Well, through LEO finance allegedly we are able to connect into the MAYA and thus Thorchain DEx. That's awesome. Suppose we move into USDC? Using this path we have HBD => HIVE => SWAP.HIVE (Hive Engine) => LEO (Hive.Engine) => LEO (Arbitrum) => CACAO => RUNE => USDC. The LEO DEX is supposed to hide this from you but the costs are quite stark:
1 HBD => 0.6766 cacao ($0.76) => ? Rune => ? USDC?
So, with 1000 HBD you end up with 632 USDC on Arbitrum.
My Thorchain client doesn't want to show me how much it costs to send 0.6766 CACAO because I do not have any. And Leodex wont say because it is too low but I can put 676.6 CACAO and it tells me. It later tells me I can get $82 million dollars worth of LEO if I buy with CACAO. So it is early days. I think we should have a direct on-ramp and off-ramp to Thorchain with HBD with low fees and we can defend the peg ourselves.
You have already lost 24% of the value just moving into CACAO. Using Hive-Engine as a manual first step is far more efficient. HBD => SWAP.HIVE => SWAP.LTC => LTC => RUNE => USDC.
Litecoin is an old school Proof of Work, limited supply UTXout style coin based on Bitcoin before the split. Its transaction fees are sub-cent and it has wide adoption through local exchanges and it sometimes develops features before BTC. It's a good way to get onto Rune as is Bitcoin Cash(BCH) which also has all of these great features of LTC.
I can understand these are early days, but the reason exchanges have one or only a few special currencies as the base currency for trades is so that there is enough liquidity so these prices don't destroy all of the value from the high spreads and fees. It might work well though for those who want to get out of LEO directly into some MAYA asset or vice versa.
☘️☘️☘️ @leprechaun
Posted with proof of brain