... and so the second round of the DEGO-KCS mining on Pool-X Kucoin is starting soon (just announced). I thought it would be nice to have a quick overview of the contest after I had an unexpectedly good experience from the first round.
So, just to sum up the prizes and rules for the contest. First, you will need to have an account on Kucoin and the corresponding NFTs and DEGO tokens will need to be sitting on your Pool-X account (the staking part of the Kucoin).
There are two leaderboards and prize-pools. The first is the DEGO part of the contest. Basically, this is the same as before with snapshots taken of the DEGO balance in Pool-X (Kucoin) at the end of the contest. 400 prizes (mining NFTs) will go to the top 400 holders, and another 50 will be distributed by lottery to the rest of the holders.
The second part is new to this Round. All holders of the Mining Pick NFTs (purchased from https://dego.finance/home) and having the NFTs on Pool-X (Kucoin) will be in this leaderboard. The Mining Pick NFTs come in 6 levels, with each level counting for different mining rates and points on this particular leaderboard. This section of the contest has 200 prizes for the top 200 holders of NFTs (point allocation is on the contest announcement page) and another 50 prizes being randomly allocated amongst the remaining holders on Kucoin.
You can see the contest announcement page here
So, onwards to my personal experience from the first round and how I think I will play this contest in the coming days.
Until the last day of the previous contest, it was quite easy to stay within the top 200 DEGO holding spots on Kucoin without needing to allocate too much in the way of USDT (DEGO only has pairings with ETH and USDT on Kucoin). The risk with these contests (as with all of crypto and Defi!) is that you don't want to lose your capital in chasing future earnings... huge future earnings are worth nothing if you lose your capital loss is much larger! Plus, the earnings need to be in something tangible... I'm always a bit suspicious of earnings in unknown worth tokens, with APR calculated at unknown future exchange rates!
So, in the first round... I set my exit strategy quite early on. If it required more capital than I was willing to put in, then I would sell DEGO at the inflated rate (contests tend to inflate the exchange rate unnaturally by creating artificial demand) and hold a tiny amount to have a ticket for the lottery. In the last couple of hours before the contest end, larger stakes started piling in... and it wasn't worth it to maintain my ranking. After all, none of us really knew what sort of returns in KCS would be coming when the week-long mining round began.
In the end, I made a small profit on DEGO selling... and then got lucky and won a Mining Tram NFT in the lottery as well! During the mining round, the little tram mined around 75 KCS... so around 60-70 USD in tokens, and I was relieved that I hadn't decided to risk more than my cutoff! I pity the people who were taken in by FOMO and tried to maintain the ranking... as the amount that were paying for DEGO would have been not worth the mining rewards!
This time, I will keep a eye on the DEGO rankings again... at around 1 USDT (or more) per DEGO I wouldn't want to risk more than I think I can get from mining with a basic cart. However, I might do anther round of playing the profiteering game by buying DEGO earlier and then selling it when (if...) the FOMO near the end of the contest sets in!
On the NFT side of things... I had a quick visit to the DEGO website to see what sort of NFTs were on sale on the public marketplace. I quickly snapped up a NFT that was priced too cheaply in comparison to it's level and I will transfer it later to Kucoin to be eligible for the NFT portion of the contest. I think that less people will be doing this part as it is less easy to do... plus, ETH gas fees...
Interestingly enough (and good for me..,.) the NFT that I won in the first round is eligible to mine KCS in the mining phase of the contest! COOL!
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