How to buy FTM

What is FTM?

FTM is the token used by Fantom. Fantom is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based smart
contract platform. It promises to solve scalability problems inherent in Blockchain technologies, as well as provide a platform for decentralized applications (dapps). There are a lot of other cool things it can do, but I just learned about it yesterday, so rather than try and describe it, here are some links that do it much better:

I found out about it through Andre Cronje. He’s the man behind yearn.finance, among other things. And I have him on my DeFi list on Twitter. He’s also part of the Fantom team. He tweeted about what you can do on FTM. I wanted to find out more so I dug deeper. I also saw a video that FTM is starting to go parabolic and I wanted in on it. Here’s how to get some…

The easy way…

The hard way…

If you’re like me and you don’t have a Binance account and don’t want to create one, but you have Coinbase and MetaMask, you can use 1inch to make the swap:

  1. Go to pro.coinbase.com.
  2. Buy Etherium.
  3. Transfer it to your MetaMask wallet.
  4. Go to 1inch and connect your wallet
  5. go to FTM/ETH swap and fill out the info.
  6. Be sure you have enough gas. One way to lower the gas cost is to open settings to adjust.
  7. In settings, enter a custom slippage tolerance of 5% and chose 128 standard gas price.
  8. Exit settings.
  9. Adjust the amount of ETH willing to send, if you don’t have enough in your wallet to buy and pay the gas price. If you have a ton of ETH in your wallet you shouldn’t have any problems.
  10. Choose the lowest gas cost.
  11. Click Swap Token. You should be able to move forward if you have enough funds.
  12. Confirm the swap on the modal that pops up. If you can’t swap for any reason, you’ll see an error. Correct the error until you can confirm on 1inch.
  13. Confirm the swap on MetaMask.
  14. Follow the transaction on Etherscan. It only took a few minutes for me.
  15. Profit!

You can connect your wallet to https://zapper.fi to keep track of the total value of your staked money and the money in your wallet.

I realize that by holding FTM, I’m missing the point of DeFi and staking. I’ll address that in another post. I did stake some USDC on https://staked.us/. I’m still in the DeFi 0.0 stage of buying and holding coins instead of than staking them. To be continued…

My DeFi history

  • I first got interested in ChainLink when I read about it somewhere and bought some on Coinbase. I even have the exact date and time, 7/18/2019 11:04 PM. 
  • I don’t remember what I read that made me look into it, but I believed whatever I read that said this was a hot new coin.
  • I followed it for awhile, hodling and buying more. But I eventually got bored and sold it all for Bitcoin (I was shortsighted in my youth).
  • I noticed it earlier this year when it doubled in value, and bought some again, then doubled again, and nearly tripled.
  • This time, I looked into what it was that I was buying, and learned about the Oracle problem, smart contracts, and DeFi. I’ll write up what I learned later.
  • I heard about the Smart Contract Summit #0 hosted by Chainlink, got a ticket, and went to it, and that’s when I first heard Andre. This video, in fact: Sergey Nazarov with Andre Cronje, Stani Kulechov, and Kain Warwick: A DeFi Roundtable from #SmartCon.
  • A day or so before, I noticed YFI tokens spiking in value, but didn’t know how to get them, being a Coinbase neophyte who purchased all of my tokens through them, not even through Coinbase Pro (mainly because my experience with Coinbase Pro was discolored by poor UI and networking issues from 2/12-3/13 this year, and general malaise when I lost 1 bitcoin due to leveraged trading during the crash preceding the crash in equities, when Bitcoin was supposed to be inversely related to the traditional financial system and act as a hedge against a global catastrophe. However, it turns out that people still want dollars to feel safe).
  • It wasn’t until yesterday that I finally got a small portion of one. But that’s all I wanted, because by that time, I wasn’t interested in its price appreciation, but its value as a voting token to improve the platform, and to receive rewards as it grows. That’s a post for another time. If you want to learn what yearn.finance is, there are much better resources than me. I recommend starting with the FTX podcast at Welcome to Learn Yearn! – learnyearn.
  • Right now I want to dive right in and share how I got a YFI token and what I did with it. If you want to do the same, follow along.

