For today’s post I am going to tell you a story because tomorrow I am going to post on wallets. It’s a subject I have been meaning to get around to for a couple of months and even said I would write on it one day. I will also admit to making a couple of mistakes.
When I first started trading Crypto I did what most people do. Armed with some knowledge (based on researching the ForEx market several years ago and a mature understanding of finance) I Googled where to start and with the exception of maybe a couple of answers all roads seemed to point to COINBASE and prominently featured in my search criteria was the word TRUST which as I read around Coinbase I quickly understood to mean security and protection of my assets, which I further assumed meant integrity.
Mistake Number 1: I threw my lot in with Coinbase without even looking at the other options.
My first few weeks of trading was a steep learning curve as I realised very quickly that Coinbase fees are very high and you don’t always get what you see – presented Crypto prices are not necessarily the fees you will attain when trading and they would take 1.49% per trade assuming you met the minimum trading value criteria. I quickly changed from buying and selling to converting and have done much better since, especially as I have introduced a number of strategies aimed at both leveraging my portfolio and minimising Coinbase’s share of my cake (yes mine!). I even posted on the best ways to play Coinbase about a month or so ago.
I am by nature a very loyal person who sticks with something once I have decided unless facing exceptional circumstances. I have learnt to play Coinbase at its own game and reduce fees as far as they can go and was fairly convinced I will stick with them despite numerous comments in my posts that expressed differing degrees of surprise that I was with Coinbase and many of them suggesting alternatives.
However, consistent with my nature, I thought I would see it through.
More recently, my driving strategies have turned more to HODLing, first with TEZOs and then with DAI. I switched over to DAI in the last week or so after learning that I hadn’t really cashed out on the recent TEZOs surge. The surge had inflated my portfolio, but now it is settling again it doesn’t look as impressive as it did a couple of weeks ago.
I had been looking at things in relative terms and my point of comparison was my bank which currently offers a massive tax free return on 0.010% (the final zero is important!). So when I discovered that Coinbase offered a return for HODLIng TEZOs of 4.03% and DAI of 2% the thought was that it was quite impressive and even a couple of days ago I was saying that even on DAI it is 200 times more than my bank and on the value of a stablecoin.
The final straw came when yesterday among others GFreud and DeFiant Donut commented on what I was doing (and I don’t mind linking them as a sign of gratitude) and pointed me in other directions and in particular Celsius Network and the comparison for HODLing is as stark as it is dramatic. These comments more than any other stirred me to consider real alternatives.
You could say my head was pulled out of the sand. I am now seeing that I shouldn’t have jumped into bed so easily with Coinbase, because while I am now in a position of having some success having learnt to play the game with them their HODLing returns suck.
As part of my epiphany I have also started re-examining their margins and taken a closer look at their whole business model which as another commentator on my post stated is fee driven.
I don’t mind paying fees, but not obscene ones.
I now face two problems with all of my eggs in the Coinbase wallet. That is choosing a new exchange or maybe two exchanges?) and extracting my working funds without it getting swallowed up.
In doing so my primary concerns remain to be security and reliability and on this subject and my topsy-turvy experience of looking into other exchanges I will write tomorrow. I will also tell you what the other mistake was I made.
In the meantime please feel free to share your experiences or preferences with me in the comments section and I would appreciate any suggestions on which exchanges (other than Atomic) support Loopring.
Have a lovely day.
