Buying Hive with BTC
Fortunately, Hive Engine and Tribaldex have made the transition from BTC to Hive a smooth, easy process. A one-way transaction process to go from BTC to Hive Power costs about 1.5% in fees, and an equivalent transaction process to go from Hive Power back to BTC would cost about the same. I read about the process and got some help from 
Several days ago, I used my purchases to fund the FreeCompliments Community. Feel free to join us – it’s a free-for-all for joyfulness, mutual support, and making each other feel better. If you’re feeling down at any point, let us know and we’ll be your shoulder to lean on. OK, the advertisement’s over now – although the concept is forever in my heart!
Some important things to consider before starting this process:
- You must obtain BTC to begin this process to begin with! That’s the entire point of this exchange. 😉 I personally used a decentralized exchange to obtain this for privacy purposes. For the skeptics, no, I’m not doing anything illegal. I simply like my financial privacy. This came at a cost of several percent (i.e. BTC selling for $27.5k would have a markup that turned my purchase into a $29k equivalent).
- You must have a Hive account.
- You must have a Tribaldex account, which requires using Keychain. Since Keychain accesses your data from other website (and again, I stress that I like privacy), I use a separate browser when I use Keychain. I only perform activities on the Hive blockchain (or 2nd layer activities related to Hive, such as Tribaldex) on this browser.
- Deposits to Tribaldex cost 0.75% in fees, and withdrawals from Tribaldex cost 0.75% in fees. You’re depositing BTC into Tribaldex, then withdrawing Hive into your account, so that’s a total of 1.5% in fees.
- There may be additional small costs when sending out BTC and when using the liquidity pool (slippage), but these are relatively small and will likely be close to 0.
- It is best to use a cold storage / hardware wallet for safety.
- In this post, I marked out several transaction IDs which may be used to identify me. Again, strong privacy focus.
- All images are my own.
- I’m now running low on dots.
The Steps of the Process
First, log into Tribaldex. You’ll access your wallet by clicking on the little wallet sign that’s just to the left of your username. You’ll reach this screen and it will show you the balances of your non-Hive tokens.
Click on “Deposit” and you’ll see this screen pop up, warning you of the fees. BTC has the 0.75% deposit fee attached. You’ll next select the token – naturally, choose BTC.
An address will be generated for you. This is the address to which you’ll be sending your BTC. Copy this address, and don’t forget that this is where you’re sending. I’m repeating this so you don’t screw up and lose your BTC!
This is the Ledger Live screen. You’ll open up your BTC account and click on ‘Send.’ The intention is to send the BTC from your wallet over to Tribaldex.
Remember that address you copied to which you’re sending your BTC? That’s the address you’ll copy and paste here. That’s where you BTC will go. Double check, triple check. Approve it on the device.
Choose the amount of BTC you’re going to send over to Tribaldex, and choose the speed (more sats per byte = quicker speed, but higher fees). I chose a slower speed for a lower fee. On this device, the fee is added to the amount that you’re sending over, so after all is said and done, the amount you choose is exactly what goes to Tribaldex.
Confirm your transaction on your device and continue.
You know the drill. Confirm, double check, triple check, and continue.
You’ll see the confirmation of the transaction here. This is still within Ledger Live. You can click on “View in explorer” to see the progress of the transaction. Once there’s a confirmation in the explorer, you should also be able to see it in Tribaldex.
And this is what it looks like in Tribaldex. The BTC appears as “SWAP.BTC” which is the 2nd layer form of BTC used for this 2nd layer exchange. It’s the bridge between the first layer of BTC and the 1st layer of Hive. Hence, it should be no surprise that Tribaldex will also have Hive in a similar form: SWAP.HIVE.
Now, you’ll notice that SWAP.BTC does not have the 0.01 BTC I had sent over. Not to worry: that’s because of the 0.75% deposit fee. All is as it should be.
Next, you’ll go to the Pools (circled in blue) in order to exchange the SWAP.BTC for the SWAP.HIVE.
Within the swap option (leftmost), you’ll find this menu. “From” will be SWAP.BTC and “To” will be SWAP.HIVE because you’re swapping from SWAP.BTC to SWAP.HIVE. If you want to swap all of your SWAP.BTC into SWAP.HIVE, then you can click on “Max” (underlined in blue).
