Like many of you, I’ve been watching from the sidelines as BSC popularity has gone up faster than Ethereum gas prices. Since I’m boring I farm stablecoins, but before that let’s first go over some background about BSC (binance smart chain).
Binance Smart Chain vs Ethereum
One way to think about crypto chains is that they’re a tradeoff between security, decentralization, and scalability (the trilemma ).
Ethereum isn’t willing to sacrifice decentralization for security, but that's not the case for BINANCE Smart Chain (BSC). I view BSC as a ‘clone’ of Ethereum 2.0 where instead of having validators run by people scattered throughout the world, have a set number of validators controlled by Binance. This keeps the fees low and the transactions high but can sometimes lead to the network overloading and transactions not being processed. Currently, the fees are very low so hopefully with its central planning it doesn’t run into the same issues as ETH with everyone choosing their favorite layer 2 solution.
Coins and Websites
To move between BSC and Ethereum chains, you’ll need to use a bridge. Where tokens on Ethereum use ERC-20 spec, tokens on BSC use BEP-20 spec.
Here are some quick mappings between ETH world and BSC world: (underlining the ones that only exist on BSC)
Utility Token: ETH | BNB
Stablecoins: USDT, USDC, DAI | BUSD, USDT, USDC
Main exchange: Uniswap | PancakeSwap
Yield farming (strategies): Curve, Sushi | PancakeSwap, Venus
Autofarm strategies: yEarn, Harvest | Harvest, autofarm
Farming stablecoins on Harvest (BSC)
Before using BSC, you’ll need to make sure it’s supported by your wallet. Instructions for METAMASK can be found here and you can verify the endpoint you’re adding is correct here
Going to harvest.finance, click on 'Binance Smart Chain Farms' on top and you’ll see EPS:3POOL (the pool that I am interested in)
The 3pool on ellipsis is similar to the 3pool on curve (with DAI swapped for BUSD). Deposit your BUSD/USDC/USDT on ellipsis 3pool for some LP tokens but instead of staking it on Ellipsis, go back to Harvest and stake there.
That's it! Enjoy farming on BSC. You can always go back through the bridge to convert bFARM(BEP20) into FARM(ETH20)
