It is often said that crypto is the new wild west, and maybe it is because of this and my affinity for spaghetti westerns, courtesy of my grandmother's house family afternoon gatherings watching these movies, that I so enjoy this space. So I thought, why not start this journey of sharing my story with a series inspired by one of these movies. Pardon my exquisite photoshop skills for the thumbnail, I assure you my trades are far better. With this series I will be sharing, obviously, the good, the bad and the ugly investments I have made, and whether or not I would do them again if circumstances were different. Let's start this off with...
The Good - VeChain (VET)
VeChain is one of the oldest projects I have known about since starting off in crypto. Even in 2017 it was already a household name and often featured in the various Youtubers I followed daily for content, but it might surprise you that I did not get involved with this gem until 2019. It was at this point in time that I felt more comfortable with my trading experience. After the 2018 bad aftertaste of the market crash I adopted a very conservative investment strategy and only dollar-cost averaged into basically three choices that I personally considered good investments, these were Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cardano. While educating myself about this space this was pretty much my whole portfolio for 2018, not counting the coins and tokens I previously bought when starting out late 2017. But all of that changed in 2019, and Ethereum was rather cheap back then, so I thought why not dip my toes in the water a bit more and actually look for those opportunities that could double or even triple my holdings of ETH and BTC, after all these were the ones I wanted to have more of.
And so was that I arrived at VeChain. I thought about starting modest, and only made a small investment of 2 ETH, at the time worth about 300$ (my how things have changed since then) and bagged myself a nice little amount of around 50k VET tokens. I bought them for two reasons, first I knew this project had potential and longevity, I thought I could easily double that 2 ETH investment and bag myself some profit along the way. And second, holding VET would generate you their native token VTHO for simply having them in your wallet. And this, this is where I was hooked. I absolutely love the idea of money generating money. And sure, the amount each single VET can generate in VTHO is minimal, a whooping 0.00042 VTHO per day for each VET you hold, they are grains of sand in a beach. Small yes, but enough of them will add up eventually. And if nothing else, in the distant future when Bitcoin is more universal and satoshis are the measure of price, VTHO to BTC conversion will effectively be a good way to stack some sats. This is how I see my VET investment. Over the course of 2019 I did some swing trading with VET. The initial 50k I bought I moved to my Ledger Nano S and acquired about another 200k VET from a BTC purchase, and with this amount I started to trade. I bought it really cheap, and would always sell it when the price to BTC doubled, and then wait for the price to drop again to the 50% mark to re-enter my position, with a bigger purchase.
Through out the rest of 2019 and 2020 I repeated this price cycle 4 times. Sometimes it would take months for the chart to align, but all that time I was simply holding I was still getting more and more VTHO, which I would then convert to VET and send it back to my Ledger wallet. Overall I reached an all time high of around 700 000 VET tokens, both in my personal wallet and the holdings I had in the exchange to trade. At this point I was pretty comfortable with my holdings and decided that that was enough swing trading. Now I wanted to make the best of my investment. I started exploring all the options to stake VET but all I could find was that simple VET staking simply gets you VTHO. This is not a bad trade at all by any means, if you have a decent amount of VET you can generate a fair amount of VTHO to convert to USDT or BTC, whichever you prefer. But I wanted more VET. And then I discovered something very interesting...
Binance Savings
Whatever your opinion on Binance is, whether you think it is too centralized or that you should not keep your cryptocurrency in an exchange (and you are right), their savings program is quite an interesting one. They pay you interest on your VET in VET on top of a daily VTHO distribution from the percentage you are generating for holding with them. I decided to run an experiment for a few months. I split my pot into two, with 350k staying in my Ledger and the other 350k in Binance, in their savings account. Every day I was getting paid around 10 VET tokens, that compounded in the savings account, and close to 1000 VTHO, again every day although this amount varied and initially started closer to 2000 getting lower and lower until it hit a steady supply of 800 VTHO daily, on Binance alone. By contrast my Ledger only generated around 4000 VTHO per month on the 350k I had there. I always converted this extra VTHO for more VET but Binance was seriously outperforming this conservative strategy. So after running the experiment for two months to get consistent results I decided to swing it all onto Binance, and started to make some serious profit on VTHO generation. Overall, at its peak I was managing to bring in around 200 USDT per month from VTHO sales alone.
The final numbers of this experiment are, for the 6 months I ran the experiment I generated a total of 13k extra VET from the compounding interest and the sale of VTHO which I would then use to buy more VET. To be honest the only reason I stopped doing this was because of the recent price action of VET. I sold around 500k of all of my holdings, both for BTC and ETH and I must say, I got my initial investment back and then some. I am left with a leftover amount of around 213k VET tokens which I am still maintaining in Binance for this strategy, albeit now the profit generated by it has been cut significantly. My ultimate goal was to get to 1 million VET tokens, to be able to get a Strength Node and support the network further, but that seems like a long way off now. I like this project, a lot actually, and am reconsidering reinvesting my income from other projects to be able to build back up my VET bag, hopefully one day to node status. The point is, I think VET and VTHO generation is an often overlooked strategy to make yourself some extra income. There are even further opportunities in the VET ecosystem, which I will talk about as well.
The VET Ecosystem
Another opportunity I have seen inside the VET ecosystem is of a small cap token called Safe Haven (SHA). This 22 million market cap token, way down in the list outside the top 500 describes itself as "Building solutions for inheritance, asset distribution and asset control on the VeChainThor Network." What is interesting and caught my eye about this one is, like VET, you can run a node by just holding SHA. Now, it takes a fair amount, in fact just like VET you need a minimum of 1 million SHA tokens to run their most basic node, the Connect Node, and unlike VET you do not get anything else until you have enough for a node. But once you do manage to get one up and running, after the maturity period, you are set with another passive income stream that requires little to no maintenance at all. And you want to know the best way to get SHA? By generating VTHO.
But how, you might ask. Well the simple fact of the matter is that your VET can get you SHA, simply by existing. If you operate out of the Ledger wallet like myself you probably have interacted with the Sync Wallet for VeChain. This fantastic wallet has it all, it allows you to manage your tokens from your secure Ledger Nano S and comes with built in apps to discover and explore VeChain's fantastic ecosystem. Within one of these dApps is Vexchange, a Uniswap relative for VET. And in Vexchange you can exchange VTHO for SHA, and the best part is you pay for the fees in VTHO, which not only is a minimal amount that you easily generate in seconds, you don't even have to spend any VET! Ever since discovering Vexchange I have used it to exchange VTHO for VET or SHA for basically free.
My Conclusion
Ultimately VeChain has become one of my favorite projects in this space. Not only is it a good way to make passive income, but I feel like it has tremendous potential as well, and so do some of the projects building in the VeChain blockchain. I often regret selling my VET, even if it has netted me the profit I wanted and look for in any investment. My experience with this has been nothing short of extraordinary and I want to continue to interact with it. My end goal for this project is now to have both a Strength Node in VET and a Connect Node in SHA and have both generating passive income. It might take me quite a while to get, but in the end I feel like it will be worth it.
If you've liked what you've read here, why not interact with VeChain yourself a little and buy me a coffee, courtesy of yet another exciting little app in the Sync Wallet, I so do love my caffeine.
As a disclaimer I am obliged to say that none of my articles are financial advice. My content is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute a substitute for personal counsel or professional advice in finances. What has worked out for me might not work for you. Make sure to do your own research so you can make the most informed decision for yourself.
Thank you for reading.
