Imagine being paid for all the noob stuff you did on-chain. All the irreparable damages caused. LOL. Its a thing now, for a week at least. Flipside is paying you to recollect your trauma.
I will recollect three of my experiences :
- Getting stuck without LUNA or UST to unbond my bLUNA
- Getting stuck without ETH to swap my USDC (just before a pump)
- Getting stuck by Ape-ing into NFTs.
Stuck in Terra
On May 8, having earned 10UST via hivemirco.com , I decided to step into Terra-ecosystem to learn about Te-Fi. The main attraction that pulled me was airdrops (more like airdrips for me).
My plan was, buy 5$ worth LUNA, put it into Anchor for leveraged farming. And cause I was hyped for LUNA, I was thinking it could be the next ETH (yes, yes, i am an idiot). So yeah , 0.4 LUNA might be worth 2000$ later right . Plus one of the airdrops might moon-shot and GMI.
So here is what I did, bonded that LUNA, provided as collateral, borrowed some UST, and deposited it into Anchor EARN. Degen farming YEAH !!!! So that’s 4 transactions right. Just burnt 2 UST in fees.
Now, don’t we all read, only after apeing? That’s exactly what I did. Turns out bondedLUNA don’t get Airdrops. They also can get Liquidated … what the hell is Liquidations bro?
So my smart ass had exactly 1 UST in the bag to do all the un-stake. So I did the math, and decided to take 2 UST from Anchor earn. Repaid my loan. Removed the bLUNA collateral, and now I gotta unbond the LUNA and claim it. I had assumed that the entire recovery process would take 4 transactions too. But the claim was something that I had not anticipated.
Now I assumed that my LUNA is still as bLUNA, so no airdrops 😭 and also can get liquidated ( yes I am dumb, but we have all been there )
Scared shitless, i went rummaging around discord asking for someone to help me with some UST. I needed like 0.5 UST. Thankfully, a Terra community member helped me out.
Later, however, I realized Liquidations don’t affect people who have paid their entire loan. Also, Anchor introduced airdrops for bLUNA holders.
Stuck in ETH
I was less of an idiot. But I had never played with expensive gas before. MATIC and BSC only required one click to swaps. Sub-dollar gas fees, so never really cared. Ethereum was different, I didn’t understand what did 200 gwei meant or 21000 gas units meant.
By tweaking a lot, i realized, lower gwei meant less fees, so did gas units.
I just got paid in USDC for a bounty. ETH after spending week hovering around 3500$ , just dipped below $3000, I was like, this is my chance. I only had 0.005 ETH to make the swap though.
I went to Uniswap. Entered 999 USDC to 0.3 ETH. Now how do I handle the gas fee. Big Briain time, i lowered the gwei to 25 and reduced the gas units to just above 21000, so now my fees will be just be around 7$. Hackerman !!!!
Except the gwei never dipped below 100 that week. All that week, the transaction stayed in the mem-pool. And when the transaction finally went through , I learnt about gas units, gas prices and the thing called slippage, all in a single transaction that popped out as error. ETH hit 3500 in a week.
It didn’t end so badly as the next story though. One flipside helped me by exchanging mainnet ETH for L2 ETH. thankfully I got the next dip, but I doubt it was worth it cause …
Stuck in NFTs
Ape together strong.
There was one week, at the beginning of October, when Flipside didn’t release the bounties on time. So I had literally 3 days without anything but browsing through twitter feeds.
Everyone has experienced the garbage that twitter feeds you. Imagine being fed the same non-sense where literally everyone is converting 0.1 ETH into 0.5 ETH for like 2 days straight, every hour. Boom ape time.
5 projects in a matter of hours. It started as I like art by buying one in dGenesis dGen Automatons one in Kinesis Art. It went into a full blown ape mode.
PunkToadz . Gecko Lounge. The White Room. and an Artblocks Playground.
Effectively burned 0.7 ETH in total including gas fees. For comparison purposes, I only hold 0.1 ETH now. I watched as the floor rise up and then crash astronomically for each of these. Worst of all, you can’t even sell at floor 😭. Since then, I haven’t aped into NFTs, that’s a good start, and have understood the dynamics behind these mints and distributions.
We make mistakes , so we can learn from them. And with each horrifying mistake, I learnt quite a bit. The key is, expand yourself, until luck doesn’t become a factor. Thanks Flipside for this opportunity 💛 .