I just swapped some STEEM for LTC. I thought that there might be some benefit to describing the process.
For this post, I asked Night Cafe to generate an image with people trading a steam engine for a bee hive. The image above was the best of the four images I received.
In my last post I indicated that was on track to earning a full STEEM a week from my curation effort. Being in a financial slump, I decided to peel off that STEEM as income.
I decided to use HIVE-Engine as my path of egress. Hive-Engine was originally created as Steem-Engine. There was a kerfuffle which caused STEEM-Engine to rebrand.
Long time users of STEEM were given a HIVE address during the HIVE hardfork. New users are STEEM are wise to create a HIVE account. Otherwise people might grab your name and pretend to be you.
Transferring my STEEM to HIVE was a simple matter of transferring the funds to @graphene-swap with the command "SWAP.STEEM yintercept" in the memo. NOTE: If you make a mistake in the swap; you will lose your money.
I sent 1.008 STEEM to the swap and received 1.00044 SWAP.STEEM in my #HIVE-Engine wallet.
There are several ways to move SWAP.STEEM on Hive-Engine. I prefer to use the SWAP.STEEM SWAP.HIVE exchange.
For this article I decided to try the diesel pool swap. There are several pools for SWAP.STEEM. Go to the pools page and type in STEEM. The pools are:
| Pool | STEEM | swapcoin | Liquidity | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| STEEM:HIVE | 52,741 | 46,676 | $21,443 | $1,182,116 |
| STEEM:BEE | 27,340 | 59,268 | $11,114 | $64,048 |
| STEEM:BLURT | 1,078 | 103,421 | $437 | $35,583 |
| STEEM:BTC | 888 | 0.003 | $364 | $32,160 |
| STEEM:LTC | 189 | 0.497 | $76 | $19,338 |
| Total | 82,236 | 209365 | $33,434 | $1,333,245 |
The table indicates the swaps are holding 82,236 STEEM. The BLURT, BTC and LTC pools appear to be underfunded. The pools would not be good for large transactions.
The pools collect a small fee for each transaction. One can actually make a little money by adding liquidity to the pool. If you had excess STEEM and some excess HIVE, LTC, BEE or BTC; then you could add the funds to pool.
BEE is the native coin of HIVE-Engine.
I wanted LTC. So, I wanted to convert SWAP.STEEM to SWAP.LTC. This second image shows the transaction.
I received 0.00263634 SWAP.LTC for my 1.00044 SWAP HIVE. Had I executed two sales at ASK, I would have received 0.00262.
So, the swap is better than selling at ASK. I probably would have made more if I speculated on the exchanges.
Conclusion
My STEEM curation reward for last week was over 1 STEEM. I do not know a direct path from STEEM to my bank account; so I swapped the coins through #HIVE-Engine. I can get LTC into my bank account.
Even though it is only $0.20, receiving an actual income from STEEM feels great.
My big problem is that I am not sure if i will earn a full STEEM every week in the future. I realize that I am in a bind: I can't keep my STEEM and SWAP it too?
HIVE Engine is a good tool. This is especial true for old-times who received a free HIVE account during the hardfork. HIVE Engine, after all, was originally built as STEEM-Engine.