Uniswap Guide with Advanced Tips and Tricks!

This video is all about Uniswap. That's apparently what unicorns sound like. Anyways, I digress. This video is the ultimate guide to getting the best experience out of Uniswap. Uniswap is becoming one of the most popular exchanges of 2020. And for three good reasons. One, you get full custody of your funds. No exchange is holding them so they can't go bankrupt. Number two, there's no KYC. So you don't have to stand awkwardly and take a photo of your passport and smile a little bit. And of course, it drastically reduces your risk of getting your passport leaked too. And finally, of course, you get the newest and hottest coins that's going out right now. A lot of new projects are choosing to launch on Uniswap first. And that is when you can get your hands on those projects. So those are the reasons why it's great. But at the same time, there are stuff to watch out for. For example, transactions can fail on Uniswap. And also, you got to watch out for fake coins. So this guide is really two parts. One is a guide for the basic usage. And second of all, there are some advanced tricks that I've developed over time that I'll share with you in this video. This video is part of our decentralized finance series. And I'll put the whole list up here where you can learn what is happening with decentralized finance. And if you enjoy any videos part of the series, make sure you smash down that like button down below. Click the subscribe button. Let's get started. Before we start, I want to talk to you about my podcast. It's all about bridging that knowledge gap between institutional investors and the rest of us. This season, we're doing a lot more interviews and covering blockchain in a lot more detail. So make sure you take that on with you if you go out for a run in your car, on the go, maybe even to the moon. Check it out in the link down below. So starting off, I'll give you a guide for how to use Uniswap. This is going to be a little bit basic, but it's going to cover some essential points that you might not even know. For example, the ability for Uniswap to have a little bit of slippage and for transactions to fail. So we'll cover that. If you know all this, just feel free. I have the time markers down below. You can skip directly to the advanced tips and tricks. Beyond that, let's get started with what Uniswap looks like. So I have Uniswap loaded up here and I loaded two coins for convenience. Let's just say we're catching out. We're selling some Ethereum for USDT. And very simply, you can see the from and to. So I'm going to just change, let's say, for example, 0.1 Ethereum and sell that to 23.8 USDT. On the right-hand side here, you can choose the cryptocurrency you want to swap to from this list. And as an advanced feature, you can also paste the address of the cryptocurrency you want to swap to. So this is for something that's not found on this list. We'll talk about that in a little bit later. Otherwise, it's pretty simple to understand. You click the swap fee. Now, in a swap menu, I do want to call attention to a few figures that are appearing up here. So we have a repeat of what we had previously. Let's say I'm selling 0.1 ETH. This is how much I'm going to get in terms of USDT. But you have to take into account this thing here, which is called minimum set. So minimum set means that if the price does change, if, say, for example, the price of Ethereum drops, then there's going to be a guarantee that the minimum of 23.69 that I'm going to receive. So this is a little bit less than the quotation. You can see that the quotation is 81 cents at the end and the minimum set here is 69. So roughly speaking, there's around a 12 cent difference here. Not the biggest in the world, but this does become quite important for some exchanges. So just watch out for this number and make sure that you can live with this rate going forward. Now, also, there is a liquidity provider fee. It's small and price impact is very small. It's on the green here. And these are factors you want to look into account or look at for less liquid coins. But for this one, this is super easy. Nothing much else to see. Confirm the swap and are off to the races. Honestly, I'm connected with MetaMask here. I get to choose the gas price for this transaction. So it operates on Ethereum. So you have to operate by Ethereum's rules here. So roughly gas can add up to a little bit. So roughly speaking here, we have 41 gas price. The fee itself for the transaction to take place is $1.39. Pinned and confirmed. We're off to the races. Transaction has been submitted. So whilst we're waiting for that transaction to take place, I do want to say I have an advanced guide for MetaMask. If you're using MetaMask with Uniswap, I teach you how to customize your gas fees, how to min-max that gas usage. So make sure you check that out. And we're actually already finished with that transaction. So we're done. We have actually finished the transaction. Transaction submitted. And it's actually successful here. So the swap has completed. Now, taking into account that the rate was slightly different from that I've actually quoted. So you can see the final rate that it did manage to help me lock in, swap it for 23.77. So a little slightly, a smidgen less than what was quoted. And you also see the gas transaction fee for that to take place. So it did cost a dollar for this transaction to take place. And that's it. That's all there is. I managed to swap my 0.1 Ethereum for 23 USDT. And I'm happy with the results. There was a little bit of slippage, few cents in terms of the price. But also there was a little bit of fee. Overall, I can live with it. I'm good with my life. So now we've got the basic stuff out of the way. Let's talk about some of the advanced tips and tricks. First and foremost, transactions can fail for Uniswap. Let's take an example of this here. This isn't my transaction, but I found it on the Uniswap log. And you can see that there was an insufficient output amount error. It will say there was a reversion. You can see it reverted. So first and foremost, when a transaction fails, all the Ethereum that you sent or the input currency that you sent, that's going to be reverted back to you. You're going to get it and you're not going to get the output currency. So there's no risk to your original funds at all whatsoever. So you don't have to worry about that. What you do have to worry about is that the transaction fee, the Ethereum gas fee, that does get eaten up in the process. So you can see here for this example, I'm assuming here, there was a 26 cents of gas fee that was used by Ethereum for that smart contract interaction. And that's not refundable. So that's just one aspect to take into account. So then why does this transaction fail? Well, transactions can't fail if the price of that currency moves. And especially if the currency, your input currency value drops, then it's not going to fulfill at the criteria you said earlier. Typically speaking