Curve Finance ($CRV) Yield Farming

All right, guys, today let's talk about some Curves. Yep, that's right. We're going to talk about Curve Finance and their recently launched CRV token. Now, why am I talking about Curve? It's because I'm trying to make an active effort on this channel to be kind of on the front lines, moving us kind of towards where all the news is at. And today was the launch of the Curve token, and it instantly got launched on Binance, OKEx, Poloniex, pretty much everything. All right, all right, all right, all right. All right, all right, all right. All right, all right. And you might be wondering why, because, well, you probably haven't heard of it if you haven't been yield mining. But if you have been yield farming or liquidity mining, it's been around for quite some time already. And there's actually a good surprise for you at the end, because you may already have Curve tokens vested. And I'll show you towards the end how to pick those up, too. So but one fair bit of warning when I talk about all these early projects. Let's take a look at this. So the token price is quite at $10. And if you look at the market cap, it might not seem very high, $5.9 million market cap. Not too bad. But if you look at fully diluted, it is at $38 billion. Fully diluted means that if all the coins are out, that's how much it's worth. And that is a huge number. So just bear in mind right now, I'm farming this coin, but I'm not speculating on the price of the coin. That means I'm not buying a coin actively. A lot of people are wondering, why am I yield farming? What's the kind of benefit? Is it too late to get in? I see this is one of the most asked questions for yield farming. And it's not financial advice for me, but I'll just say this. When you're yield farming, the key difference is you are not really buying a cryptocurrency. When you're yield farming, you're taking a stable coin and then shoving them in a liquidity pool. And the assets stay like that. So it stays in a basket of stable coins. So this is very unlike when you buy a cryptocurrency. So when you speculate in something that's gone up maybe 10, 20 times, people are very worried if it's suddenly going to crash. Right? Because there's that potential of it diving down. But here, the risk is different. It's the assets are kept as stable coins. But the risks really come from smart contrast risks. So if there's any problem or bugs in their programming, that is when things can go bad. So it's a very different risk profile. And before we start, guys, let me tell you a little bit about my podcast. So Bitcoin Out of the Box is my latest podcast. It features a lot of amazing interviews before a lot of times before everything even gets hot. Check it out, Google Podcasts, Spotify. It's on everything. Link down below. All right. First, let's give you guys a very high-level overview of what's going on. And there's two concepts here. One is Curve itself. And the second of all is the governance token. That's CRV. So let's start off with Curve itself. It's, I hate this analogy, love this analogy, but it's almost like a bank. You deposit your stable coins inside. It takes it. It uses it either for swapping and taking on trading fees, or it takes it and puts it into different protocols, like lends it out and then takes some interest on the side. So almost as if it's operating like a bank. The difference here between that and a normal bank is that here everything is done in a transparent manner. It's on the blockchain, which is why it's super suddenly very interesting. Because we can verify that it is being used where it should be used and not being sent to pay people on top, like pyramid schemes or BitConnect in the past. So we can verify that it's not being used like that. Now with Curve itself, with that lending platform, it doesn't generate too much. So the amount of interest it can generate is somewhere between five and I've seen it almost go up to around 40%. So it's, you know, it's like a bank, much better than current banks right now. Now what's very interesting is with the distribution of this new governance coin. So CRV. So if you deposit and then also stake in this mechanism, it's a two-step process, I'll show you a process in a sec. But you'll also give this extra token on the side called CRV. Now these are the ever so popular governance tokens. You can call them Chuck E. Cheese tokens if you want. You know, they really hold no intrinsic value per se. And a lot of projects have been saying that because, you know, how do you evaluate governance? These are used for voting. Any user can set proposals, can vote on anything. Maybe what the founders wear or where things get distributed to it. It can be important, non-important votes, whatnot. So this is where it's very hard to put a price on. But now recently with the rise of DeFi, governance tokens have also taken off in popularity. So what yield farmings are looking for is for that token. Especially during the initial launch of a project, that token can hold a lot of speculative value, which is why people deposit, earn that token, and then sell that on the market. So that's kind of yield farming in a nutshell. So next up in the video, I'll give you a quick summary rundown of what the steps to do this are. I'm not trying to promote this anyway, but people have been asking me endlessly