As you can imagine, it combines a bunch of new DeFi protocols and also adopts many best practices from the space. For instance, YAM token will launch with full on-chain governance, similar to Compound. It has elastic supply, so has many properties similar to AMPL. The treasury (similar to AMPL) is held in yCRV – the stablecoin pool on Curve that has yTokens from YFI.
Another big selling point for YAM is that it is taking a leaf out of the YFI playbook, i.e. no premine, no founder allocation, no VC allocation.
The above is very similar to what YFI did with its initial Curve pools and then Balancer pool for YFI. The interesting thing is the Uniswap pool would be 50/50 for YAM/yCRV whereas the YFI Balancer pool was 98/2 DAI/YFI.
Update: After the original YAM fiasco, the project is surprisingly still very much alive. In fact, it is adopting a lot of the DeFi stack and building new financial products like insurance. Also, the rebasing part has now been voted out and removed from YAM, so it behaves more like a regular token. To that end, YAM seems like a younger cousin to YFI.
How to Buy YAM
YAM liquidity is spread across multiple exchanges currently. The best way to buy YAM is therefore via 1inch which will aggregate all the different exchanges and also private market makers (e.g. those that connect DeFi and Binance). An additional advantage is that you can convert from any token to YAM, not just ETH.
Simply connect your MetaMask or another Web3 wallet to 1inch and convert from ETH or another ERC20 to YAM in a single transaction. If you don’t have ETH, you can buy from Binance or Coinbase. As you can see below, 1inch does smart order routing via the best exchanges for you.
Edit: 1inch has natively listed YAM! Just enter the tokens you have and the conversion to YAM and you should be good to go. For example, here is how they route the order to exchange a few BAL from Balancer to YAM. This is an older example from the older UI that I’ve retained to show a sample exchange.
Staking YAM
Update: Farming for YAM has now ended.
Instead of buying YAM, you could also stake your crypto to earn YAM based on the phase-1 distribution mentioned above. To stake, go to yam.finance and then stake your tokens. Be aware though that YAM smart contracts are not audited and it has a much higher smart contract risk than some other projects.
Also see how to buy YFI if you’re interested in projects like YAM.
This is a guide on how to buy TEND (Tendies) – a meme token that has captured the imagination of some far flung communities. Believe it or not but TEND remains a very community driven and active crypto token.
In some ways, it is very similar to DOGE that catapulted to over $1 billion in marketcap but started as a joke or meme currency. To this day, DOGE remains firmly in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by marketcap.
To be sure, one should be very careful before buying tokens like TEND that could easily lose a 100% of their value very rapidly. Even then, if you are looking to diversify your meme tokens, TEND is a good candidate.
How to buy TEND
There are two primary starting points if you want to buy TEND via completely decentralized exchanges (no need to send your money to an exchange or deal with KYC or other friction points. Read more in our guide to buy DeFi tokens).
Buy TEND with ETH
Currently, the deepest liquidity pool for TEND to ETH trades is Uniswap. Check out this price chart that also shows volume and liquidity.
In general, you want to look at the liquidity, trade volume, and price in conjunction. You can see Uniswap has the most trading volume and deepest liquidity for TEND.
If you already have ETH, you can go to this direct link to trade your ETH for TEND. Note that Uniswap does not natively show TEND in the list of tokens on their frontend, so make sure to double check that you are buying the right token. See the information section below.
Since the liquidity pools move around the entire DEX ecosystem, it is best to check on 1inch before buying directly from Uniswap (see next section).
Buying TEND with Other ERC20 Tokens
If you have other tokens like LINK, RLC, etc. and want to use those to buy TEND, do not go directly to Uniswap. This is because Uniswap may or may not have the best price for you in those cases.
Instead, go to 1inch exchange, a liquidity aggregator, and enter the token that you have and the token you want to buy (TEND). Luckily, 1inch natively shows TEND so you don’t need to search by the token address.
You can see the difference achieved in price on Uniswap versus 1inch in this hypothetical trade of 10,000 RLC to TEND. It is similar for other tokens as well. 1inch is able to execute in a single transaction the best order fulfillment across multiple decentralized exchanges from 0x to Kyber to Balancer.
More information on TEND
First, make sure you are looking at the right contract address. Here is TEND on Etherscan. If you are looking at Uniswap, here is TEND Uniswap.info page to check the price and liquidity.
Always double check the contract address since anyone can create a token called “TEND” on Ethereum.
