Hey folks, longtime lurker and first time poster. I hear a lot about how hard it is to buy IOTA as a US citizen so I wanted to share my experience making a relatively large purchase with the least amount of fees (as well as brag about my new bag). This is in no way financial advice.
A little background about my trading history with Iota; I’ve been invested since 2017. I have personally made three purchases. One was near the ATH in 2017 (~$4.00), one in Oct 2020 at ~$0.25, and one over the course of this week (~$0.2385). I’ve been following fairly closely since the token blew up in 2017 and I strongly believe in the technology and the team building it regardless of all the current valid criticism and issues with the ecosystem. But this isn’t about iota; This is iotamarkets 😈.
You will need a few things to be able to go through the steps I describe below. You need a verified Coinbase account, a verified Binance.us account, and some cash to exchange for your precious jotas. “But jimmiscuous, there’s no liquidity on binance.us!” Just hear me out man. Do you want to trade on magicsea? The sea is dry my friend. At least for now.
For the more advanced traders of us, please feel free to skip to the third step.
First step: Load up your Coinbase account with USD and convert to USDC. USDC is feeless to 1. exchange from USD and 2. to transfer off the platform on Coinbase. This is your cheapest option to transfer into binance.us. For comparison, there was a roughly $500 fee to convert USD to USDT directly.
Second step: Transfer your USDC to binance.us and convert to Bitcoin. Then convert that Bitcoin to USDT. I tried to do a 1:1 trade of USDC to USDT, but there was absolutely no liquidity. You should be able to get in and out of Bitcoin fast. As you can see from the picture below, I even made a little profit. About $46: nice.
Always use limit orders folks.
There are no trading fees on the BTC/USDC pair. Actually, throughout the whole operation, I didn’t pay more than $50 in trading fees thanks to the volume I was doing.
Third step: This is where things get interesting. Once you have your tether, it’s time to buy your jotas. Take a gander at the price action and pick your happy price (within reason you degenerate). Always use a limit order folks. It should get filled…wait…where is the liquidity????
That’s the interesting part. It really doesn’t look like there’s much going on when you look at the 24hr volume and the order spread. Take a look at the order spread on the day I completed my buy. Those numbers are tiny!!
Going into this trade I was not psyched because of how little volume appeared to be on the exchange. I even hit up my friends in Denmark and Germany to talk about doing the trade for me, but the tax burden made it not really worth it. I’m a super compliant guy after all. So I decided to roll up my sleeves and stick it out in the liquidity desert of binance.us. I was ready to go into the trenches for weeks, even months, if it meant getting my precious jotas. Or so I thought.
I made a few orders below market rate to test the waters on 4/18/24 and, of course, the price gapped up and my orders were hidden from view. Whatever, I’m in it for the long haul. We saw the price peak above $0.26 and then slowly gap back down to 0.24 on 4/23/24. There I decided I would make a buy spread around 0.24. Once I found my buy price, I stuck to it. I could stay in that trench forever. I set limit orders for .2410, .2400, .2900, .2385 and .2380 with a few lower in case of a flash crash.
I got my first drink of water at 11:14 am PDT on 4/23/24. A partial fill at 0.2410. I knew I had someone on the hook. I picked my spot, 0.2385, and laid down a couple grand on it and waited. I cancelled all my other orders above that spot to show my benefactor where I’d meet them.
One hour later at 12:14pm, I received another sweet iota injection: this time a 100% fill at 0.2385. My eyes rolled back into my head. 35 minutes later I placed another order at 0.2385. Immediately filled upon opening. Dopamine flooded my brain.
After the initial excitement died down, I started to get suspicious. My 0.2380 order was untouched so this wasn’t some goober selling down the market. It felt like someone was looking at my orders and had silently agreed on my 0.2385 price after a 5 day deadlock. Stingy bastard wouldn’t even look at my 0.2380 order!
At 2:14pm, I placed another order for 0.2385. Immediately filled. Another one seconds later. Immediately filled. I took a break, but placed another and then another at 3:47, also immediately filled. I decided to lay all my cards on the table. At 3:48, I placed two very large orders for the remainder of my funds. I thought, “yeah, this guy’ll have to think about that one.” But they didn’t. Roughly 115k yodas straight into my mouth like a baby bird.
I was extremely pleased, but something was not quite right. None of those sell orders ever hit the live order book. If the price had gone up after one of my buys, it would always gap down to 0.2385 once I placed an order. Sure maybe they don’t want people to front run their sale, but there’s no liquidity anyway! Or at least that’s the way this seller wants it to seem.
This seller was also sitting on a very large stack of jotas. They sold almost 150k to me without even batting an eye once the price was set. This, to me, seems to be a highly capitalized individual or group with a vested interest in keeping the price of iota low. Also, to project an appearance of having low liquidity in the market. My buy 1.5x’ed the daily volume on binance.us that day. Who would sell this many jotas at such a low price? Nobody on iota discord I know. This is just my opinion based on my experience.
Note the USDT volume. My order cost roughly 35k USDT. Still alotta 7s on that order book.
The whole time I was looking at the order book (a few weeks), it felt like no one was there but me. I didn’t see very many, if any, large sales go through. After I was done buying, I got curious and looked around the other non-US exchanges and noticed a similar trend. No big orders going through. The price of iota was moving on a dime in response to 7 iota trades. It feels like you can hear pin drop in all the iota trading pairs market wide.
What’s my takeaway? I’m going to get hypothetical and am no way asserting any of these thoughts as truth. And again, this is not financial advice. There is a liquidity fairy. I said it. Somebody is making this market liquid, but us joe schmoes can't see it. If I were a US based Iota enthusiast, I would try to meet the fairy before it goes away and we have to use magicsea and experience real price discovery.
Final thoughts:
Over the last 7 years, Iota's price has not spent much time below $0.25. Simply put, the price is a steal for us Iota maxis. Dom and the team have put out a vision for this project and have worked consistently for the last 7 years. Yeah, there was inflation, but you don't work on something for seven years if you don't think you can deliver. If the coin price ain't high, IF doesn't have access to capital, and they need to do something to keep it going. Iota 2.0 beta is almost done, IOTA EVM is just over the horizon. There is no better time to get in than now. Dom even told us we were war heroes at the recent binance event. IF needs us to do our part soldier! We even have our own enemy shills to tweet at (Looking at you DAGnetics and Guido Lange). If that doesn't inspire you to buy, then I don't know what will. That being said, I'm going to be making my quotas and buying my yodas.
TLDR: I bought some IOTAs in the US from a fairy. It was sweet!
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