Slippage can be kept at 0.5%. There’s no need to make your potential fee higher! That slippage is there in case the price of either SWAP.BTC or SWAP.HIVE changes rapidly.
Now you can swap these two. Unless you’re swapping hundreds of thousands of dollars worth, don’t worry about the price impact. This pool’s liquidity is pretty deep, so your exchange likely won’t destroy the internal market.
Take notice of the minimum SWAP.HIVE received. This accounts for the slippage; it may be higher (up to the amount you see listed in “To.” Click “Swap” to complete to exchange.
Indeed, I got the same amount of SWAP.HIVE as “To” indicated. Tat means I lost 0% on slippage, which is pretty nice.
Going back to your wallet, you’ll now see SWAP.HIVE in place of where SWAP.BTC used to be.
At this point, I took a few steps to move the SWAP.HIVE from this personal account to the FreeCompliments community account, so in the next image you’ll see that hive-140084 is the username listed on the top right.
As promised. Your next step is to click on “Withdraw.” This will start the process of converting your SWAP.HIVE to the Hive that you’ll soon see on your account.
Clicking on “Withdraw” gives a popup confirming the 0.75% fee for withdrawing Hive to your account (which is a conversion from SWAP.HIVE to Hive).
Select “Hive” in the top field, then you can click right on the current balance to input the entire amount in the 2nd field (or you can manually input any value you want to withdraw).
Your username will be pulled up as the withdrawal address. That’s exactly where it’s intended to go. Once this is all confirmed, click on “Withdraw SWAP.HIVE” and wait a few moments.
You’ll see the Hive appear in your account. Once again, you’ll notice that the amount is slightly lower than the amount of SWAP.HIVE you had before withdrawing. That’s due to the 0.75% fee for withdrawals. You’ve now spent a total of 1.5% in fees to smoothly transition BTC to Hive through a 2nd layer exchange. Not too bad!
While I haven’t tried the reverse process, it will probably be similar in terms of following steps: Deposit from your Hive account (with a 0.75% fee), swap SWAP.HIVE for SWAP.BTC, and send it over to your hardware wallet for another 0.75% fee. Another 1.5% in fees for a total of about 3% in fees.
The percentage I paid to purchase BTC one-way using the private, decentralized exchange was about this much or higher. I’d say that Tribaldex has a pretty good thing going!
This entire process took me about an hour and a half… most of which was used to take screenshots of the process and starting writing things down for this post.
Subsequently, the process took ~5-10 minutes, excluding the waiting time required for the BTC sending to clear. It clearly shows how quick Hive itself is as a network compared to BTC, although that’s a bit of a peripheral point.
By the way, you can see that my Leo is currently unstaked, but it will be staked as soon as I reach the 150 Leo threshold for Leo Power Up Day. That’s a promise, 
Some numbers and analysis:
I used a decentralized exchange to obtain BTC. I traded a total of $5847 for 0.2016 BTC (an average price of $29,002.98 – this was marked up by an average of 3%). This was traded for 12,855.911 Hive, which is currently worth approximately $5250. This comes out to about 89.7% of the original purchase price. Part of this can be attributed to the swings/drops in BTC and HIVE price that were taking place over the past week, part to the markup for BTC from using the decentralized exchange, and part to the fees on Tribaldex. Keep in mind that the Tribaldex fees themselves were only ~1.5%.
Through Hive’s mechanisms, it won’t be too difficult to regain that total of ~10%, especially if playing smart. However, an exit strategy must also be considered, during which process we can also expect similar effects to impact the final price. It’s not a short-term investment by any means, but the FreeCompliments Community and idea is meant to last an incredibly long time, hopefully well beyond my time on this crazy little planet of ours.
I hope that you’ve found this delineated process and analysis of efficiency informative. While it is not financial advice, it may be useful to help you determine whether you want to undertake the process of turning your BTC into Hive, and how to do it.
If you’ve enjoyed the content of this post, are feeling down and need a shoulder to lean on, or would like to make someone’s day a bit better, or found an interesting post you’d like to share that you believe deserves a compliment, please join the FreeCompliments community. We welcome everyone with open arms. :)
Disclaimer: LeoFinance will be a beneficiary for this post, and I will attempt to boost it via Ecency points as well. I will also try to find an option to make FreeComplments a beneficiary of this post.