for me, when I do transactions on Uniswap, what I do look out for is I go to analytics and I'll look at the coin and how contested it is. So take, for example, I'm looking at BZRX, which was recently listed. There's a lot of transactions happening every minute or so. So when I do see a coin, maybe it's on its way up and I really want to lock in my price. Typically speaking, I'll try to pay a higher gas fee than everyone else. Obviously on Ethereum network, the higher gas fee you pay, the faster a transaction goes through. That means you're going to beat everyone else to that rate and be able to lock it in. So the way to do this is you can check out ETH gas station. So I'll put a link down below. I'll find out what the fast transaction usually costs in terms of GUE, gas price for that. So this is for transactions less than two minutes. And I usually just top that by 10, 20%. So I would say maybe at this current situation, going for 50 GUE might be an option. So I just take that in practice. Let's say I'm buying some discounts, quite hotly contested. I'm going to go to my MetaMask, manually set to 50 GUE to confirm that transaction. If you don't see this option showing up, there's a guide for MetaMask, advanced guide for MetaMask. I'll show you all the options and get all these advanced options enabled. But that's typically what I do for these coins. Unfortunately, this doesn't 100% guarantee you'll succeed. Sometimes you'll still manage to fail that transaction because some other douchebag is paying a higher gas fee than you are. There's a case when this really does get abused. There was a case when BZRX first launched. Someone really wanted to get into that coin really bad. So this person actually flooded the Ethereum network up with expensive transactions. So everyone else's transactions doesn't get through. And they paid an extremely high gas cost. So they managed to be the only ones who got in on the initial offering for BZRX. So anyways, that's extreme douchebaggery for you. Next tip here is we have to watch out for fake coins. Because any coin can be added to Uniswap. There are a ton of scams. So take, for example, UCN. This was a fake Uniswap coin made on this exchange. And yeah, people were trading it for a long period of time. And people are buying essentially what is a fake cryptocurrency. So just take that into account. Even if the tag, the ticker looks the same. Even if the logo is the same. There is no guarantee that this is it. The best way to actually verify and make sure that you're getting the correct coin is to check it on CoinGecko first. So say, for example, my friend Jeff's project, Uptrend. That's up on CoinGecko. You can check out the price. You can check out where it's being traded. And typically speaking, you can click the icon here, the Uniswap pair to go through. And you'll automatically be linked to the coin. You can also, for a double confirmation, you can also click on the ETHER scan section. So just go to the top explorers and go to ETHER scan, and you'll see the correct contract for Uptrend. So this contract up here is starting with 0x07597. Just make sure that number matches here. On top here, you can see 0x07597. So it's the same exact same contract that you're interacting with. So that's one way to double check and secure. So I do have one special tip that you do have to be careful of. So even if you're on ETHER scan, let's say you search for 1UP, you can see a bunch of them, a bunch of fake ones here. So just be extremely, extremely careful not to search for the token on ETHER scan. Go directly either to the project or to CoinGecko. Link it from there. That's the safest way forward. Next up, this is a neat trick. If you're contesting a coin that's heavily being traded or is on the way up, you can adjust your slippage tolerance to increase that a little bit more. So you have a higher chance of the transaction going through. So you can do this by clicking on the little ears on the top right-hand corner. They typically set your slippage at 0.5. So you can increase that to 0.1 or even type a manual figure here. You can say like manually I have a 5% tolerance. So let's see how this plays out. First of all, on this chart, you already see the slippage tolerance as 5%, the one I just set up there. And when I click swap, you'll see the current rate. So 1.1 ETH is going to 23.8 US dollars. You can see that the minimum that they'll send, the contract will send me, is 22.7. So you're tolerating, you're accepting that during this time, maybe prices can go down and you're accepting anything above 22.76. So this way, of course, you have a higher chance of the transaction going through, but at the cost of potentially receiving a little bit less cryptocurrency in the process. Also, there's one last trick I want to talk about, and that's with trading on the go. Say, for example, you don't want to be stuck to your computer to trade and you want to go out. But at the same time, prices might be fluctuating a lot over time and you want to have the ability to sell. You can actually use Uniswap on your phone. So it's the same address and use Wallet Connect to connect to a mobile wallet. So this includes both MetaMask and Trust Wallet. Those are the top two that I've been using right now. And you can import a wallet into that and start trading. So typically speaking, what you can do is you can actually have the same wallet appear on both your computer and on your phone. And if you don't know how to do that, it's with the recovery phase, just importing that in. And I have guides for that up here. But the essence is that you can have both the same wallet appear on your desktop and on your phone. And then you can connect to it using Uniswap on your phone as well. So a quick demonstration. I'll just say, for example, I want to sell 0.1 ETH again. Connect to Wallet. Wallet Connect. You have a bunch of choices here. You can choose MetaMask or Trust Wallet, etc. I'm just going to choose Trust Wallet here. Connect it up. You can see connect that interface. Now go back to your browser. Back. Click the swap button. Confirm swap. So now I can just sign and confirm that transaction. And it's good to go. So I'm mobilely trading my cryptocurrencies with Uniswap. It's not the most convenient feature because you have to multitask between multiple windows. But at the end of the day, you still manage to get to do what you wanted to do, which is potentially buy or sell cryptocurrencies on the go. Now that covers it for the Uniswap tip guide and tips and tricks. I really hope you found this guide super useful. If you did, make sure you click the like button down below. And we have a lot more videos on decentralized finance and guides. Especially I think you'll find the MetaMask guide extremely useful because it tells you about some tips and tricks to optimize transactions and even how to use a, well, ledger with your MetaMask. So make sure you check out those videos up here. And with that, thank you guys so much for watching. I'll see you next time.