I've been hearing quite a bit about the cross-chain DEX of Thorchain (RUNE) for a little bit now. Being the hesitant person that I am, I had held off on the idea of putting liquidity into the pools, but had purchased RUNE after reading and understanding what the purpose of the project was. Of course, it helps when you have the CEO of Shapeshift actively promoting the project!

The idea of having native swaps is something that is really quite important in the cryptocurrency space. At the moment, there are "hacked" solutions using bridges and pegged tokens... which works sort of fine, but isn't really the most ideal solution. Given that the future may be one where there are many blockchains that may not be able to talk to each other, a DEX that can easily bridge across them all is definitely going to be an important infrastructure tool! And I'm all about backing the infrastructure projects!

Anyway... as luck would have it. After I had read enough and understood about the pools and the whole project, the entire thing went down for a spell over summer. I guess everyone knows what happened there!

However, the sheer resilience of the project and the drive of the developers to bring everything back online in a seemingly safe and ordered manner has me very impressed! So, I've decided to dip my toes into the liquidity pools with some spare change and see if I can put some assets that weren't doing any passive earning to work.

My first thoughts about the Thorswap landing page is the awesome dark theme! Of course, dark theme should be mandatory (default!) everywhere... but this is just such a cool look with the turquoise and black! It isn't really a huge functional thing... but it is one of the things that make for a very pleasant UI experience!

So, I've actually been trying to get some liquidity onto the pools for quite some time. However, in this staged rollout, the liquidity cap has been full (over 100%) every time that I've checked... and trust me, I've been checking quite often on my mobile! I've had the landing page open constantly in my browser!

I had seen the light go green a few times, but each time I wasn't at a proper computer in order to move assets and dump into a pool. Every time that I did manage to reach a computer, the light was brown again and the liquidity cap was tapped out!

There is a very nice range of wallet selections to choose from for connecting to the DEX. Actually a nice wealth of options... but in my case, I wanted new wallets and addresses. A fresh lick of paint for a new exploration!

After looking at the various options, I figured that the keystore was the most useful as it had the most chain connection options. The other options would only have a few options, and I didn't want to faff around with multiple new wallets and extensions.

Of course, a keystore is more of a pain in the arse to store safely... but that is the tradeoff. Besides, this is just an exploration first up... so, if I lose the keystore or encryption key... well, it will be really quite annoying, but I won't die (much..).

So, a few pools entered into... I'm pretty happy to get some funds out of CEXs like Binance, Kucoin and FTX. It has been a slow process, but I'm migrating as much as I can out of the exchanges... partly out of the "not your keys...", but also to capture better staking rewards from on-chain staking instead of custodial staking.

The process was pretty smooth, the wallets didn't update in real time, you actually have to manually refresh them. That was a little weird... but not a problem, I just spent more time sitting at the computer doing something else whilst waiting for deposits to happen.

The deposits to liquidity pools went off quite smoothly... a little slower than I expected, but I suspect that has to do with the native chains? Or perhaps Thorchain, as I saw that there was a brown dot on the system monitor for the "outbound" transactions?

I liked the idea of single sided liquidity provision... I know that the double sided provision is more flexible, but I couldn't be bothered with exchanging. So, the only thing left to do is to just let things sit and don't thrash around... see what happens in a few months, and don't forget where I have stashed the keystore!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
FTX: Regulated US-based exchange with some pretty interesting and useful discounts on trading and withdrawal fees for FTT holders. Decent fiat on-ramp as well!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
Stoic: A USD maximisation bot trading on Binance using long-term long strategies, powered by the AI/human system of Cindicator.
StakeDAO: Decentralised pooled staking of PoS assets.