This evening I took advantage of Coinbase's reward system to get some free MATIC. If for whatever reason you are are still unaware of this, Coinbase allows its users to earn free crypto by going through a series of short tutorial videos that teach you about various alt coins. After you finish each video in the series, you are presented with a quiz about the material have just seen. It's multiple choice, so it's not too hard. Anyway, if you get the answer right, a small amount of the crypto you were learning about in the tutorial is sent directly to your Coinbase account.
If you're new to Coinbase, the first thing you should know is that Coinbase bleeds you dry with its fees. I have wasted more money than I care to remember both buying crypto from Coinbase and withdrawing crypto from Coinbase to external wallets. Being conscious of this, today I deciding to figure out how to stop being a cash cow for Coinbase.
Immediately, an idea popped in my head. Why not use a currency reputed to have lower network fees than the rest? I suddenly remembered a couple tidbits from an article I had read on Coinbase's own Help section about doing just that. It recommended converting your bitcoin or ethereum or whatever else into stellar lumens (XLM) and then sending that XLM to an external wallet to minimize the cost of moving your money if you wanted to avoid losing too much of it in the process. So that is what I decided to do.
When I proceeded to convert my newly acquired MATIC to XLM I was pleasantly surprised to see that it would cost nothing. Amazing. So far, so good. Then I proceeded to convert the tiny balance of ethereum I had on Coinbase into XLM as well and sure enough, the conversion fee in this case was also zero. Awesome.
Finally, went on to send all of my XLM on Coinbase to an external wallet on another platform. At first I encountered some difficulty. Not only did Coinbase ask for a XLM address, but also for something called a "Stellar Memo." While the external platform had provided me with an address, it hadn't provided me with a Memo. Worse still, when I decided to try sending my XLM from Coinbase to that address, I was warned to make sure that the other platform didn't require a Stellar memo with my transaction. I was told that if it did require one and I failed to provide it, my Stellar Lumens would be lost! Kind of intimidated, I checked the other platform for a Stellar Memo corresponding to the address it provided, but there was none.
Being impatient, I decided to risk sending my XLM to the address without the memo. To my frustration, Coinbase told me that the transaction had failed. Nervous, I checked my Coinbase XLM wallet and was relieved to find that none of my Stellar had been lost. Still, though I was unsure to proceed. So I googled it.
It turns out that Stellar Lumens allows you to write any sequence of letters in the memo field with each transaction. So I wrote the name of the platform to which I intended to send them as my memo. Then I clicked the button to send and it worked.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the fee for this transaction was not only low, it was zero!
From now on, I will definitely be using Stellar Lumens more often. Whenever Coinbase releases a new "learn-to-earn" series, I will probably repeat what I did today, converting my newly earned crypto to stellar lumens then sending it to another platform where I can then convert them to something I would like to hold for the longer term such as bitcoin or ethereum.
Do you want to earn free crypto from Coinbase but you don't have an account yet? Sign up for one here and get started!
Want to earn interest on your crypto assets? Sign up here for a BlockFi account. If your first crypto deposit is worth $100 USD you will get $10 of bitcoin!
