It's embarrassing but after a year of asking how I can use Coinbase as an onramp to buy Hive, today I finally figured it out.
Simpleswap.io, it turns out, was the answer. It wasn't perfect, I had to buy $MATIC (fee), transfer the MATIC to my wallet (fee), bridge the MATIC to the Polygon network from ETH (two fees), and then use it at simple swap (slippage) but all told, the $220 USD I put in at the start ended up as $208 worth of HIVE.
I do think there are probably ways to streamline that but I'm not crushed by it.
I was originally thinking I'd just buy MATIC and send it straight to Hive-Engine for swap.matic but swap.matic has no liquidity. Under $100USD worth traded today. Also I'm not sure how to send from Coinbase using the Polygon network. I read a year ago they were implementing that but I'm not sure if they did.
Anyway! That means after spending 150 hive on some new Serfdom & Sorcery swag (check out that fast -growing game on the PsyberX discord if you haven't already), I had 493 hive left to power up!
I blew past the 2500hp goal I had last week and now I'm nipping at the heels of 3000! I cannot wait to get to 10k. and then 100k. I think Hive is shining brighter by the day and I'm way underinvested.
Prior to this I was investing a lot into Splinterlands because I could use Paypal to buy credits but the only way I knew I could get money into hive was to spend those credit on cards and then sell the cards. But I'm bad at that. Once I own a card, I never want to sell it. This gives me a way to start building my Hive (and LEO) nest egg up while it's still cheap.
So what does 3000hp look like when curating? I expect to go from about 17 Hive in monthly curation rewards to a little over 20 hive. While that's a nice pop, I don't expect that to do much to get me to my 10k goal so I'll be trying to figure out more efficient ways to add from fiat and get there.
I'd love to do it by writing more but the 4-6 hive in author rewards for my normal 2000 word posts just isn't quite worth it and I'm not consistent enough to get the big votes. Hopefully soon I'll be able to give them though.
How about you? Do you buy Hive with Fiat? How do you get your money into the Hive ecosystem?