If you have been exploring DeFi this past year, then I’m sure you’ve heard of Olympus DAO. I won’t go much into detail about it in this article, but they were the hottest thing in DeFi 2021 and how the whole DeFi 2.0 thing started.

Needless to say, it inspired a LOT of forks. Projects revolving around rebase tokens and high APYs started popping up like mushrooms on a soggy forest floor. Some of them were flat-out rugs, some of them tried to capture the same spark, and some of them aligned themselves with Olympus.

2022 comes along and a majority of them are dead while a few are left hanging by their teeth. Olympus stays standing, along with their fork friends(although they got hurt too.)

Long story short, I got into an OHM-aligned fork called Concave. Grinded in their discord by reading and digesting and commenting on the articles they shared until I got a White List. Awesome. When time comes for the Whitelist Sale, news comes out that Concave is launching on Ethereum – the chain with notoriously high gas fees.

Now, I’ve never stepped into Ethereum. I bought a multichain NFT(Angel Baby Hit Squad) but I paid in ADA and it was done on Discord. Naturally, I felt a little worried. 

From conversations in Discord, I quickly learned that the less transactions you do, the better. So instead of transferring ETH and converting it to DAI(the WL sale is done with DAI/FRAX), I used Binance!

Sold ADA for USDT, swapped it for DAI and sent it over to ETH mainnet for 15 DAI. I also checked out Synapse Protocol, a bridge, and the fee for bridging to ETH was 200 DAI. LOL. I then bought $100 worth of ETH for gas fees.

Okay, so there’s only two transactions left. Approve the minting and the mint itself. I loaded up my wallet with these 2 tokens and waited. While waiting, I learned through Discord that anything below 110 gwei is good. There’s also a heat map that shows you the best time for cheap gas fees.

https://ethereumprice.org/gas/

I also learned that Concave coded the minting process to be relatively cheap. It uses Merkle Tree contracts or something. Anyway, turns out to be true! It’s not cheap cheap, but cheaper than I thought. I was expecting fees in the hundreds, but here’s what it came up to:

• $7 to approve
• $23 to mint, along with
• $15 Binance fee to send DAI
• $20 Binance fee to send ETH

That's $65 in total. I'd hate to convert it to my local currency because that's enough to buy me a lobster at a good restaurant. But all things considered, it was a good experience! I feel a little less intimidated with the chain now. Makes me want to explore it more. Most high-rollers are there, which means bigger opportunities.

Although, I still haven’t faced gas wars or MEV so I’ll tread slowly...