Good day investors! I’ve been really into EOS lately but participating in their ICO (especially using MyEtherWallet/MEW) has proved to be a bit more complicated than I expected, so I thought I would write this guide on how to safely invest in EOS.

There are basically two main ways to get EOS tokens, buying from an exchange (I) or buying from the EOS crowdsale page (II).

I-Buying from an exchange.

Plenty of exchanges have EOS listed although not all exchanges offer the same trading pairs but you should generally be able to buy EOS with BTC or ETH.

What I have noticed is that the $ price of EOS can vary considerable across exchanges (sometimes +/- 10%) depending on the liquidity.

So if you want to get your tokens from an exchange, you should definitely check the price of EOS across exchanges here so to get the best price in the market.

As far as exchanges go, my personal favorite is the decentralized Chinese exchange Binance. Binance is an exchange I have recently discovered and started to use to trade Chinese coins.

The advantage of using Binance:

• very fast account verification;
• decent liquidity;
• good trading engine;
• decentralized !;
• reactive customer support;
• trading fees are currently at a 50% discount if you pay them using Binance’s native token: the BNB token. You can purchase BNB tokens directly on the exchange with BTC, once you have BNB tokens in your account, the total will be automatically depleted every time you trade.

Really check it out.

As for storing your tokens, I recommend you use MEW (if you are an advanced user) or Exodus (for users unfamiliar with MEW).

If you decide to store your exchange-purchased EOS on MEW, you will still need to complete two steps which are detailed at the end of this guide.

II-Buying EOS through their ICO.

We'll first discuss the advantages of buying EOS through their ICO (A) then we'll look at how you can do just that using MEW (B).

A-Why buying EOS through their ICO.

To understand why buying EOS from the ICO can be beneficial we first need to understand their ICO model.

EOS has a rather exotic ICO model.

Basically their ICO has been running since July 1rst and will be running until June 1rst 2018.

You read that right EOS is having a year-long ICO. This model has stirred a lot of controversy in the community. Personally, I think it maximizes tokens distribution and allows investors to track the project development before making the decision to invest.

The ICO is split into 350 contribution periods (23h/period) and 2,000,000 EOS are released at the end of each of these. The 2,000,000 EOS are split proportionally to the number of ETH that were sent during the contribution so basically the final number of EOS you receive will vary depending on how many ETH were sent that day, so if 10 Eth are sent you get 2,000,000 EOS/ETH, if 2,000,000 ETH are sent, you get only 1EOS/ETH, etc.

You can track the EOS/ETH ratio of the current contribution period
(as well as past ones) on EOSscan.

I have spent a bit of time monitoring the ICO on this page and I can made the following observations:

• most of the contribution ETH is usually sent at the very last moment before the end of a period so I strongly suspect bots are at work (possibly bot developed by the EOS team to keep the price around market level);

• the ICO price is usually slightly cheaper than most exchange price which gives you some opportunity of arbitrage (dump your ICO coins on exchange for immediate profits);

• there is less ETH sent in times of panic. I invested in period 70 a few days ago (when the FUD surrounding China’s ICO “ban” crashed the market) and actually got the cheapest price on record.

So there are some incentives to buy EOS from the ICO, however I would strongly advise people that aren’t familiar with using MEW or contributing in ICOs to go buy their EOS on an exchange.

For those who desire to participate in the ICO, wellm let’s get into the meat of this article, using MEW to get your EOS.

B-How to participate in the EOS ICO using MEW.

I will base this guide on the excellent videos from Crypto Kom’s YouTube channel and add my personal notes.

/!\ If you bought your tokens on an exchange and wish to store your EOS in a MEW, you only need to complete step 1 (Register your MEW address) and 4 (add the EOS ticker to your MEW). DO NOT send your EOS tokens to the ICO smart contract or you will probably lose them all.

1. Register your MEW address.

• The EOS key generator which appears at the very beginning of the video can be found here.
• Registering your MEW address can be done before or after you receive your tokens, it doesn’t matter, just make sure to map an EOS public key to the wallet where you store your EOS before July 1rst 2018.

2. Send your ETH to EOS’ smart contract.

• Open your MEW (you can safely contribute from your LEDGER via MEW);
• Go to Send Ether & Tokens Page;
• Unlock same wallet you are unlocking here;
• Send the Amount of ETH you want to Contribute to the smart contract;
• Gas Limit: at least 90000;
• Make the transaction.

/!\ You will not receive your EOS automatically after you send your ETH. Wait for the end of the contribution period in which you participated then claim your tokens.

3. Claim your EOS.

Follow the steps above but:

• Use a "claim" command instead of a "claimALL" command and specify the Period of contribution, you can find this information on EOSscan (#70 in my case), by doing so, you will claim your tokens faster and cheaper;
• Sent a Tx with the following parameters: 2 Gwei / O ETH / Gas Limit: 90000.*

Once you’ve claimed your tokens you still won’t be able to see your EOS in your MEW, for that you need to add the EOS token symbol to your MEW.

4. Add EOS token symbol to your MEW.

Voila!

Your shiny EOS is finally in your MEW, ready to be transferred to an exchange for an arbitrage dump-sell or to be kept as investment until the dawn of time.

I hope you'll find this guide useful and if you have questions regarding contributing with MEW you can leave them in the comments section and I'll do my best to help you out.

Finally, for more on why now is a good time to invest in EOS, go check out and support my latest article at:

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@tradealert/trader-s-opinion-why-you-should-invest-in-eos-rather-than-in-ethereum

Cheers :)

#cryptocurrency #bitcoin #ethereum #eos

Trade safe guys, and please follow, resteem and upvote if you like the content.

Dan @tradealert