how this happens. So I'll leave this out there for what I did to get this started. But definitely do your own research. Make sure you are satisfied yourself with what's going on. And when I first started, I actually used very small amounts, say like $100. And I probably paid more than gas fees to do so. But I was comfortable with every single step before I moved forward. So that's just putting that out there. So let's start off with what the hell is all this curved stuff? What does it do? So if you actually look at CurveFi, and I think a lot of people snuck a peek at this. I've been using this for a while. So if you saw it on the background, well, I'm not surprised. CurveFi looks like Windows 3.1. It really looks like it brings us back all the way to the 80s. Not sure if you were born back then. And I certainly was. But anyways, it's definitely old school, that interface. And what it does, so you probably look at the top-hand corner. You look at this little bar here. There's quite a few pools up here. I'll be focusing mainly on this Y pool. This becomes very important. Let us just click into that. Y pool is really just a pool of stable coins. You've got DAI, USDC, USDT, TUSD. Technically, these are all supposed to be worth one US dollar. That's kind of why it's called a stable coin. But you can swap between them. And they have different risk profiles and different use cases. So there's a reason why people kind of want to do that. So this is kind of the original way Curve kind of came about, is where these coins get stored. People can swap between them. And then, of course, well, yeah, you can earn a little bit of trading fees on the side. So you can very much do that right now. You can just swap from DAI to whatever, and they'll charge you a little bit of money. But that's not the whole story. So when you enter something like the Y pool, it's a little bit more than that. But these assets get invested into other protocols to maximize that return, the return on investment for that particular pool. The caveat here is that it does have risks. So if the protocol invested in something like Compound, Ava, etc., you're subjected to the risk off those particular protocols as well. So if those protocols get hacked, then what causes a chain reaction upwards? But that's kind of the general theory of how it works. Do your own research on all those risks. This is definitely not a full coverage of all the risks here. If you want to be part of this pool, you click deposit and you can deposit any of these coins. I'll give you some few pointers here while we start. So in this case, with my wallet, there's a thousand DAI inside. So that's where it posts up. So just remember that after you click deposit, it's going to convert it into this ratio of stable coins, number one. And number two, you're going to receive these Curve Iron LP tokens. That's what you're getting out at the end. And also, it's going to cost quite a bit of money. So gas costs are quite expensive right now. So you can set it manually yourself. But just keep in mind that sometimes, if you're a little bit cheap, transactions can be stuck. Personally, I spent roughly $3,000 worth of gas for just doing various actions in the past two or three weeks. And you just have to bite the bullet on this one sometimes. But just be mindful that this can happen. Gas fees are non-refundable. They just get burnt up and it's gone. Also, there's something quite interesting as well. They have something called bonus pricing here. So if you deposit a coin that they kind of need, they give you a little bit of a bonus. So this is a 0.388% bonus. If you deposit DAI, DAI is well sought after. And if you want to see what's popular, you can switch this to take off this maximum coins available and just type what coin you want here. And you can see if there's bonus or there is slippage. So say for, again, so USDT is not very popular. So there's a slippage. So you'll lose a little bit rather than gain in the case of DAI. That's why you like the little green here. But anyways, if I click deposit right now, it's going to turn make my MetaMask. And there's going to be an approval process. And there's going to be quite a few transactions here. In fact, the estimated cost it shows you down here is around $84. Yeah, it's quite expensive to do so. So I'm not going to go click the transaction just yet, I think. For the demo account, I'm just going to pretend it's kind of done and there. Now, that's not the entire story. So that's the first step. So if you want to farm CRV, there's one more step you have to do. Okay, one more, not two more. One more step you have to do. And this is to stake it into their staking contract called Mentor. So in the next step, you have to go to Mentor. So I'll put the link down below. But it looks like this. The address is dow.curve.fly slash mentor slash gauges. Long address. Anyways, I know that. So once you scroll down, you'll see over here, I did make a deposit myself. So you'll see this little interface here for the Y liquidity gauge. Now, this is where you'll see your tokens and you can just flip the bar and play deposit. One special note here. This is the first day of everything happening. So this is where you take a lot of risk because obviously it's still new. There's also one minor bug here. So you know how you see the 0.1 here. I