After I met Alex and had a chat with him I decided to buy some $ALEX tokens for two reasons.
- I want participate in the world’s secondly publicly traded person!
- I want to understand first hand how difficult the process is of using crypto as a solution.
Back in 2015 I tried buying some Ethereum and it was not a great user experience. Let’s get started!
First thing you need to do before you buy some $ALEX is to have some ETH. The easiest way is on an exchange like Coinbase or Kraken. I’ll be using Coinbase for this walkthrough. There is a great walk through from UserOnboard about that highlight how much the crypto currency community doesn’t care about anyone NOT in the crypto currency community (it’s two years old, so maybe it’s better now?).
To buy $ALEX I need to trade on Uniswap. To trade on Uniswap you need a wallet that supports it. Lucky for me I use Chrome and have already installed MetaMask. MetaMask is one of the most confusing things I have ever used online. But it has a cute fox face that follows your cursor around…
So I’m going to move some of my ETH from Coinbase to MetaMask. That is, this site that made me verify my identity and accessed my banking information (Coinbase) is going to send virtual money to a browser extension I installed and have no idea how it works. Seems fine.
Once I login to MetaMask I have the following options: Deposit or Send
But actually that isn’t right, I need to fumble around for the address (which is never labeled in any way) and copy and paste that into Coinbase in order to send the money over. So I’m sending $50 to a Chrome extension, which costs me $0.10, and it is pending for a while.
After some amount of time, I am confirmed! And checking MetaMask… I now have $55 worth of ETH in my account. So let’s buy that $ALEX.
Now, if you go to Uniswap you can’t actually buy $ALEX. I don’t know why. But if you use this special link Alex gave me, then you’ll get redirected to Uniswap and you’ll be ready to buy $ALEX. How? I don’t know, but it seems to work…
Because I have no idea what will happen I’m going to try just $10.00 USD worth of $ALEX (which is 0.044 ETH).
And I guess it worked, because now Uniswap shows that I have 696.674 of $ALEX.
But because $ALEX isn’t that popular, I have to add this new “custom” currency to MetaMask. I do this by adding the Token Contract Address to the Custom Token field. Then the Token Symbol and Decimals auto-populate…
And there we go! Now in my MetaMask wallet I can see that I have 0.1937 ETH, 3 CK, and 696.674 ALEX. Success!
Alex explained that the contract address number is the reference ID for the smart contract that was created for the token $ALEX, giving it its initial properties. The page on Etherscan (blockchain explorer) lets you track all the holders’ addresses and amounts held.
This address let us know that there are 10,000,000 $ALEX in total, and that the Roll address owns most of it still (they have a vesting schedule so Alex can’t be an evil dictator, and so that the market slowly absorbs the liquidity).
If we look up the ID for the smart contract of $ALEX we can see a record of transactions and the total number of shareholders.
Okay, I’ll buy another $40 worth of $ALEX (which is 0.17 ETH) now that I know how it works, and I’ll start keeping an eye on my investment on the DeFi Market Cap site which gives the changes in value for $ALEX.
Hopefully Alex does something really amazing and the price jumps up and I can sell my $ALEX at a wild profit.
🤞
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