This should not be taken as advice or financial advice. This is simply a story of how I started trading Chia / XCH. I am not affiliated with any other companies mentioned in this article, or in this series of articles.
Right now there are not a lot of good options to trade Chia. The options that exist are few and far between, and none are currently based in North America (that I am aware of) so actually pulling your money out in usable fiat currency is quite difficult from what I can tell. The other thing that has changed since I last traded crypto is the usage of so-called “stablecoins” like Tether.
This makes me super uncomfortable, as these US dollar-backed coins have no actual controls around them and are not capitalized the way an actual backed asset is. There are more USDT “Tether” coins in existence than US Dollars in a bank account somewhere backing them. This has become known recently, but its also obvious because otherwise what’s the point even. It seems to me that the entire reason for these coins to trick people into thinking they are holding money in USD instead of volatile crypto while they are executing trades, but that’s not really what is going on.
My mechanism for dealing with these stablecoins is to only use them transiently. I leave my crypto in crypto assets, and not in an exchange while executing trades. I don’t know that that’s better, but it definitely feels better than some illusory coin that is clearly not what it appears.
The exchange I chose to try out is OkEx, and so far it seems alright. My plans here do not include becoming a prolific trader, merely to try and make a little scratch off the ups and downs of the Chia price but just using one these exchanges with their custom internal currencies seems a lot shadier than my normal brokerage. I am beginning to see what people like David Gerard have been saying about these currencies. I do not believe the people involved with creating them, developing them or mining them are shady but the financial services world that has sprung up around them certainly seems to have an element of shade to it.
I’m going to use this post as the first in an article on my adventures in trading. So far I deposited 352 XLM (Stellar) i found in my keybase wallet and converted that to USDT then bought XCH with that. I also deposited 0.2501 XCH from my Transfer Wallet and am currently sitting on 0.4603 Chia in my trading account at a little over 700 per coin.
I am going to set a 1 month challenge with weekly updates to see how well I can do day-trading XCH starting with basically no knowledge of how crypto markets work or what the prices of other coins do.
My guess is its going to be a bloodbath.
Oh that XCH was trading at $700 per coin again. What a difference 7 months makes.