Chasing the Pot of Gold at the End of the Crypto Rainbow: Buying Tokens on Uniswap

If you have been paying any attention at all to crypto, you will know that the Defi (Decentralized Finance) sector has been red hot.

People trading DeFi tokens have made 1000% return on their investments in ONE DAY.

Mind you, people have also lost 99.5% of their investment in one day as well.

But let’s not focus on the negative. I assume you are not reading this newsletter because you are interested in buying Treasury bonds.

Here is how to gain access to Uniswap, or the Devil’s Playground which it what I called it in last week’s bulletin.

Here is a screensnap of my Uniswap dashboard:

It is important to remember that Uniswap is a decentralized exchange, meaning it does not have any custodial ownership over your Ethereum or Ethereum tokens.

Instead, the tokens and ether are always stored in your own wallet, in this case, my Portis wallet:

First thing to learn about the Uniswap dashboard: It’s not very informative.

About a week ago I deposited two ether to my Portis wallet. Where did the rest of the ether go?

This next screen provides a little bit more information. You can see him that I have some sUSD and DEXT tokens in my wallet.

But Uniswap doesn’t try to put a price on those tokens. For that, you have to look elsewhere.

The next screen snapshot is one of my Portis wallet, where my ether and tokens are stored:

Again, you will notice that the Portis wallet does not attempt to value the tokens that I have bought through the Uniswap exchange.

Even when you click on the balances, it is tough to find the tokens that you have in your account:

At this point in the process and depending on much money you have spent buying these tokens, you are either 1) very frustrated or 2) very worried.

But fortunately, Etherscan saves the day. See the clickable link in the screen snapshot below, from the Uniswap dashboard.

Etherscan gives you a ton of information about the holdings in your wallet.

All transactions to and from my Portis wallet are shown at the bottom of the screen.

Notice the boxes that I have highlighted. I spent 0.25 ether buying some DEXT tokens which are now worth about $69 (Yes I am down on the transaction).

Etherscan is also a wonderful tool for showing information about the tokens on the Ethereum network.

You can see that the DEXTools token has a market cap of $12.95 million USD with 200 million tokens issued. There are 3615 separate wallets that hold the DEXTools token.

Clicking on the info tab in Etherscan also gives us more information:

Note that the number of tokens circulating is very different from the 200 million tokens issued. When will the other 100 million plus tokens hit the market? That’s up to the DEXTools development group.

We can only hope that they don’t “dump” it.

Conclusion

It’s a good idea to learn to walk before running. Before doing any serious trading in Uniswap, you better know how to FIND your tokens after buying them.

I hope this guide helps.

In future articles, I will cover how to buy into liquidity pools and some token screening tools that may help you choose which tokens to buy.

Should you take this seriously? I honestly don’t know. I pointed out last week the problems with Uniswap.

But the last time there was a token craze, I made a killing. Check out this article I wrote almost three years ago and tell me if you get a sense of deja-vu.

Good luck.

Disclaimer: As always, what I write should not be taken as advice on investing.