How to convert USD to FTM: My fellow Americans

Disclaimer: None of this is investment advice. There are gas fees, exchange fees, and market volatility along the way. $100 may turn into less or more than $100 depending on what crypto and the network is like.

A friend of mine has recently been raving about his journey into crypto. He’s bet his life savings on it, and so far it’s working out pretty well for him. He’s tripled his investment so far, and whole-heartedly expects it to continue. It piqued my interest to say the least, but…

crypto is a scam and I don’t want to be a part of it… RIGHT?

Well, after earning more than I make in a day in returns from his investments for the past few weeks coupled with a talk I listened to at Clearwater Analytics’ recent developer conference, I started to think “Maybe there’s something here that I’m not seeing.” Fast forward to now, and I am in the honeymoon phase of crypto/blockchain/web3. I honestly struggle to stop thinking about it.

All that being said, it’s hard to “get into crypto” even quite literally… it’s just flat out hard to buy stuff without accumulating lots of fees. So, for the time being, this seems to be a pretty straight forward way for me to convert my USD to FTM. We will be going through crypto.com. If you don’t have an account already, feel free to sign up with my referral code to throw $25 both our ways: https://crypto.com/app/yqky7srbep

After you have a Crypto.com account, the cheapest way I’ve found to get coin off of the exchange is via USDC over the Polygon Network. So, we buy some USDC (and $1–2 of MATIC to cover gas fees) using the following process:

f

Now we need to transfer it off of Crypto.com to an external wallet. Metamask is a popular, well-supported wallet if you don’t have an external wallet already. Time to transfer our crypto:

It may take a few minutes for Crypto.com to process the withdrawal. Once the coins make it to your external wallet, then begins the swapping and routing.

If you don’t have it configured already, install the Metamask extension onto a supported browser. Once you have your wallet all sorted out and the coin is there, then begins the swapping and routing to get it to FTM.

I use SpookySwap to route it from the Polygon Network to the Fantom Network and swap it from USDC to FTM:

You may need to leverage a faucet to get from USDC to FTM. A faucet will give you enough gas to swap your USDC for FTM, and then you just need to make sure you don’t run out of gas for the remainder of your transactions. SpookySwap has a faucet on their discord in a pinch (SpookySwap (discord.com)).

There may be a more straightforward and cost-effective way to go from USD to FTM. If you know the way, please comment it below.

If you found this helpful, feel free to send a tip my way: 0xd222069643E7FbDA6cEA7962146ff8d29Fb209f2

Stay safe!