I love these days and weekends when all the hype has gone away and Ethereum main-net fees are manageable again! Today, I was seeing blocks with gas fees ranging from 8 to 20 gwei... which is something that I haven't seen since my first forays onto the Ethereum blockchain! Which makes it quite fitting that I'm going to take the opportunity to close out some long dead DeFi and other smart contract positions that have been hanging around for just about that long as well!
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Anyway... in the morning, I had to head off to a rehearsal... and so, I just lined up a batch of things that I wanted to get done at low transaction costs. These were pretty much all withdrawals from various protocols that I had been putting off... nothing time critical, so I could just whack in a low bid starting around 10 gwei through to 17 gwei in the hopes that a sudden dip in gas prices would see them included in a random block sometime during the day!

First off on the chopping block were some really really old positions on the Yearn Vaults... wow, this was revolutionary at the time (it still is...) and it has since been copied many times over by many DeFi projects. In fact, these positions in stablecoin vaults were sooooo old that they were still sitting in the V1 version of Yearn! It actually took a bit of searching around to find the website front-end for interacting with the smart contracts!

Next up in the list of rescues was a batch of deposits that had gone into the no-loss lottery protocol, PoolTogether. I had joined this nearly at launch, and I had stablecoins and a few other tokens hanging around locked in the lottery pools.

Unfortunately, I had never won one of the jackpots, but they did garner me a nice airdrop of POOL governance tokens. Well, time to get them out and into easier to access DeFi pools!

Finally, a bunch of Uniswap V3 NFTs that needed to be cashed in for the underlying tokens. When Uniswap V3 launched, it was an interesting experiment in concentrating DeFi liquidity pairs by specifying the exact price range over which the tokens would be exchanged.

This would result in much better returns... If the price for the pair remained in range. Sadly, the sudden burst in Ethereum price threw most of these V3 positions out of whack... So it was time to withdraw them, eat the impermanent loss and rescue the rewards as well.

Unfortunately, with these last Uniswap transactions I made a mistake... As the execution of the smart contract was time sensitive it it would fail. So after sitting in the queue for a while, when it was time for the transactions to execute they had gone stale and failed. Sigh... When I found out later in the afternoon between rehearsal and concert, I immediately resubmitted the transactions at a juicy 12 gwei...unfortunately, it did mean that I paid twice (once for the fail and the other for the successful). Ah well, still cheaper than during NFT hype season.

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Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
FTX: Regulated US-based exchange with some pretty interesting and useful discounts on trading and withdrawal fees for FTT holders. Decent fiat on-ramp as well!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Huobi: One of the largest exchanges in the world, some very interesting listings and early access sales through Primelist.
Gate.io: If you are after some of the weirdest and strangest tokens, this is one of the easiest off-chain places to get them!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
Stoic: A USD maximisation bot trading on Binance using long-term long strategies, powered by the AI/human system of Cindicator.
StakeDAO: Decentralised pooled staking of PoS assets.
Poloniex: One of the older regulated exchanges that has come into new ownership. I used to use it quite a lot, but have since stopped.
Bitfinex: Ahhh... another oldie, but a goodie exchange. Most noted for the close affiliation with USDT and the Basic "no-KYC" tier!