While Bitcoin and Ethereum are recovering from their recent crash and new altcoins like Safemoon and Shiba Inu (SHIB) are stunning the crypto community with massive returns, many risk-tolerant investors are turning over every rock to find small market cap coins with moonshot potential. A relatively new decentralized exchange (DEX) on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) called PancakeSwap facilitates investing in high-risk cryptocurrencies with moonshot potential.
What is Pokeball?
Pokeball is a new altcoin that launched early this year on the Binance Smart Chain. The goal of Pokeball is to create a financial ecosystem built around the Pokeball token and a steam game that is yet to release. The platform also wants to incorporate non-fungible tokens (NFTs) dubbed Pokemoons. It calls its ecosystem Pokenomy. The Pokenomy runs on the POKE token, which will be used to buy NFTs that will be tied into the upcoming Pokemoon battling game, allowing users to fight with their Pokemoon NFTs.
The developers plan to burn a large amount of POKE to make it deflationary and raise profits for holders. They initially burned all tokens that went unsold in their presale in January 2021 (around 2.4 million POKE), and they plan to burn 50% of POKE to buy their Pokemoon NFTs.
40% of each NFT sale will go to “prizes” to compensate POKE users. The developers also started burning 10% of every POKE token minted (in their yield farming pools) and 3% of every POKE transaction. These implementations may seem familiar to those paying attention to the tokenomics of new high-risk altcoins like Safemoon and HODL token.
High burn fees and “prizes” for POKE holders disincentivize selling or even moving the token to another wallet, making it look a bit like a pyramid scheme. They also lock 75% of POKE rewards from their yield farming pools for a whole year, making most of the POKE earned impossible to sell for 12 months.
Depositing any POKE you invest in into their yield farming pools could earn significant interest over time from trading fees. Remember that 75% of these rewards will be unclaimable for a year, so it will take time to lock in profits.
Brief History of Pokeball
POKE launched via a presale in January 2021 selling for 1,000 POKE per 1 Binance Coin (BNB), roughly between $.03 and $.04 at the time. Since then they haven’t completed much of their planned roadmap for the 1st quarter of 2021. However, they launched yield farms soon after POKE launched on their platform and are liquid on PancakeSwap.
POKE’s initial max supply was about 100 million at launch, but it will likely decrease significantly from planned burns. Its initial maximum supply was already enormously lower than Safemoon and NFT-Art Finance (NFTART), which launched with 1 quadrillion and 10 quadrillion tokens, respectively. The price of POKE, about $0.079 at the time of writing, already reflects this, as it’s much more expensive than Safemoon and NFTART.
POKE peaked on May 5 at $0.6999 after exploding from about $0.07 on May 4. This peak didn’t last long, and POKE’s price has fallen back to $0.075 over this month before jumping 157% to $0.18 on May 31. The token has shown 10 times potential earlier this month, and even though it dropped significantly after its peak, it could make another run in the future.
How to Buy Pokeball
- Open a Binance Account.
First, you will need to purchase BNB tokens that can be used to swap for POKE on PancakeSwap. Purchasing BNB is easy on Binance.US, and you will have to sign up for an account with the company if you don’t already have one.
U.S. users are required to fill out Know Your Customer (KYC) information, including a driver’s license or passport number, Social Security number and address. Otherwise, you can set up an account with just your email and a password on Binance non-US!
Once your account is set up you can purchase BNB. You can do this by depositing fiat currency (USD, EUR, etc.) or purchasing cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum on another exchange (Coinbase, WeBull and Gemini are some of the best) and transferring them into your Binance account.
- Download a Browser or Mobile Wallet
Among the most popular wallets for BSC tokens are Trust Wallet, made by Binance itself, and MetaMask, which was initially built only for Ethereum tokens, but can be used for BSC tokens as well. Read this forum post from Binance detailing how to add the BSC network to your MetaMask to start trading BNB, BUSD, POKE and other BSC tokens with your wallet.
Trust Wallet is already set up to receive and send BNB tokens, so after downloading it for free (on iOS or Android) and setting up your account, you are ready to send your BNB tokens to your wallet. Be careful with the address you receive your tokens with on Trust Wallet because if you send them to the wrong address they may be lost forever.
You will want to buy and send BEP-20 BNB tokens because they are on the Binance Smart Chain and are the only form that can be swapped on Pancake Swap. If you’re in the U.S, it may be easier to send your BNB tokens as BEP-2 and then convert these BNB tokens to be compatible with BSC through Trust Wallet. To do this, you can exchange between the 2 types of Binance Coin (the black logo is on BSC, the traditional yellow logo is a BEP-2).
- Connect Your Wallet to Pancake Swap.
If you’re doing this on your browser with MetaMask, all you need to do is navigate to Pancake Swap, click Connect Wallet in the top right corner, select MetaMask and enter your password if you aren’t already signed in. If you are using the Trust Wallet app, simply go to the dApps tab of the app and look for PancakeSwap. If you can’t find it by just scrolling down, type in Pancakeswap.finance in the search bar and it will come up.
- Complete Your Swap
Now you are ready to swap for POKE (or pretty much any other BSC token) with your BNB. All you have to do now is enter the token you have (BNB) in the From box and copy-paste POKE’s contract address in the To box.
Here’s POKE’s contract address: 0xcdad3683335a4a96d2c437dd4513b061e4aec4ff
You will have to pay a small transaction fee for the swap, but luckily these fees on BSC are significantly lower than those on the Ethereum network. This means you will have to account for the small fee and swap slightly less BNB than you have in your wallet. After you pay the fee and the transaction goes through, your wallet will automatically be credited with your POKE tokens.
Trade, Sell or Convert your POKE Tokens
When you decide it’s time to take profits (or losses) all you need to do is swap back to BNB or another BSC token like Binance USD (BUSD) on PancakeSwap and then you can either hold these tokens (BUSD is a stablecoin pegged to the USD so it’s a great coin to take profits with) or send them to a cryptocurrency exchange to withdraw to your bank account in fiat currency.
Leverage Your Crypto and Avoid Capital Gains
Cryptocurrency investors are always looking for ways to lower their tax bills, especially in the United States where capital gains taxes may soon double due to a proposed bill. BlockFi provides the best way to make use of your crypto profits without having to realize them and pay capital gains.
BlockFi offers loans without approval by requiring cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as collateral. As long as you pay back the loan, you will be able to reclaim your crypto. This is perfect for crypto holders who strongly believe their token of choice will perform well because they can use the cash from the loan while still having the exposure they want.
Some BlockFi users use the loan to buy more cryptocurrency to leverage their position even more, although this can be risky for volatile assets. Users with lower risk tolerance on BlockFi may instead choose to simply keep their assets in BlockFi’s high interest bearing accounts to earn 5% to 10% interest. If any of BlockFi’s services are for you, check it out and set up an account to start earning!
Current Crypto Prices
The 1st quarter of 2021 has been a wild ride for cryptocurrencies. At the beginning of the year, we saw a massive bull run continue to push cryptos to their all-time highs due to newfound institutional interest in crypto. Recently, crypto has seen a large correction caused by the Chinese government’s recent banning of financial institutions from providing cryptocurrency services. Whether this will be the end of the current bull market is debated to no end in the crypto community, and we likely won’t have a definite answer for a little while.
Is POKE a Good Investment?
POKE should not be construed as a safe investment in any way. It has a high risk of crashing and never recovering, especially because most of the Pokenomy ecosystem hasn’t even been launched yet. Once its steam game and NFTs drop, it will probably be much easier to gauge its future success.
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