I write this article as a "Gordon on a journey" piece. This is intermediary, not the conclusion.

If comments suggest I'm about to mess up, the story may trend in a new direction- we shall see!

Another if: If we were talking about tens, hundreds, thousands of dollars, I might be more emotionally invested in the outcome, but I still hope I did 'this' right.

I haven't used metamask in a while. When it comes to ETH wallets, the flexibility and diversity is pretty awesome, all because of smart contracts. But, the experience is also a stark reminder, for me anyway, why mass adoption is not going to look like a metamask wallet.

For the 'easy' part that most people can handle, adding a chrome extension, everything else is still a "crypto" person easy thing to do, not an average person easy thing to do.

The crypto world has still not, in my opinion, done very well to simplify the "explain and name" process for newbies. If you target the "I use email and Zoom" grandparents as the target for crypto education, then you can imagine explaining Password, 12 words, Keystore, Private key is not the friendly path to getting them thinking "your bank without a bank".

Anyway, I didn't have any issues remembering my personal path to my metamask wallet, and even know where my private, seeds etc were in case I need to load on a new computer. I even tested myself by starting from scratch to prove seeds work: they do.

I added FTM easy just clicking "import" and the same for the mainnet FTM Opera was also easy. Grab the right contract, do the thing.

For whatever reason, adding STA was simply not coming up. I was going to give up, except I'm going to be earning pennies and eventually dollars, and iFARM was useless to me (shhhh don't educate me about it, unless you really want to lol). For whatever reason, STA simply did not come up, and then it did. I checked the contract address I don't know how many times. So, when it works, it works; boom pops right up in the list, add, done.

But, there is still a chance I haven't done things right. There are STA and there are wrapped STA, which I don't have trouble understanding. I've studied, and used, wrapped coins. No problemo. In this case, I'm not trying wSTA, but I am setting up STA to exist on FTM, I assume for reducing gas fees. But, from my understanding, you need your wallet to "see" your coins, hence importing their info, and then once that is set up, you simply point that coin's pay-out to your wallet's address. I don't know anything different or unique beyond using the wallet address, to tell Publish0x when filling in settings, on-chain wallets. Did I miss something? If I "point it to FTM's chain"... seems like it should still be my metamask wallet address.

So, still not satisfied that adding Fantom's Opera chain, and successfully adding STA as an import under the ETH mainnet was correct, the lightbulb moment. Switch to FTM mainnet, go grab the FTM blockchain explorer, look up STA on FTM chain, grab that contract address... not the STA address on ETH's chain. Boop, there it is. So, now I've got STA recognized under ETH and under FTM.

Trust me, this is not the future of finance. If grandma has no clue any of what was discussed, it isn't the new piggy bank of the future. It really wasn't hard to figure out, or do, any of it, but there wasn't any helpful explanation from STA, ETH, or FTM documentation, and seriously, guys, this stuff isn't any different than its been. STA explains their contract. FTM gives their contract. STA focuses on explaining the difference between STA and wSTA. Any 3rd party instructions need maybe 4 sentences to explain the difference, and the 2 contracts, ETH and FTM, and perhaps I was not in the reading mood at the time of my journey, perhaps it's all on me, but I have an inkling, that if I were the grandpa in the scenario, I'd simply decided not to go into crypto and might accidentally hit "buy" on an NFT which is nothing but a bad turn in the worst part of town- lol.

Shame on me for not immediately thinking "chain, contract, import, import coin, done". But, it was the actual instructions that led me astray.

If you're dealing with adding 2 new coins to your wallet, that you've never held in private custody, and both have to be imported, but one is supposed to be the actual chain provided for the other, that's 2 steps to financial freedom, errr... two separate concepts for someone to grab on to. It's historically an ETH wallet. Adding a separate mainnet chain is cool, but not something everyone will automatically understand. When someone starts saying "import STA but make sure it's on FTM"... that's not sufficient when providing the wrong smart contract address, or without specifying the contract address for FTM as opposed to ETH.

Anyway, I have no issues with smart contracts, mainnets, and going peeping on chains, but if I had zero instructions, I would have landed at the right conclusion in a few minutes. WITH random instructions, it took me some in-background mental processing to realize what I had done wrong, or more accurately, what I had not yet done. Perhaps I'm the only one, but something tells me not. So, this is either public mocking time, or a helpful story for someone else.

Now, the question I still don't know the answer to, is whether there will be any issues when sending STA to my wallet, since technically it is recognizable under ETH AND FTM. Does Gordon need to remove it from ETH to prevent confusion, or other issues? Lemme know; haven't gone that deep into personal metamask use.

Maybe its the creepy fox watching everywhere my cursor goes? Maybe it's just that Loopring still needs 10X the volume before I'm staying in the ETH ecosystem for months at a time. Either way, I'm prepared for disappointment if first wallet send of STA comes with glitches. The next phase will be getting the STA/FTM stashes somewhere for convertability. Small amounts of crypto are still relatively useless for moving them around, so if Publish0x sticks with paying out in these two, it will accumulate. If they shift again, it may add to my forever hodlbags if I can't swap or trade them into something I tend to always trade up into profit.

The future is ours to see. Tell me your experience with this. Pretty much everyone on here has probably used metamask, FTM, and STA more than me. I've been busy with MyCryptoWallet, MEW, Exodus, and 40 different exchanges over the past 5 years.

Thanks for reading, and perhaps I'll write a follow-up with my joy that things simply arrived safely, or my dismay that having STA under both mainnet's is a recipe for disaster, but I have a feeling the chain chosen only matters when it comes time to choose which one to send from. We shall see.

And on that note, Crypo Gordon Freeman, for now... out.