The siren song of 'just one more conversion'
My big lesson in the stablecoin space wasn't about missing a pump or an algorithmic failure, but rather the cumulative toll of micro-fees. Early on, I was constantly shuffling funds between various stables and fiat on-ramps to optimize for the 'best' rates for different merchants, chasing a perceived half-percent here or there. You know, $USDC to $EURC, then to EUR bank, then to a merchant that prefers $USDT for a slightly lower processing fee, then back again. Each transaction was small, usually under a dollar, but the sheer volume of them added up to a surprising amount by the end of the month. It was like death by a thousand papercuts. I realized I was spending more time and cumulative fees optimizing these minuscule differences than the actual savings were worth. Sometimes, convenience and simplicity have an invisible value that far outweighs the theoretical maximum efficiency.