How to get dollars from a bank to UST on Anchor on Terra

So right now Terra has interest rates of about 20% for UST (which is a dollar stable coin). Unfortunately is is pretty hard to get dollars into terra. If you already have crypto in various ecosystems it is easier, but it can also be expensive.

Here are a few ways to get UST on Anchor.

Starting point: USDC on Metamask on Ethereum

If you have USDC on Metamask on ethereum, then you’ll want to convert USDC to UST using Uniswap. This costs probably $30 in transaction fees today.

Then you’ll bridge UST on ethereum to UST on Terra. This costs probably $30 in transaction fees. So doing a swap and a bridge works, but has a lot of fees. You also already need to have USDC. ( https://bridge.terra.money/)

Starting point: Bank account with dollars

Say you have a bank account and you want to get those dollars onto anchor. This will take some time.

First you should get a Coinbase account, and connect your bank. Then you can buy USDC on Coinbase. When I try this there are no fees, so $100 USD gets you $100 USDC.

Now you have USDC on this exchange. You can get UST here, but UST on coinbase is on ethereum, and we are trying to get to terra. So if you swap here you get some of the coinbase fees, much less right now than eth DEX transaction fees.

Next you can get a Kucoin account. You’ll have to set this up and set up the security components like 2FA. Now go to Main Account, and then Deposit. Deposit USDC from your Coinbase account. This fee is usually smaller, recently was about $5. Now you have USDC on Kucoin.

Now you need to transfer USDC from the Main Account to your Trading Account.

Then you’ll go to the USDC/UST market and you can exchange USDC for UST. You’ll probably get something like 99 cents for a dollar here.

Then you transfer back from the trading account to the main account.

Then you add your UST deposit address that you had from a terra account.

Then you withdraw your UST from Kucoin to Terra. Then you can deposit this on Anchor ( https://anchorprotocol.com/).

Easy!

But this way is really only about $5 in fees, so much better for smaller amounts.

Now say you want to get those dollars back to your bank? You could go in reverse but it’s too much work so I assume this money is staying in the crypto ecosystem for now. Hopefully soon terra has good debit/credit cards or direct bank connections.