I’ve posted a couple of articles in the past weeks covering various Decentralised Finance (DeFi) topics about Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Ethereum, Decentralised Exchanges (DEX), Decentralised Wallets, Yield Farming and Automated Market Makers (AMM).

This article will be about my personal experiences using the most notable DeFi platforms and applications I’ve tested so far and ones I still use.

The ones I’ve tried, where I either lost my funds or cashed out my balance, won’t be mentioned at all, as it’ll be to much to write about :)

PancakeSwap (PS) - $Cake

PancakeSwap, a DEX, Yield Farm and Staking platform, is the reason why I entered the DeFi space and why I dared to take the leap towards decentralised exchanges.

I read on a Medium post, that there was a giveaway of $Cake tokens that had previously rallied quite a bit and also gained a large number of users in a very short time. I continued to read up on the project and found that the developers of PS decided to stay anonymous and that $Cake has no hard-cap. Initially, I thought to myself - another scam - and decided not to use the service.

A couple weeks later, I read multiple articles of PancakeSwap’s performance and their increasing Total Value Locked (TVL) in Smart Contracts. I was intrigued and decided I wanted to take the risk and buy $Cake.

After creating my BSC wallet and depositing some $BNB, I connected my wallet and progressed with the swap. During the time the $Cake price was around $8.50-$9.00 and bought myself 10 tokens to try out their services. I decided to put them into the Syrup Staking Pools and left it running for a week.

After the week passed and I checked on my rewards, I tried swapping them back to $BNB and tried sending them to the Binance Exchange. Seeing how all that checked out with no issues, I decided to increase my $Cake holding and keep staking for rewards.

I currently stake $Cake in the $Cake auto-compounding syrup pool, the $BTT pool and the $pBTC pool.

$Cake was at one point on another bull rally and when it hit what I thought was the top, I swapped some of my $Cake and spread them across various other BSC projects.

ApeSwap Finance (AF) - $Banana

Apeswap Finance was another one of those DEX/Yield Farm projects I initially thought was a scam, since it offered insanely high Annual Percentage Returns/Annual Percentage Yield’s, which I’ve never seen before (couple thousand %). Thinking I’d lose my tokens I still swapped a very small amount of $Cake into $Banana when the price was at $0.8.

Surprised about the fact that the platform allowed me to withdraw my rewards back to the Binance Exchange, I again bought more $Banana and entered the $Banana staking pool as well as the $Banana-$BNB LP farm.

PancakeBunny (PB) - $Bunny

PancakeBunny, a Yield Aggregator, caught my attention, as they were rewarding liquidity providers with both $Cake and their governance token $Bunny. Valued - during the time - at $420, I entered most of my $Cake into the $Cake pool so I could benefit from the multi-currency rewards.

At some point the price of $Bunny plummeted which presented an attractive buying opportunity and entered a few other pools. The $Bunny boost pool earning $Bunny, the $Bunny pool earning $WBNB, the $Bunny-$BNB flip pool earning $Bunny and $Cake and finally the $BNB and $BTC pools earning their respective currency as well as $Bunny again. PB also offers relatively high interest for their pools. And whatever I made in $Cake on PB I staked in PancakeSwap’s auto-compounding pool.

Dividing the rewards back into $BNB and other currencies to further stake, I also swap some back and forth trying to make most of market opportunities. There are many tools I found very useful to maximise your trades and to keep track/monitor your DeFi portfolio.

Open Ocean Review: Aggregating Centralized and Decentralized Exchanges Cross Chain | CoinCodex

OpenOcean (OO)

OpenOcean is a decentralised aggregation protocol where it finds the best price and lowest slippage for traders across many DEX’s like PS, AF, MDex and DODO. You can complete your trades you would usually make on one of those DEX’s on the OO website. For those of you trying to maximise every bit of assets you have, this is a helpful tool. It is as easy as connecting to PancakeSwap with your wallet and I am pretty sure I managed to “save” a decent amount of crypto’s using OpenOcean.

Introducing yieldwatch.net. Welcome to yieldwatch! | by yieldwatch.net | yieldwatch | Medium

Yieldwatch (YW)

After using the above mentioned sites for a while, I wanted something that would present all my entries and pending rewards across these platforms on one page, which brought me to Yieldwatch. YW is a smart yield farming dashboard, that allows users to keep track and monitor their liquidity and its performance. Instead of going to each individual website and checking how your investments are performing, you can copy your BSC wallet address and paste it into the search bar on the top of the homepage. It’ll pick up your entries from popular DEX’s, but unfortunately doesn’t find ones that are less popular.

There are an abundance of platforms offering almost identical features and services so be careful you dont fall into a trap and end up losing funds, which has happened to me a couple of times already.

Remember to never invest more than what you are willing to lose, as any form of investment carries its own risk, especially funds in the DeFi space.

Sources:

https://pancakeswap.finance/

https://apeswap.financial/

https://pancakebunny.finance/pool

https://openocean.finance/

https://www.yieldwatch.net/

added to the river via Styx Exxp : https://www.nyx-labs.com/my-personal-experience-with-decentralised-finance/