It’s been a crazy ride that began with a painful launch delay, but it’ll be worth it in the end.

As I said in my previous article on the Animal Farm launch, I wouldn’t be able to hold back my excitement, and I definitely didn’t. Although I’m typically an early riser, I will normally force myself to try to go back to sleep for a couple of hours of extra sleep.

Not this time. I was going to get up and be ready for the launch at 8AM PST.

The Additional Anticipation

As pretty much everyone knows, the launch was delayed, for a very, very long time. It was probably close to 6 hours late, if my memory is correct. Thank goodness for guys like Brandon from the Drip Guide on YouTube. He was live streaming from before the advertised launch time until past the actual launch! It was a place where we could chat, listen to him talk about strategies and stuff. I think it was good for some people who just wanted to vent somewhere, since the Animal Farm and Drip telegram channels were muted. :)

In the end, everything went fairly smoothly, so I’m happy about that. There was a good reason for the delay as well — Forex said in an AMA that it had to do with a safety mechanism triggering to prevent a smart contract from spending too much of the BUSD available. I didn’t really dig into this, as I wasn’t interested. The Animal Farm is live, so let’s go!

The SNAFU

Hmm… except that this Swap button isn’t working. Refresh. Still not working. Refresh. Hey wait, where did my pL2 go?

Yes.. fairly smoothly. Imagine my excitement when the smart contracts went live, but then I couldn’t do anything in the Animal Farm page related to the pL2 swap. I was able to get my other assets into the farms and pools, but I couldn’t get my PIGS and DOGS! I went from euphoric to frenetic in a matter of minutes. It was kind of gut wrenching to be watching Brandon click Swap on the live stream and be able to get his tokens right away.

However, in the end, I really lucked out. After refreshing multiple times somehow killed the pages ability to refresh the pL2 token selection and my balance, I noticed that I had another tab open to the same page in another browser window, and it had the Swap button activated! Lo and behold, I clicked it and my swap went through. I was so relieved!!!

The price on PIGS and DOGS had a huge run up after launch. In hindsight, I probably should have sold my PIGS for $1000 when I saw them hit that price, and then buy them back at $400. However, I didn’t want to mess around with that and decided to just get my farms set up.

The Plan

As I mentioned in my previous article, I had a plan in place for asset allocations. I followed it exactly, except for one thing — I left a bag of BUSD available so I could pair 100% of my DOGS and stake in the DOGS/BUSD LP farm instead of the DOGS single asset pool. Boy, am I glad I made that choice! For reasons unknown, it appears (based on multiple complaints online) that the DOGS/BUSD LP pair has a significantly higher APR than DOGS alone. I really lucked out with that. DOGS/BNB is also a good farm, but there’s a minor bug in the UI display that’s throwing off people. The number is off by a factor of about 100 (too small), so people think they’ve lost money, and a lot of it, once they stake their DOGS/BNB in the farm.

Everyone is going to have to learn to chill and wait. We’re only 48 hours into this thing, and issues will be resolved in time.

The Numbers

I went into the Manor Farm completely blind and just clicked buttons. I learn by doing, and I was willing to risk a little bit of money to try to learn how the mechanics work. I don’t think I really understood everything, but in the end I still ended up with a pretty decent amount of REV tokens, which hopefully set me up for future success in the Animal Farm.

This time, I did things differently. I actually created a spreadsheet and had a separate sheet for every farm and pool I was participating in. I started with the basic info:

With just this basic info, you have almost everything you need to keep track of things. This really made a world of difference to me — instead of guessing which farms and pools were working for me, I could actually see my APR and how it compared to the numbers provided on the Animal Farm page.

To be honest, though, given the few allocations I have, I’m not going to change anything. I calculated that both DOGS/BUSD and DRIP/BUSD were giving over 1000% APR, which is huge. The one farm where the calculation might help tremendously is DOGS/BNB. That one looks like it could be 5x better than the other two farms! So I need to start pairing DOGS and BNB and see how that fares over time.

On paper, I am “earning” about $800/day from the Animal Farm, but since I haven’t sold anything, and have actually been spending BUSD to make DOGS/BUSD every cycle, I am technically dumping money into the system. I’m hoping that once the farm really starts to take off, things will turn around and I’ll be able to realize some profits.

I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on my progress and plan to do a one month report.

If you aren’t in the Drip Network, please read my article on that as well!