closer to where the trading was going on, and there’s been a move upward since. You see, that price moved through this range once, but I didn’t have the buy order placed then. I hope it will move through again, but if it doesn’t, I’ve already completed my goal of adding to this bag. I don’t care if I get all I set out to earn. I only need enough to help lower the crazy high prices I paid last time.

Here’s one I put in way too late.

This market took off as soon as it filled only 26% of my order. I didn’t start this early enough to capture all that I wanted to get. You can see the price is now making new higher lows and higher highs. Hopefully, it won’t come back, but if it does, I’ll be there with my orders waiting patiently.

Low prices make greater gains.

You’ll see that in these cases, I’m buying assets that are priced low because those are the assets that should make the most percentage gains in the next bull cycle.

For example, this last asset above is Flow, an NFT platform with utility that should be around on the next bull cycle. Its total supply and circulation supply are known, and the fully diluted valuation makes sense to me in the long run. Plus, its all-time high was $42. To me, even if this goes back to $10, I’ll be happy because my cost for each is below $1.50

Or it could crap out, be hacked, or die on the vine. I don’t know, but I only purchased a few of these, just in case. It’s the same with the other 15 assets in this investment push. I combined my years-old bags into Gemini Grown and bought new, less-expensive assets to lower my overall cost per coin.  I then stuck all of them but Flow—it doesn’t trade on Gemini yet— into Gemini Grow to earn more coins.

Strategy will make a difference

Without a strategy or plan, you’ll have to rely on luck in most realms, including crypto. And we all know luck isn’t reliable. 

One of the ways I have been building quantity is with a focus on buying quality assets with superior growth potential at discount prices. This strategy includes a solid business plan on how to be relevant in 2, 3, and 10 years. Think about it— if I’m investing in something I believe in and intend on selling in a 2-5 year timeframe. I need to be certain my asset will be saleable for a gain at that time. More importantly, I must know that it will be useful to the public until I sell. Those, after all, are the rules of the game we play.

Going into this next cycle, the virtue of my initial picks will get tested, and some will fail catastrophically, while others will hopefully succeed!

This isn’t a prognostication but more a realization from an alt-coin addict. Not all altcoins will survive this test of product relativity and relevance. It’s an evaluation on a larger scale for every project, whether it has a coin that trades on Binance or a stock listed on NASDAQ. But I am comfortable knowing my project was initiated with a plan this time. And I’m banking on that making all the difference.