did the maximum amount minus 0.1 because some contracts were reported to fail if you have the full 100%. So I just subtracted 0.1 at the end. Seems to be a rounding error for now. So I took that one precaution step. Once you're done with that, the interface should show your balance and it should show a withdraw option. So if you want to be able to withdraw everything out, that's a process. There's no lock. There's no long-term lock here. So that's one of the good things about it. And if you stake it, you'll see all those tokens disappearing. So you'll see in the first step, you'll see your DAI or whatever stablecoin disappear from your wallet. You'll get the liquidity tokens. In the second step here, you'll see the liquidity tokens disappear after you stake it. The platform's taking it. That's where it goes into the staking contract. Now, over time, so you can see this over time as well. You can see the claim CRV button. That's where you can collect your yield. That's when you're properly yield farming. Now, there's a lot of questions I get asked. I see this on Telegram a lot. Do come on our Telegram if you want to ask some questions. But technically speaking, for me, when I click this button, it does cost around $15 to $10, depending on the gas cost at that time. So I don't do it like every hour. I technically do it every half a day or maybe two days, depending on how much there is to collect. That's kind of the case here. And one last thing, if you have been in CRV before, so if you were in Wi-Fi mining or something and you have Y-Curve tokens before, you might be in for a surprise. Because if you go to the website and click on vesting, so this is DAO, CRV, FI, Minter, Vesting, you can actually see if you have any CRV tokens there already. So the team behind CRV decided that anyone who was mining or providing liquidity prior to the launch of their token, they're eligible for rewards as well. But these rewards get distributed over a year. So that's kind of the vesting idea. So you can definitely check it out. And you can also claim it. So as tokens unlock, you can start claiming it. And, well, you know, free tokens. Why not, right? So, yeah, that's kind of the fastest video I can make on CRV. Now, there's a few things in common about this. So, first of all, like I said, your farming has a different risk profile. You're mostly subjected to smart contract risks. This is definitely still extremely risky. But for me, why I jumped into it was mostly because the risk profile is different. I wanted some exposure to less volatile assets. And that's why mining made sense for me. But for you, you guys got to make the right decision. That's my financial advice going forward. Now, what is this use of this token? Well, it's used for the DAO. So this Decentral Autonomous Organization, anyone can propose and make modifications. And this is very much an experiment, which is why it's also extremely hard to calculate the value of said token. I mean, you know, how do you put a weighing on what people are going to do in the future? You don't even know that yet, right? So this is where there's a lot of speculation. And that speculation is just not for me. So I've said in the past, I yield farm, but I don't really keep the tokens. I mostly sell 90%, keep 10%. That's been my rule going forward. Now, there's also a lot. Today, there was a lot of drama concerning the launch off curve. It didn't launch a very clean launch. It was so much drama. You can follow it on Twitter, just like today's Twitter. I was all tweeting about it. I wasn't actually very happy about this initial contract deployment. Long story cut short, a community member actually took the code from the publicly available GitHub off curve, spent $18,000 launching the contract. And people started using it as if it's a real thing. And then the real community, the guys behind the project said, you know what, that looks clean enough. We'll use it. Whilst that doesn't sound too bad, why this guy did it was because at the initial launch of contract, when there's so few people mining in there, this guy essentially mined a few million dollars worth of tokens, and he managed to sell it on the open market for a lot of money. So, mind blown. So, I guess it worked well for him. But whether or not, you know, that's the right way forward. I don't agree with it. But, you know, it's been like 10 hours after all this, and I kind of buried the hatchet already for this. So, anyways, there was a comment here that, yes, this guy ended up making 20K worth of CURB tokens. But, technically speaking, there's going to be 2 billion of those in the future. So, who cares, I guess. And, oh, that's the current case. Anyways, guys, that kind of wraps it up for everything here with all this curve stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed kind of this early release content to just get on the front lines, at least for you guys to know what the hell is going on. As I said, I'm mining it, but I'm not speculating on it. I hope you guys watched the entire video and figured out what's going on. And if you have anything else you want me to look at, it's weekend coming up very soon. That is also my research time into finding new stuff. So, yeah, leave a comment down below of what coin you're into this weekend. I'll take a look as well. And, guys, have a nice weekend.