Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only. Dexpanse does not endorse or is not in any way associated with any of the tokens, platforms, services or projects mentioned in this article, nor does Dexpanse take any responsibility for the proper functioning of these services and platforms. The information provided through Dexpanse does not constitute advice or recommendation of investment or trading. Dexpanse does not take responsibility for any of your investment decisions. Please seek professional advice before taking financial risks.
Altcoins, memecoins, shitcoins… we’ve all heard of them. It all started with Doge Coin and no introduction is needed there, but that’s definitely not where it stopped. Nowadays we have dozens of new coins popping up every hour. Every so often a new coin goes viral and through gargantuan growth attains truly outlandish trading volumes and market caps. Of course, once any coin gets this big it can be easily traded on all the major centralized exchanges, such as Binance or Kraken. But, how do you buy a meme coin before it is listed anywhere?
Setting up a wallet and choosing a smart-chain
Let’s start from the basics — currently most meme coins do not accommodate their own blockchain, but instead are built on smart-chains belonging to large, established cryptocurrencies. A smart-chain is a blockchain that supports smartcontract-based applications. This essentially means that users can implement code into blockchain transactions and through that create decentralized applications and services, an example of which is the creation of tokens.
For the purpose of this article we will choose the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Therefore, we will need to pay for our meme tokens with BNB (Binance Coin), and so we should acquire some. This in itself is not very problematic and all we need is an account on the biggest cryptocurrency exchange (at the time of writing this article) on the planet (https://www.binance.com/ ). However, as was earlier stated, we want to buy unlisted coins, and for that purpose the next thing we need is a crypto wallet.
So, once again, we will arbitrarily choose Metamask (https://metamask.io/) as our crypto-wallet of choice for this article. After setting Metamask up (remembering to write down and stow away our secret phrase in a very safe place), we need to add the BSC network to the wallet — Binance Academy has that nicely explained here: https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/connecting-metamask-to-binance-smart-chain .
Once all is set up we can send our BNB from Binance to our wallet. Here it is very important to copy and paste the correct address from Metamask and to choose the appropriate network, in our case — the Binance Smart Chain (BEP20). If you are unsure whether you have done everything correct, then you can always first send a very small amount as to check whether it arrives correctly to the wallet’s account. Do keep in mind, however, that these transactions may take up to a few minutes to be processed.
Buying your token
Now that everything else has been taken care of, it is time to buy your token. Maybe you already have a project that you truly believe in or you have always wished to be a billionaire in <insert-your-favorite-meme> tokens… But, what if you don’t even know where to look? One way to find potential tokens is by using dextools (https://www.dextools.io/app/bsc/pool-explorer) — here you can easily find the addresses for all newly created tokens on the network (to be exact — what we are actually seeing is new tokens that have had their liquidity created — but we won’t go into much detail here). But finding tokens this way is very dangerous, as a majority of these tokens do not have locked liquidity and so are susceptible to a classic rug-pull scam, where the token owner in one transaction withdraws all of the funds allocated in the liquidity pool of the token, rendering it worthless. We will not discuss liquidity pools here, as that is a topic for another article, but for now remember that investing in tokens without locked liquidity can have disastrous consequences,
Ok, so what other alternative do you have, besides paging through countless crypto forums and telegram communities? Well you can always check out token presales on Dexpanse’s launchpad (https://dexpanse.io/presales/). The convenient thing about presales is that it’s much easier to scrutinize a token, as most information regarding the token and its liquidity is readily available on the presale page, oh, and if the presale is still ongoing then you can simply buy the token by connecting your wallet and clicking the appropriate button on Dexpanse’s platform.
But, let’s say that you want to buy a token whose presale has already ended or a different token altogether. What you need is a decentralized swap exchange native to your chosen network. In the case of BSC it is Pancakeswap (https://pancakeswap.finance/swap). Its use is very simple:
- Connect your Metamask (or other) wallet to the platform.
- Copy the exact address of you chosen token.
- Choose to swap between BNB and your chosen token by pasting its address in the input field.
- Approve the token on Metamask.
- Choose how many of the tokens you wish to buy.
- Commit the transaction on Pancakeswap and confirm it on Metamask.
- You will receive your tokens shorty.
Closing Thoughts
While investing in meme coins is fun and can be profitable, it is also very risky. Never invest funds that you know you cannot lose and make sure to double check all your transactions. Finally, be wary — anybody can make a token in minutes (even you) and so there are plenty of scammers looking to make a quick profit.
It is also worth noting that blockchain transactions are not free and part of your funds will got to pay a so-called “gas” fee to facilitate the transaction. On the Binance Smart Chain this fee is relatively small — no more than a few cents, but on some networks (hmm….<cough> Ethereum <cough>..) this fee can even be in the magnitude of hundreds of dollars per transaction.
-Dexpanse Team
