As one of my more consistent investment returns, I thought I would do a step by step guide on how to get started with Cake Defi. 

EDIT PLEASE READ FIRST  

The Olympic referral rewards I stated through out this piece ended on August 13th.  The referral rewards as of today are you get a total of $30 tokens, and I get $10 after KYC and a one off $50 or more deposit.  Still not a bad deal. If they release a new referral reward I will amend this part again.  I have amended the article as well with the new details

EDIT END

First things first, you WILL want to take advantage of their sign up option.  At the moment, yes, the referrer gets $10, but you get an extra $30 to play around with.  You need to complete KYC, and deposit $50 worth of crypto ( in one shot ) to be eligible to get this.  Also the bonus is locked up for 180 days, but it is put inside the 100% staking pool, so it is not sitting around doing nothing.  My referral code is 122863 ( hint hint ) Here is the full details in black and white from the horses mouth. 

So first you need to do KYC. This is pretty standard, and involves your ID card. I won't go through these steps as they are all pretty self explanatory and take you through it step by step. I had no problems here. 

Next you need to fund the $50 worth of coins. I must admit I ran into a bit of trouble here. Being the cheapskate I am, I wanted to pay the absolute minimum in fees and charges. 1,99% in card fees, no thanks. SEPA ( european payment scheme ) was free, but it involved going through Banxa. I had never heard of them, and I wasn't about to send money to them.  Transax also wanted to charge for SEPA. So I have to get my coins elsewhere. 

These are the coins cake accepts.  If you have any lying around, you can transfer it in and swap it for DeFI tokens.  It was at this point I checked how much it would cost to actually withdraw the coins, depending on the coin it can be expensive.  Only the DeFI withdrawl amount was reasonable in my eyes.  

EDIT:  Part of the problem was this was right at the beginning of my crypto journey, and I had very little idea about all the different networks, and the various coins. So I went for an exchange that deals with most of the problems for me. I had a card, I wanted to buy into cake safely. As one of the comments asked, depositing $50 of ANY of the above tokens works. I would transfer a little more than $50, since if in the transfer window the value goes down a little and $49.99 arrives in cake, you will not get the referral bonus. 

I have also gone through the coins, and here are the withdrawal fees listed on the website. Now to be sure, if you withdraw the wrapped version of the coins the fees are miniscule, but that only really works if you are working with the DeFi nodes, so will skip those values.  These are the withdrawl fees for unwrapped tokens. 

0.0005 BTC ($22 ), 0.001 BCH (57c ), 0,003 DASH ( 50c ), 0,2 DeFI ( 50c ish ), 5 Doge ( $1.28 ) , 0,013 ETH ( $39.54 ), 0,01LTC ( $1.54 ), 25 USDT, 25 USDC ( as of 09/08/2021 according to google )

at that point I had never heard of Bitcoin cash or dash, so decided to stick with DeFi which was the native coin. 

If you deposit the currency in, you can swap into DeFI tokens for free, and the swap rate is pretty good, but I noticed I would get a little more at the exchange.  Just me being cheap again.

END EDIT

So I had decided, I needed DeFi coins to transfer in, and keep them there to transfer out if I needed to.  Next stop, Bittrex

here are the markets you can trade for Defi.  I used my card, and bought the slightly over $50 of coins.  Then I withdrew to the Cake address. Yes I know the charge was about the same, But I had heard of Bittrex before. 

And that was that. I received my sign up bonus no problem. Staking has been consistently around the 100% ( lowest I saw was 96% for one day ).  There is an option to Auto compound.  Staking rewards are paid out every 12 hours.  Cake has been by far the easiest invest and forget of everything I have going on. I get a weekly email detailing how many tokens I earned that week. 

The only caveat I would say is, do NOT try to run a node yourself, unless you are supremely confident in Linux.  I got greedy, saw that you could earn a little more interest running a node yourself, and got myself in to trouble. The community was very helpful, and I eventually got everything out and back into the Cake website.  Not going to go totally into it, but putting it in the node means the coins automatically get wrapped. And for some reason I couldn't unwrap them.  You are giving up some of the interest to avoid all that hassle. Stick with the Cake website. 

I hope this helps someone.  If this inspires anyone to try cake, please use my reference number 122863 . $30 for you, and $10 for me, win win.