A new day meant a day for discovering a new blockchain. I had a pleasant experience on Polygon so far (forgiving transaction fees for unnecessary transactions) with the little capital I had, and decided to look around to see if there's any other blockchain that offers the same (priority being low fees so I can afford my own inexperience).
A couple under my radar:
- Fantom -- tempting APR% yield with low fees
- Terra -- an easy 20% on depositing their native stablecoin (greatest selling point I see from many websites)
- Shoutout to I simon who did a fee comparison against Polygon on a USD200 capital: https://www.publish0x.com/crytpo-adventure-by-ira/terra-network-fees-compared-to-polygonmatic-network-fee-xpppgrd
- Don't laugh please, there are plenty of people who don't go around wielding thousands of fiat to deposit onto blockchains, and as such, this was very applicable to yours truly
Token values (extract from CoinMarketCap)
Terra looks notably more established at the rank of #22 compared to Fantom, and commands a higher price currently. Given that I'm chasing low fees, I decided to try out Fantom. Kopi Ape has little idea on the tokenomics etc. and went with the simplest comparison. More than happy to hear from you all, do leave a comment below if you have better ideas on these 2 blockchains!
Some resources to help on your "research"
If you're wondering how many blockchains are there or would like to do your own discovery, you may refer to the tabs under: https://vfat.tools/
This website has a good collection of the different protocols available on the various blockchains.
Another popular website to assess the risk of the protocols: https://rugdoc.io/chain/fantom/
There's an easy risk icon level indicated for those farms that had been reviewed by RugDoc. No prizes for guessing which farm(s) I am eyeing on.
Below is the summary of steps I planned (conclusion: I didn't get onboard) to get onboard Fantom, read on if you want some more details:
- Bridge from ETH to Fantom
- Get gas
- Deposit on Spooky/Beefy (auto-compounding is the best buddy for lazy humans)
How to get to Fantom?
Spookyswap has a friendly instruction page to help us with that: https://docs.spookyswap.finance/links/bridge-to-fantom-opera
There's also another bridge being promoted on Reddit: https://bridge.evodefi.com/?token=USDC
How to get my gas (to make transactions)?
And so, here comes the anti-climax. I'm unable to put through my request for free Fantom (FTM) using their official Discord page - if you are at least 30-day-old in Discord, lucky you!
Without any viable faucet for FTM, I'm stuck to transferring FTM onto Fantom network. Not many bridges offer that, and the one that does charges 80FTM to transfer FTM from Ethereum network. That's USD26 on bridging fees, and not forgetting the typical ETH gas fees which has inflated since they started burning ETH. Compared to what I'm planning to transfer over, I'm thoroughly unpleased at such high transaction fees and has decided to put on hold my Fantom exploration.
So what's the point of this article?
You might be wondering, this seems like a pretty aimless article with no end-goal (i.e. a failed attempt to get onboard a new blockchain). Well, it shares my ape-like thought process, and also provides some resources that might be of interest for you if you're willing to swallow that amount of transaction fees (if you do get the official faucet amount, then I'm happy for you!). Who knows - one man's trash is another's treasure.
For those into tokenomics, check out Fantom: https://www.fantom.foundation/
Cheers all, happy exploring crypto!