You can set nonce in MetaMask but it is hidden by default. You may want to set your nonce because the gas prices are high and you want to unstuck your transaction. By setting your own nonce, you can try to override a pending transaction. You may not be able to do this via the MetaMask UI – for example if you imported your Ethereum wallet.
This is especially useful if you have a stuck transaction on MetaMask due to low gas and want to try to cancel it.
Update: If you are having trouble with gas prices, make sure to use GasNow or ETHGasStation for the latest gas prices instead of relying on the MetaMask default gas prediction. If you are trading, look for best execution on 1inch instead of going directly to sites like Uniswap, Sushiswap, Balancer etc. since 1inch can aggregate across all of them and give you best execution and better pricing.
Before we begin, note that you need to double-check the nonce that you’re setting. If you set the nonce too low or too high, the transaction won’t get confirmed. This is definitely for advanced users of MetaMask and Ethereum, so do this with care. Read more about nonce on Stack Overflow. The information below assumes you know about nonce on Ethereum.
Now that you’re ready, let’s get down to setting your own nonce in your MetaMask
Step-1: Go to your account on the top right corner of your MetaMask extension and click on Settings.
Step-2: Under Settings, click on Advanced Settings. Then find the setting that says: “Customize transaction nonce” Turn this on to change the nonce (transaction number) on confirmation screens. This is an advanced feature, use cautiously. Toggle this to “ON” state.
Step-3: Now you can create a transaction as you normally would (e.g. if you want to send a 0 ETH transaction to yourself) and you’ll see a new field appear called “Set Custom Nonce“. This will show up in the confirmation screen when you try to send the transaction out.
Here, we have manually set the custom nonce to 10000. Make sure you double check the nonce value!
When you hit confirm, MetaMask will broadcast your transaction with the custom nonce that you chose above.
How to Cancel a MetaMask Transaction?
Now that you know how to set a custom nonce in MetaMask, it is time to learn how to cancel a transaction in MetaMask. Why would you need to cancel a transaction? Mostly because gas prices can fluctuate a lot on Ethereum.
Let’s say you create an expensive transaction, like creating a new Balancer pool or a Tornado Cash withdrawal. These can be > 1MM gas operations, which at current ETH prices and gas prices can be up to $500 or more. If you create these transactions at a lower gas price, you can hope they eventually get confirmed but that is not a guarantee. After a while, you may simply wish to cancel the transaction.
MetaMask provides a native way to cancel the transaction when you click into your most recent pending transaction. However, this is far from ideal. The reason is that MetaMask does not let you customize the gas price to set on the cancelation. See the experience below – they decide the gas price, set at 10% higher than whatever you set the gas for the original transaction, not based on the most recent gas price of the network.
Instead, they default it to 10% more than the previous one. This can cause a lot of headache where you can continue trying to speed up the transaction by flooding the network with increasing gas costs. Not ideal.
Instead, a better method is to follow this guide:
Step-1: Enable custom nonce on MetaMask as described above.
Step-2: Find out the nonce of the transaction you wish to cancel (e.g. via Etherscan)
Step-3: Create a new transaction sending 0 ETH from your address to your address. Make sure this is the same address as the one you are trying to cancel the transaction from. This will be the cheapest way, since an ETH send is 21,000 gas, the lowest amount.
Step-4: Before submitting the transaction, set the custom nonce to what you found in Step-2 and set a high gas price. You can look it up on ETH Gas Station or Gas Now.
Step-5: Check etherscan to make sure the new transaction is confirmed before the old one that you are trying to cancel. The old one will be shown as ‘Dropped and Replaced’ on Etherscan. This means the old transaction is canceled.
What to do if a transaction is stuck (e.g. on Matic or BSC) on MetaMask and you can’t speed it up?
This issue happens sometimes especially on non-Ethereum services. Now that MetaMask has become the entry point for many other blockchains, this issue has been popping up more and more.
The underlying reason for this is that sometimes the nodes will drop a transaction completely due to the volume. Now you are stuck – the network thinks you are at nonce “n” whereas MetaMask thinks you are at nonce “n+1”. This means if you broadcast another transaction, then the network will reject it (or keep it in a cache) since the nonce is out of sync. The network is expecting “n” nonce but your MetaMask sends “n+1” nonce.
To solve this problem, you can follow one of two approaches:
Method-1: Set the nonce manually as described above to a value that is 1 more than the previously confirmed transaction. You may need to look at a block explorer to find out the right nonce. Then, send yourself a 0-value transaction with this nonce.
