In case you missed it, there is a new "wrapped" version of HIVE, living on Binance Smart Chain. BHIVE is a Bep20 token, pegged to Hive through a similar system to WHIVE and WLEO. @fbslo has built out the peg, and you can find the website for BHIVE here.
You can see the full details in this post.
A new learning experience.
Seeing this, and with a concurrent strategy at the moment of shifting my crypto holdings gradually into more liquid investments, I have decided to have a dabble with BHIVE and learn my way around Binance Smart Chain (BSC). I've never used it before, but am familiar with Binance Chain (BC) and ETH, so its time to branch out once again.
First thing I discover is that BSC has some kind of connection to Ethereum, somehow. Not sure I understand it, (is it a fork, clone or just similar - I dunno) but You can rune BSC in your metamask. To do this, you have to add BSC as a new network. The guide on Binance itself was crap, but I found this walkthrough by Spartan Protocol which makes it straightforward.
Next job is to wrap some Hive as BHIVE, which is easy through the BHIVE bridge site. Here I start to notice the benefits of using BSC over Ethereum. It's the first point of contact with fees, and they are much smaller than ETH GAS.
Then I added some BNB to my wallet. To do this I traded some other stuff on Binance to BNB, and then withdrew to the wallet as BEP20 BNB. This is important. Also, it's interesting to see that my BSC wallet address is the same as the ETH one - a bit confusing TBH. Is this just an ETH clone? Anyway...
Having sent my BNB to Metamask, I am now even more confused, as it is calling it ETH.
You can clearly see in this, I am on BSC, but it says ETH. I can also guarantee it is actually BNB, not ETH. Super confusing, not sure if I have set something up wrong, or if its just some weird Metamask glitch.
Next stop - Pancakeswap.
Into another very familiar environment, Pancakeswap is an obvious clone of Uniswap. Here is the pool page for BHIVE - BNB
Over a couple of transactions, I add liquidity into the pool, which is straightforward, cheaper then ETH by a mile, and faster. The "account" page seems to be broken, but I can find this summary on the Pancakeswap website:
So there you have it, BSC seems to be a faster, cheaper alternative to ETH. Pancakeswap is a clone of uniswap, with a bunch of farming pools to farm CAKE, and then a bunch more stuff from there. With around $100 worth of assets, I have 16.99% of the pool.
Despite a few glitches and confusing little issues I have encountered, it wasn't too difficult to start up and figure out. Now it will be interesting to see if this pool gets any support and grows, or stagnates like the WHIVE one did.
The bridge to wrap HIVE to BHIVE is centralised at the moment, but @fbslo is working on decentralising these bridges. using these wrapped tokens is risky, and things could go wrong as we saw with the original WLEO. But the push to get HIVE into Liquidity pools and DeFi needs to continue, and be supported by the community in my opinion. The future for crypto is DeFi and Dex's, and HIVE needs to be involved IMHO.
One last little footnote, if you have not voted for @fbslo as a witness, you should consider it. Work on these bridges and linking HIVE to other chains is very important, and he is leading the charge on that and deserves consideration for your witness votes in my opinion.
The other thing to note is that I asked on Twitter if it would be a stretch to wrap LEO onto BSC as BLEO, and @fbslo said it would be simple to do. I'm not sure it is likely, as I would think the priority would be to keep the focus on WLEO on Eth, but it's interesting to note the potential is there. Could be a very interesting play for some of the other tokens looking to boost their profile without the expensive gas bill?
Let me know in the comments if you have played with BSC, Pancakeswap or other BSC apps and what else I should look into on BSC.
Cheers,
JK.