Diving into Crypto

It is quite auspicious that I want to publish my first post about crypto today, when the overall crypto market has crashed 30% in 24 hours. Ever since watching the 2017 blockchain/crypto fever from the sidelines in 2017 during the market upswing after Covid-19 (so around July of 2020) I decided to take the plunge.

Being a US person living abroad, I am a bit cautious about signing up to places that would not normally let US people create an account. After some looking, I ended up going with Kraken.com.

Over the past few months my crypto investments have been going quite well. So well, I have started to look to expand my crypto investments into more coins and possible running validators/masternodes.

I like Kraken.com but I am not a fan of the fees and time it takes to wire money. A friend mentioned Coinbase as one of the biggest/most trusted US exchanges for crypto and I ended up moving money from fiat USD onto Coinbase Pro. Coinbase is not very upfront with the info but it is cheaper and faster to move fiat into crypto via their pro.coinbase.com portal instead of the 'vanilla' coinbase.com portal. Only downside with Coinbase and Coinbase Pro is that while they allow you access to trade with your fiat deposit instantly, they hold the money from withdrawl (via fiat or crypto) for up to 7 days.

There is a huge amount of information to learn about the crypto 'landscape' of projects, tokens, and blockchains. I have most recently been looking into buying NFTs and getting into Liquidity Pools and Yield Farming, among other things. I will be posting things as I learn them and hope to help at least someone avoid some of the early mistakes that I made.

I went from the single Kraken account to almost a dozen accounts in a few short weeks before the ongoing crash. I have a few validator/masternodes setup and will share more after they are active for a few weeks and there is some data worth going over. I can foresee crypto related things going either way at this point. They could be regulated into the ground or truly change the way we interact on a daily basis, only time will tell.

*Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. Do your own Due Diligence and never trade with money you cannot afford to lose.