Method-2: Go to Settings > Advanced > Reset Account. This will clear your local data and history so make sure you are ok with this. Once you confirm, your nonce will be reset as well, along with the pending transactions that would previously have shown up in your account.
Are you experiencing a slow Metamask and looking to speed up Metamask while your browse the decentralized application (DApp) world? This guide will walk you through all the steps to get it up to speed.
Metamask has become a staple of the DApp ecosystem on Ethereum. It lets you interact with the Ethereum blockchain via a browser extension. This is really convenient as you don’t need to download Ethereum node, connect hardware wallets, or download other software. As a simple extension, it really is a browser’s gateway into Ethereum’s DApp world. Metamask is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Brave browsers.
But there is a big problem with Metamask – it gets really slow for power users. After a while, it seems to be taking longer and longer to load a transaction and send it to the network. When does it happen? It happens when you submit many transactions. This is especially the case for crypto-gamers that play games like CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained, etc. since they submit many transactions. For example, CryptoKitties players in aggregate birthed over a million cats so far, each birth recorded on the Ethereum blockchain! Those are large numbers.
If this describes you, here are the action items that you can take now to speed up Metamask. Hopefully this makes your crypto-gaming experience smoother.
Note: This article tells you what to do you when your MetaMask extension is slow, i.e. the browser or extension becomes unresponsive. If you are looking to speed up a specific transaction from your MetaMask, see MetaMask’s official help site on how to speed up or cancel a transaction.
1. Reset Metamask Account
The very first thing to do with a slow Metamask account is to remove the transaction history. As the number of your Metamask transactions increases, your Metamask becomes slower. I think most users have already noticed that. If you have many transactions, the first thing is to ‘remove’ all these transactions. Since all your previous transactions are already sent to the Ethereum blockchain, there is no need to keep a history in your local Metamask.
How to reset Metamask Account?
Here are the steps you need to follow to reset your Metamask account:
First, click on your Metamask plugin to open the app. Below is how it appears on Brave. It is similar in Chrome and Firefox as well.
When the app opens, click on the circle on the top right corner of the app to display a menu.
From the menu, click on the Settings at the bottom.
Scroll to the bottom of the Settings, and you’ll see an option for ‘Reset Account’. Click on this button.
Metamask will ask you for a confirmation, along with telling you what exactly this ‘Reset Account’ feature is. “Resetting your account will clear your transaction history.” Click on the RESET to confirm. This will remove your transaction history and make Metamask run much faster.
2. Change Ethereum Network, and Change it Back
After you’ve done the reset account, you can try this other trick for slow Metamask. You will need to switch the network that your Metamask connects to. Don’t worry – you’ll change it right back to the main Ethereum network.
First, open your Metamask in your browser as shown above, and click on the dropdown at the top of the app that says ‘Main Ethereum Network’.
Now change this to another option, such as Ropsten Network. You’re telling your Metamask to connect to a Ropsten node now instead of the Mainnet Ethereum.
After this, switch back to the ‘Mainnet Ethereum’ option to connect back to the mainnet Ethereum network.
This step ‘resets’ your Metamask connection to the main Ethereum network. It helps with, for example, flushing your transactions. You may have noticed for example that sometimes Metamask doesn’t tell you that the transaction has been confirmed. This step will force Metamask to recompute the transactions and give you a notification for when your transaction has been broadcast. Some DApps like CryptoKitties also recommend this step for some errors on their application. This is a handy little trick to not only speedup your Metamask but also update its state.
3. Disable, then Re-enable Metamask
In your browser extension/add-on section of Options/Settings, disable and then re-enable Metamask. This will likely ask for your password again, so make sure that you have your Metamask password handy. This step is helpful to ‘reload’ the Metamask extension, and helps speed up Metamask by restarting it, thus getting rid of its current state and restarting.
Here’s how you would do it on Brave, as an example (similar steps for Chrome and Firefox)
Go to Settings (three horizontal lines on the top right of your Brave browser), and click on Preferences
Then go to Extensions on the left side, where you’ll see Metamask installed.
Under the ‘enabled’ column, disable (just click to disable) and then re-enable Metamask.
Note that when you do this, you’ll be asked to enter your password again. Make sure you have that handy before trying this step.
4. Close and Re-Open Browser
Sometimes your browser can take up an ungodly amount of memory on your RAM. Chrome is especially notorious for this. In these situations, Metamask will slow down as well. The best solution is to close your browser and re-open it. Make sure your browser settings are set to re-open all your sites, so you don’t lose your tabs when you restart.
When you do this, you will be asked for your Metamask password again.
