This is a continuation from Part 1. The summary for that article is how TRONex is a scam with the team behind running the platform. After the TRONex fiasco, I searched again for other platforms to try so that I can find one platform good enough for me to stay and HODL.

Here are the platforms that I tried which is giving me mixed results.

1) NanoTron

NanoTron is one of the first TRON staking platform where if you locked 100 TRX with them, you can earn up to 8.5% daily interest rate, which means you can get back your return of investments in just 12 days! You can withdraw your earnings anytime according to their platform. There are 4 different rates: 5.5%, 6.5%, 7.5% and 8.5%, where the locking periods shorten from having your money staked forever to 18 days. I staked 100 TRX in the 8.5% rate, at first I can withdraw consecutively for a few days, before the withdrawing stops working and I lost 100 TRX with the platform and then they closed down the platform already.

2) TRX Profit

This is the worst staking platform I've ever experienced, even worse than TRONex. The platform states that you can earn around 30% in daily interest rate for staking a minimum of 50 TRX, which is a return of investment in 4 days! So I tried again, staked the minimum amount and see what would happen. I checked my TRONlink wallet and automatically, I have 720TRX directly pulled from my wallet and into their platform! I tried withdrawing without success, and then I lost another 720 TRX in the process to them and similarly, they also closed down their platform permanently.

3) Sun Mining

SUN.io is a farming platform where you stake your TRX to farm for SUN tokens. This platform has much lower risk than NanoTron and TRX Profit, and you can withdraw your SUN tokens to your wallet consistently. However, if you hold your SUN tokens long enough, your tokens continue to lose in value over time so I swap to TRX every time I got my rewards.

I staked my TRX and sold my SUN tokens consistently back in the early days where SUN token is worth around $20, and now it stabilized below $10 without any utility. Thus, I earned a little from using this platform.

4) T2X 

T2X is another platform where you auctioned your TRX tokens for T2X and then staked with their platform to earn T2X which can be converted back to TRX. It was a nice platform where you can read a litepaper explaining how their platform works, and you're earning both TRX as rewards and T2X as dividends daily. You can choose how long you want to stake your T2X, and if you staked them for at least 5 days, or any period with a multiple of 5 (10 days, 15 days, 20 days, etc.), you can earn extra bonuses. I liked the platform where I earned and withdrew my earnings consistently without any issues. Furthermore, during the early days T2X was trading at 1 T2X = 2TRX at some point., so I compounded my TRX earnings to auction more T2X to earn more rewards.

As of today (28/11/2020), the price of T2X has dropped significantly to just 1 T2X = 0.0245 TRX. Since the value of T2X has been losing value day by day, I pulled out all my funds when the exchange rate was 0.3TRX per T2X, but still made a small loss from using this platform. 

5) BNKR

Bankroll is actually one of the best earning platforms I've ever used in the TRON ecosystem. You buy CREDITS with TRX using Bankroll Credits to earn BNKR, withdraw TRX and compound your CREDITS to earn more TRX & BNKR. Then, You use Bankroll Stack to buy STACK with your BNKR tokens to earn more BNKR and compound your STACK. I find this to be the most rewarding as the BNKR token value increases to around 24 TRX per BNKR before dropping to around 3 TRX. The only downside is that it's click intensive, where you have to roll, approve smart contracts and withdraw multiple times to maximize your rewards, which if you don't have enough energy and bandwidth, the transactions fee may outweigh the rewards depending on how much TRX staked. In addition, the BNKR platform experience is confusing because they offer many services and some of the services are outdated but the announcement to close down some of the services are not easily spotted by a regular user which increases the chances of depositing to the wrong services. 

Overall Thoughts

There are some advantages to using the TRON ecosystem as compared to Ethereum. If you froze TRX for the energy and bandwidth more enough, you don't have to pay for gas fees. Even though you don't have enough of both, the transaction fees are super low with an average of just 3 cents. Due to it's DPos consensus, the execution of the smart contracts are instant compared to Ethereum's waiting time of at least 5 minutes due to its PoW consensus. However, I don't like the Dapps that they are offering at the moment. If you check through Dapp.com, most of the apps are either categorized as high-risk or gambling, without much useful utility besides earning a good amount of interests for your tokens. The only useful platform that I used consistently from the TRON network is BitTorrent, whereas the safest place to earn a stable TRX return is by freezing and delegating your TRX to a super representative.

As a more conservative investor, I don't like to gamble my money for higher rewards because you'll also have a high chance of losing big. Likewise, all platforms that I encountered requires locking your funds to a platform to earn the rewards which means a vast amount of time is needed to research their platforms to determine whether if they're legit or not. Justin Sun is also a controversial figure to which I do not have much confidence in putting my money on him who runs the blockchain. Overall, TRON has been a very high risk place to HODL so finally I pulled out all my funds from there, losing some money in the process but I earned a valuable experience of becoming wiser in making better cryptocurrency investment decisions.