Why do I need tBTC?
In this article, I will consider options for investing synthetic bitcoin, but not tBTC, but KEEP network competitors, because at the time of the examples I mentioned, tBTC was not yet available, but I will show you how to use it so that You no longer hesitate to plunge into the world of DeFi.
1. Time to change your life.
So, why do I need tBTC? This question will be asked by a fairly large number of people who own bitcoins and you will not be able to do without illustrative comparisons! Of course, the technical component is extremely important in the project, but without a real client, it will seem meaningless. I will present You a short article showing ordinary doubting BTC Hodlers a visual comparison of why you should try to use tBTC. For people who are already immersed in the world of DeFi, they may not learn anything new, but it is important to continue to expand the audience until KEEP gets hold of all the bitcoins :-D, exchanging them for tBTC — it makes sense to work with the community. Let’s imagine an ordinary person who has 1 bitcoin in his account at the beginning of 2020. He does not want to sell it, because he is afraid to miss the moment when the price goes to $ 1,000,000 per btc, which many are waiting for and may never wait :-D. However, we will not be engaged in price forecasting but will focus on the amount of bitcoins. So, 1 btc is 1 btc, and this is quite good, but at this rate, by the end of 2020, you will also have 1 BTC gathering dust on your ledger. However, what would you say if there were fairly safe ways to increase their number without risking losing them? Pretty exciting, isn’t it?
2. Consider the 2020 retrospective of 2020
So, as of January 1, 2020, you are the lucky owner of 1 btc and you are not going to do anything with it. And this is very reasonable, because at the beginning of the year there were not so many options for earning on synthetic bitcoin, if there were any safe ones at all. However, in the summer, there were amazing opportunities to increase the number of your bitcoins, without much risk. Since at this time there was no tBTC, I will consider examples of competitors renBTC, wBTC which I used myself:
- Curve liquiduty mining.
In June, Curve Finance provided an opportunity to provide liquidity in a pool consisting of 3 synthetic bitcoins: sBTC, renBTC, wBTC. After two months, you received tokens of the curve project, and also received back your bitcoins, which, by the way, You could withdraw at any time when you want during this 2 monts. You can read more about this pool here: https://medium.com/renproject/introducing-an-incentivized-btc-liquidity-pool-by-ren-synthetix-and-curve-213d21691d9a
So, after 2 months of providing liquidity in this pool, you received about 3800 curve project tokens for 1 invested btc. These tokens are locked for 1 year with a daily unlock. Let’s take the current situation. To date, you would have 520 unlocked CRV tokens, which cost 0.9$ each on 1 invested bitcoin, i.e.$ 468 profit when selling today. As well as 3280 locked CRV tokens, i.e.$ 2952, but let’s not even take it into account at the current moment. We’v already get 4% real profit on 1 BTC plus 27% locked profit in CRV tokens. I do not know about you, but I already have the WOW effect! What’s next?
- Uniswap pool wBTC-ETH
After the end of the curve program, I withdrew bitcoins in the form of wBTC, added my existing ETH (if You believe in the future of the crypto industry, you must have ETH!) and added liquidity to The uniswap WBTC-ETH Pair pool. You can read more about pools here: https://uniswap.org/docs/v2/core-concepts/pools/. In it, you get a % reward from the commissions that are charged to people who trade in this pool. But after 1 week, another event happened and I couldn’t hold the tokens in the uniswap pools for a long time.
- Mooniswap pool wBTC-ETH
On August 22, mooniswap announced the opening of its pools and, most importantly, will distribute tokens to those who provide liquidity to their pools, which I did in pool wBTC-ETH. You can read more about it here: https://medium.com/@1inch.exchange/1inch-token-and-liquidity-mining-announcement-5a75bad40ded
At the moment, there are no exact figures, but according to my subjective assessment, the profit from the sale of the 1inch token is expected to be around 10–15% of the invested funds during this year.
- Insurance
I invested only in the most top-end, reliable projects, not paying attention to others, of which there are a great many. No one can provide you with 100% security guarantees. However, it is possible to insure your funds in case they are lost due to hacking of contracts, etc. Nexus mutual gives you this opportunity. For example, to insure invested bitcoins in the CURVE Protocol from the first example, you would have to pay about 70$ for 2 months of funds in the pool. You can learn more about this issue here: https://nexusmutual.io/
I did not make insurance, because I invested only in the most reliable projects that passed repeated contract audits. But since there is an insurance option, I just can’t help but mention it, because I consider it very important in the DeFi ecosystem.
- Generous bonus
The cryptocurrency market is very generous and can surprise you at any time, the main thing is to use the tools that are available to you and constantly learn something new. And such a generous bonus in my history was the airdrop from the uniswap exchange, for using it. The fact is that they distributed their token to all people who have ever used their exchange. I received 400 UNI tokens, sold them for 1400$ and bought some more BTC ;-)
3. Financial re
In the table below, in the lines I indicated the total balance of BTC and other tokens, after the events passed.
As I mentioned earlier, in addition to the received bitcoins, we will have tokens of first-class projects, which, according to my estimates, at the time of unlock will increase the total amount by another 0.34 BTC, which will bring us a total of additional 0.51 BTC and the total amount will be 1.51 BTC, i.e. +51% to the original assets. Not bad, right?
While you are still thinking, others are already acting!
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