This is a guide on how to buy CREAM token. Cream is a crypto-financial protocol for lending and borrowing crypto-assets in a trustless manner by providing collateral that covers your loan, built on Ethereum. In the event that someone is unable to pay back their debt, the Cream protocol automatically sells the collateral to cover the debt.
If the above sounds familiar to you, that is probably because it sounds like Compound or Aave (LEND). And it is – Cream as a protocol is pretty much a fork of Compound.
So why should you buy CREAM when you can just buy COMP from Compound? For one, the valuation of CREAM is orders of magnitude less than COMP, so you’re getting a less popular protocol but at a much less price point. Second, Cream supports many more tokens than Compound. For example, the recently popular YFI token can be used as collateral on Cream but not on Compound.
In addition to the above, CREAM token and Cream protocol are a bit more in the Ethereum community’s general field of view at the moment (aka it is currently hot) due to an aggressive campaign of yield farming. You can earn CREAM token rewards simply by putting your capital into the Cream protocol or lending against it.
Finally, a decision to buy CREAM should be centered around future developments, and one of them is an Automated Market Maker (AMM), which is another hot crypto-primitive right now in the DeFi space. While it seems everyone and their grandma is building an AMM right now (we are looking at you Sushi), it can be an interesting profit center.
How to Buy CREAM
CREAM is becoming a popular DeFi token, and therefore its liquidity is fragmented. This means that many decentralized exchanges (DEXes) and also some centralized exchanges list CREAM. As an end user, you want to get the best execution price when you buy CREAM, i.e. the most CREAM tokens for your money. See our guide on buying DeFi tokens without KYC on why we recommend decentralized exchanges.
The best way to find the cheapest price for CREAM is to go through an aggregator like 1inch. You first enter the token that you want to use to buy CREAM and then the output of CREAM. 1inch does the rest to find you the best execution route. You don’t even need to start with ETH – start with whatever token you have.
For example, here we try to convert 1 YFI to CREAM. As you can see, 1inch checks over a dozen exchanges for you and pulls in the best price, while also taking care of the conversion from YFI <> ETH <> CREAM, all in a single transaction.
In the above example, 1inch is routing your order through multiple exchanges – in this case Uniswap and CREAM’s own AMM. You generally get much better prices this way than simply going to Uniswap.
If you are starting from Bitcoin or a non-ETH token, then Binance might be the simplest way to convert to ETH, and then follow the steps above. If you are starting with fiat, like USD, Coinbase might be the easiest way to convert your fiat to ETH and then follow the steps above to buy CREAM.
How to Farm CREAM
The good thing about CREAM is that you can also farm CREAM with very good APYs at the moment.
To farm CREAM, there are currently 3 mains ways:
- Borrow or lend your crypto assets on CREAM
- Stake Uniswap or Balancer LP tokens
- Provide liquidity on CREAM’s AMM and stake the LP tokens
For example, the above is a sampling of APYs on Cream for their LP tokens on the AMM. As you can see, the pairs are unconventional but that is because they use the yield-wrapped token versions (e.g. yETH instead of ETH) instead of the plain vanilla asset type. This means you gain not just CREAM rewards but also the yield on the underlying asset, not to mention the 0.25% LP rewards.