Yearn.finance: Get YFI

  • Get MetaMask. It’s a chrome extension wallet that works well with these DeFi apps.
    • At first I thought I needed my Ledger hardware wallet, but a Ledger is more like cold storage; a safety deposit box more than a wallet. It works with some of these DeFi Web apps, but not all, and not consistently.
    • MetaMask is like a real wallet. You probably don’t want to keep all of your money there, as someone else once said, you wouldn’t be walking around town with your life savings in your pocket, but it’s a good tool to have for interacting with the various platforms. And it’s pretty well synchronized.
  • Once you have MetaMask, fund it. For example, go to Coinbase and transfer some ETH into the MetaMask wallet. 
    • More on this later, but it’s pretty straightforward if you know how to send crypto coins to different addresses.
    • There’s some stuff I had to pick up about Ethereum (ETH) Blockchain Explorer (etherscan), but nothing too complicated once you get a feeling for the fields.
  • Once your wallet’s funded, it’s time to have fun!
  • There’s a bunch of different places you can go and things you can do, but one thing I wanted to clarify is how you can get in on the ground floor of yearn.finance.
  • To stake YFI on yearn.finance you have to get some first. I found Uniswap is the easiest way.
  • Go to Uniswap Interface and connect your wallet. It’s pretty straightforward. Click Connect Wallet and select Metamask. I’d write up the steps here but I don’t want to disconnect my wallet as I haven’t tried before and I don’t want to lose anything (probably won’t, but just being extra careful as all of this is less than 24-hours old for me).
  • Choose Swap and ETH. 
  • Choose the 1inch list and search for the YFI token.
  • Enter the amount of ETH from your MetaMask wallet that you want to swap for YFI.
  • Be sure you have enough gas to pay for the transfer. See ETH Gas Station or Etherscan’s Ethereum Gas Tracker for details.
  • Click Swap.
  • MetaMask opens the confirmation screen to accept or reject the transfer. This is your basic OK/Cancel screen.
  • If you accept, the transfer will start and you can view it on etherscan. You can also go to MetaMask and see a summary of the status on the activity tab.
  • Once the transfer is complete, you’ll see YFI in your MetaMask wallet.
  • Now here’s where I made my mistake. I went to yearn.finance and clicked vaults and deposited my YFI into the yearn.finance vault. This is all fine and good as a 2.75% return ain’t bad (as of this writing 9/9). But I wanted to vote and get all the benefits and rewards therein. How to Vote with $YFI spells it out pretty clearly, but here’s a summary of what I did:
  • I went to ygov.finance.
  • On yearn.finance, you can scroll to the bottom of the page to see the list of other applications, such as ygov.finance and click it there. 
  • Or you can click this URL to go there directly: https://ygov.finance/.
  • The page has two choices: stake and vote. Chose stake.
  • Under Governance V2, click Open.
  • Click Stake tokens.
  • Choose how much YFI you want to stake (I recommend it all). To stake all of your tokens, click your balance number. 
  • Click Stake.
  • Just like with Uniswap, MetaMask opens and asks you to accept or reject the transfer. Make sure you have enough ETH to cover the gas fee.
  • Once you accept, follow along in etherscan.
  • Once it’s confirmed you’re done! You should be able to refresh the ygov.finance page and see how much you staked.
    • I had a slight issue with this. My MetaMask activity shows that I had to “Approve YFI spend limit” and then “Stake” on ygov.finance. I saw another approval request from MetaMask for more ETH and I clicked okay, because I used to mash keys on my keyboard back when I had a C64 and the games that I “borrowed copies from” my friends didn’t come with instructions.
    • Somehow this worked. I’ll look into why this happened and add more info later.
  • As a bonus, you can also see “stats for nerds” details about your stake here: Yield Farming Info for ygov.
    • Incidentally, that’s how I figured out that I hadn’t staked any YFI even though I thought I had. I didn’t see anything listed under “You are staking”. I clicked around and found Yield Farming Info for yvault and it showed that I was staking there.
    • That’s how I figured out that the YFI that you deposit in the yearn.finance vault isn’t the same as the YFI you stake in ygov.finance (duh!).
    • Anyway, my loss is your gain, I guess.
    • Also thanks to SteveO at the yEarn Talk Discord channel Discord for answering my question, that I should see something in the “You are staking” field. I thought that since I had less than a tenth of a YFI that it wouldn’t show up. I even added more to be sure. 
    • When I learned what I’d done wrong, I had to withdraw the YFI, which cost some ETH, and stake it, which also cost some. So, back to my mashing keys analogy, back when I was a C64 gamer, it didn’t cost me anything when I hit the wrong key. Now, it can cost me $1-5 of real money.
  • That brings me to my next story, how I lost $40 in ETH fees trying to interact with yborrow.finance. Serves me right for disregarding the warning “This project is in beta. Use at your own risk.” But I’ll have to write that one up later.
  • Afterward: https://yieldfarming.info/ has a lot of great tools, including Zapper – Dashboard for DeFi, which shows you where all of your assets are staked.
  • And that’s enough for today. I wanted to write up some notes after my first deep dive into DeFi. Let me know what you think! What’s your story?
  • If you want to keep up with the latest in yearn.finance, check out the newsletter. The first issue is here: Yearn Finance Newsletter #1 Week Ending September 6th, 2020.
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started