In general, freeing up some computer RAM will make your Metamask faster as well, so close any large programs that you may not be using, especially browsers running in the background.
5. Change Browsers
As a final step, Metamask is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Brave currently. Try switching your browsers to make it faster. You can also exclusively use one of the browsers for all your DApp needs, and use another for regular browsing.
Hope at the end of this, you’re able to solve your slow Metamask issue. If not, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll try to help.
This is a guide to help you on how to buy fractions of Ether. Before starting, let’s get something straight – yes, you can buy fractions of Ether. Like other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum network’s native currency, Ether, is divisible. This is similar to how Bitcoin works, since you can also buy fractions of a Bitcoin. In fact, 1 Ether can be divided into 10^18 units, each unit called a Wei. Wei is the smallest fractional unit of Ether.
To write it out, 1 Wei = 0.000000000000000001 ETH. As you can see, there is ample scope to buy fractions of Ether!
As a quick refresher, the Ethereum network is created similar to Bitcoin, but has a Turing complete smart contract platform. This allows programmers to create decentralized applications that can be arbitrary complex. Bitcoin has a much more limited support for smart contracts. Ether is also fueling a lot of token sales, or ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). To participate in many of these ICOs, you need to buy Ether first, to send to a smart contract.
In addition, Ethereum has a whole ecosystem of decentralized apps called DApps. These need “gas” to execute. Think of this as equivalent to miner fees in Bitcoin. You pay for compute instead of bytes like Bitcoin. In order to pay for gas, you will need to buy fractions of Ether, or hold some ETH in your wallet.
You’ll need less than 1 ETH if you want to pay for gas for popular DApps like Uniswap, say. In that case, say you want to convert some token into USDC, you don’t need to buy a full Ether. Instead, you can just buy smaller fractions of Ether to pay for the gas fee. Also, as the price of Ether goes up, it may make sense for individuals to buy less than 1 ETH each time and dollar cost average into it instead of a big buy at a single point of time.
Conversion Guide for ETH Denominations
Use this handy Ether denominations conversion guide for the different fractional units of ETH (similar to bits, satoshi, milli Bitcoin, etc. on Bitcoin). We are only listing the major ones:
1 wei = 1 wei = 10^-18 ETH
1 gwei = 10^9 wei = 1,000,000,000 wei
1 shannon = 10^9 wei = 1,000,000,000 wei (1 GWei)
1 szabo = 10^12 wei = 1,000,000,000,000 wei
1 finney = 10^15 wei = 1,000,000,000,000,000 wei
Buy Fractions of Ether on Online Exchanges
Now that we know how Ether fractions work, it’s time to buy some. The simplest way to buy fractions of Ether is via online exchanges. You will need to connect your bank account, so you can purchase Ether directly with fiat (USD, GBP, etc.) Here are your options:
Coinbase: Coinbase is the simplest way to buy fractions of Ether. It is perhaps also the most trusted source of buying digital currencies and storing them. It’s a venture backed unicorn (valued over $1 billion). The San Francisco based company started in the US, but is fast expanding in many other countries as well. If Coinbase is available in your country and you’re new to crypto-assets, Coinbase is your best bet. The list of countries that Coinbase supports are: Singapore, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jersey, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States, . You can see the full list here.
Binance: Binance has emerged as the major competitor to Coinbase for trading different cryptocurrencies including Ether and buying fractional ETH. Binance has lower fees and is available in most countries. For non-US residents, Binance allows a withdraw of up to 2 BTC a day without KYC, which is a major advantage. Binance also lists far more tokens and cryptocurrencies than Coinbase so if you want to diversify your crypto assets, you should have a Coinbase account.
Bithumb: This is a Korean exchange, which at the time of this writing, does the most Ether trading volume in the world! Part of the reason for high volume is there’s no fees, so the volumes get inflated. If you’re in Korea, you don’t have access to Coinbase, so Bithumb would be your best bet.
Buy ETH with BTC: If you have some Bitcoin already and want to convert that to Ether, then there are other options to follow, such as Bittrex, Poloniex, and Binance. This may be a good strategy even if you’re completely new to crypto-assets. In many places, it is easier to buy Bitcoin with local fiat money, and then convert into Ether, than buying Ether directly with local fiat.
One of the most popular uses of Ether is converting ETH into tokens for projects. These are ERC20 tokens and you can trade them on decentralized exchanges called DEXes. Some examples are Uniswap, Balancer, Sushi, etc. However, you can simply go to 1inch to trade instead which aggregates the best price and routes for best execution among all the DEXes.
