$100 to $5.5mil in 4 Years — A Complete Beginners Guide to Crypto
By: Allissa Auld
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Defi, Finance, Binance Smart Chain, Drip

If it shows you only Fiat currencies and not crypto, select Withdraw Crypto on the right hand side. You can now select BNB as the coin you want to transfer, and then enter your address. Note that I can not enter the address directly (as shown below) as I have security settings to only allow whitelisted addresses from my address book. I recommend you enable this (via Binance account security settings) as it prevents someone who gains access to your account from easily withdrawing your money.

Withdrawing Crypto to Binance Smart Chain

After you enter your MetaMask BSC address (that we copied from MetaMask) the page will then it will realise it is a BSC address and Binance will ask you a couple of questions. It is important to note that:

Yes, the MetaMask address you have copied from MetaMask does support the Binance Smart Chain (as long as you followed the add BSC to MetaMask instructions above)

the MetaMask address you have copied from MetaMask does support the Binance Smart Chain (as long as you followed the add BSC to MetaMask instructions above) If you enter the wrong address your money will be lost. This goes for much in the cryptocurrency space, always check the address and network before committing to any transfer.

This goes for much in the cryptocurrency space, always check the address and network before committing to any transfer. Binance Smart Chain uses the BEP20 token standard, you don’t yet need to know what this means technically except that it is not directly compatible with other networks such as Ethereum — hence the above warnings about the wrong network.

If you answer the above questions correctly, then Binance will allow you to transfer the funds. Enter your desired amount in the Withdraw Amount box (note that this is in BNB, not your native Fiat currency — if you just want to transfer what you converted earlier, then select max). Depending on your security settings you may be asked some confirmation codes, I have two-factor authentication, and email codes turned on so I have to enter these every time I transfer — it is annoying, but think of how much more annoying it is for someone trying to steal your money.

You can track the progress of the transfer, and once it appears in your MetaMask wallet you are ready to proceed to the next phase. You can see in my screenshot below I now have the 0.28 BNB (approx $200 AUD) that we began with but in our crypto DeFi wallet.

BNB in MetaMask Ready to DeFi

Gas Fees

You will see and hear the term gas fees, while the background behind these can be complex depending on the network protocol in use you can simply think of them as bank transfer fees. Any time you move crypto around you need to pay a transfer fee, and the fee currency for BSC is the BNB coin — hence we used our initial transfer as BNB so we had gas fees immediately. If you happened to use another currency or an exchange that did not support BNB then you will not have any BNB to cover gas to accomplish anything. The crypto world did think of this and provides faucets which you can get a tiny amount of the relevant gas currency for free to get you started. The BNB faucet is at this link, note that you can only use this function every 24hrs, so make sure your first transfer is into more BNB, if you need to transfer between currencies use pancakeswap.finance, they are the primary exchange on BSC.

Binance Smart Chain Faucet

Phase 4 — Dripping Crypto

Now that you are ready to explore the world of DeFi, it can become easy to forget where you put money (yep, I’m serious) and also to find your way onto scam or poorly run sites. I recommend Apeboard.finance to track your accounts, but also I tend to use sites that are on their protocol list as they have at least seen some moderate trading volume and have some level of legitimacy. When you enter their site you can input your MetaMask address and then it will search the public blockchains and tell you what currencies you have (as shown below, with their Christmas theme active, note the AUD amount varies slightly based on currency rate changes between the screenshots — change the currency to your native currency in their settings).

Apeboard.finance — DeFi Dashboard showing our Example $200 AUD

We are about to get into investing our crypto, it is important to note that the demonstrated investment I provide below is just and example of what is possible in DeFi; you can do other amazing things such as coin farming or invest in stablecoins at interest rates like 20% per year (think of how that compares to your normal bank account). You are obviously free to jump into the deep end and find further opportunities, and again what I provide here is not financial advice, its just a guide. I recommend sticking to the Binance Smart Chain initially, as Ethereum gas fees are ridiculous at the moment. There are also many other networks to explore (which can be seen in the above screenshot), but that is well outside the scope of this article.

Drip Network

The recommended example is the Drip Network which is a project offering a 1% return on investments, daily, up to a maximum of 365%. The details behind Drip are detailed in their whitepaper, but I will attempt to cover the highlights here.

Drip utilises what is referred to as tokenomics, which means that the developer has aimed to design factors into the token to ensure longevity and price stability based on their token goals. While the tokenomics term does get thrown around a bit in the DeFi space it at least indicates an attempt to maintain the project as a long term investment.

In the case of Drip, the tokenomics include a 10% tax on every transaction, and these funds are fed into the Drip contract (think Drip money bucket) to pay investors. The caveat here is that if you compound your investment (or hydrate in drip terminology) then there is only a 5% fee.

What the Drip tokenomics does is embrace the power of compound interest, and in the absence of fancy calculations and diagrams I present this link to a fantastic Drip Calculator by Kelly Snook, who also has an excellent article on the details behind Drip strategy which I highly recommend to select your preferred strategy. This compound interest calculating is where this article headline comes from, by entering 1 wallet with 1 drip (current price approx $100 AUD), then we get $5.5 million dollars in 4 years and more if the price of drip increases. That is the power of daily compound interest.

Note I only put $100 in so we have spare BNB for future transaction gas fees, and if you run low in the future, sell some drip into BNB which we will detail soon. The amount you enter into your Drip initially does not significantly affect the amount you earn overall, it just means if you put in more you get more out sooner.

Example Drip Calculation for 1 Drip wallet with 1 Drip

Now, it is important to mention that some people consider Drip to be a ponzi scheme since you need to be invited to join the network. Dr. Chris does a great job at dispelling this concern in this article and while Drip is not without risk, it is indeed (at least in my experience) well worth the investment. Additionally, the liquidity of Drip is being supported by The Manor Farm, a project created by Drip’s founder, which is further supporting the Drip ecosystem.

Depositing Drip

We now have the what covered so lets move on to the how; using the browser you have MetaMask installed go to the Drip website, and select Swap at the top of the page and then Connect Wallet at the top right corner.