Ever since I started playing around with CUB DeFi, I have been getting increasingly braver (some would likely call it reckless). I played around with PancakeSwap for a bit, but based on the amount of money I was able to invest, the earning of the CAKE token was slow.
Then I found PatherSwap and things seemed a bit better there. In fact things were going really well over on Panther. Then I read that a burn was coming and out of panic I pulled all of my funds out of Panther. Looking back now, I probably should have let it go. It still seems to be holding its own right now. The fees and taxes on transactions are much higher than what we are used to on CUB, but overall it seems to not be a rug pull.
With my money out of Panther, I was looking for something new, so I decided to check out Garuda Swap. With APR's in the 8000% range I was doing pretty good on Garuda. Luckily, I pulled out the majority of my funds from Garuda before things went down the tubes. Looking at the site now, it appears that the GARUDA token is only worth about $.31. I think I pretty much broken even on this one getting out when I did.
This is where it gets interesting...
So, while I was poking around the Garuda Telegram group, I heard about this site called Gatorswap. I jumped over to the gatorswap site and noticed that it was advertising APRs in the 65 million or so percent range and the price of the token was around $500.
In case I haven't mentioned this yet, I am a bit of an idiot apparently, so I decided to throw some money at Gatorswap. I mean 65 million percent APR, how can you go wrong right?
I took about 250 BUSD and bought about half of one GATOR token. Then I paired that GATOR token with another 250 BUSD and put that liquidity into the "GATOR Swamp". I went to bed and expected to wake up the next morning with a fat stack of tokens ready to collect.
Can you believe that I logged in the next day and there was a big fat 0 where it said "Gator to Harvest"? I should have cut my losses right then, but like I said, I am a bit of an idiot.
I found the Gator Telegram and soon learned that the Swamps were going to go live until the next day at 10:30 AM or so. I figured why not wait it out and see what happens. By then the price of the token had started to drop and I didn't want to take the loss.
Finally, 10:30 am came the next day and by now the token price was back up to about $500. Before I knew it, I had 3 tokens to harvest, so I quickly tried to swap them, but BSC has been nuts lately and yada yada yada, the transaction didn't go through.
My 3x return was gone and by now the price was starting to dump hard.
Before long the price was down to $150, but my tokens were racking up at an incredible pace. The two hour harvest timer is what ended up killing me in the end.
Thanks to some helpful people on the LEO Discord, I finally realized I was in the middle of an epic meltdown. After my two hours were up, I had about 95 tokens to claim. I collected them and quickly swapped them at a price of about $.260 to give me a total loss of about $250.
I see now the GATOR token is at $.12 and if you want a really good laugh, go take a look at the chart from last week. It's like lemmings jumping off a cliff!
The good news is, my DeFi money comes from my daily RPlanet and Alien Worlds earnings, so it was kind of free money in the first place. I didn't really lose anything. Unlike some people would put a lot more money into the platform than I did. I feel even worse for them...
I see that there is still $16 million TVL on GATOR. Heaven knows why. I guess some people are still holding out hope that things will get better. It sounds like the platform had some faulty contracts, so I am not sure they will ever recover from that. Probably not with new platforms popping up every day.
I've moved 100% of my DeFi into CUB at this point. It isn't that I am opposed to trying a new platform again, but I need to lick my wounds a little first. I still think if I had clicked just a little quicker this could have been a win for me.
The biggest thing I took away from this is probably the old adage that "if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is". That's a fine line in crypto these days though...