In the inaugural edition of Never have I ever tried series we covered how to set up an ArConnect wallet. Now we own the vehicle that will fare us far and wide through the Permaweb, but do we have the gas in the tank? If you remember, we directed you to use a centralised exchange in order to fill your wallet with AR. What if you already have some $ETH in a MetaMask wallet? Can you swap it for $AR? Or what if you already read more about Web3 and became a strong supporter of decentralisation? What if you don’t want to be forced through KYC (know your customer), or simply, based on your location the CEXs that are active in your area don’t offer you an option to buy $AR?

Worry no more, even if there are no active decentralised exchanges in the Arweave ecosystem (there is just a matter of a couple of months until both Permaswap and Verto.exchange will be fully operational), there is one project that offers you almost all you need: everPay.

What is everPay? A cross-chain platform that grants you access to a Layer 2 solution where you can execute various types of transactions instantaneously with 0 fees. If you are a total beginner you will find this explanation totally and utterly useless, so, let me break it into smaller pieces and see if it makes more sense.

A cross-chain platform means that you can connect from different blockchains. You can use your ArConnect wallet if you want to connect from the Arweave network or you can use MetaMask if you want to connect from the Ethereum side.

A Layer 2 solution represents a protocol that exists on top of another stand-alone chain (called a Layer 1), in our case Arweave. What’s the use of it? Why not stick to the “real” one? If you haven’t experienced it already, you’ll find that it takes a rather long time to send $AR into your wallet from a CEX for example. Imagine that a Layer 1 is a sturdy chassis that comes with no extra features. Do you want to pimp your ride? To transform it into a specialised one? Then you have to create a Layer 2.  So, in order to support cross-chain functionalities, instantaneous transactions, and 0 fees, everFinance, the team behind everPay, created a Layer 2.

If even these explanations didn’t make things clearer, it’s okay, we’ll try to see exactly how it works in a much more empirical way.

How to set up an everPay account

Step 1

You will be surprised at how easy is to create one. You won’t need to download anything, you won’t need to submit any information about you, or to set up a password. You will only have to your crypto wallet, so be sure that ArConnect is active. First, access https://www.everpay.io/. As usual, I’m making the link visible in order to be certain that you see it and you won’t become a victim of a potential phishing scheme in the future. Sometimes scammers will try to mimic certain web pages and will try to lure you in and drain your wallet. Anyway, once on everPay, click one of the two buttons that are inviting you to open your wallet.

Step 2

You will be prompted to another page that will ask you to “Connect Wallet”. I know, pretty redundant, but hey, another click won’t kill you. So, just click another time. As you can see, they are already showing what options you have regarding the types of wallets that can connect with everPay. In our case, it will be an Arweave wallet.

Step 3

Being a cross-chain project, you have to first choose the network (from the options you are presented in the yellow box), and then choose the type of wallet you are using to connect with that specific network (blockchain). Ethereum chain is selected by default.

So choose the Arweave network and then ArConnect.

Step 4

Being the first time you connect on everPay, a message will pop from your wallet. Call the below picture the “triptych of ArConnect” or whatever, but it is pretty important and you have to pay attention to it. The first message will ask you to validate that you are yourself by filling in the password field and hitting the log-in button. Between the password field and the log-in button, there is a pretty important feature characteristic for ArConnect: the “use allowance limit”. You can uncheck it, if you trust the dApp that you will connect, let it be checked or set a different allowance limit. By default, the value is fixed at 0.1 $AR. If the dApp will try to extract more than that limit, ArConnect will ask you to validate that specific transaction again. This way, you are setting a fail switch that will prevent malevolent actors from draining your wallet without you knowing about it. I’ve set my allowance limit at 1 $AR because I find it rather tedious to validate anything under that threshold.

After you establish the stance of your allowance, input the password and hit log-in. You will be directed to another message that will show you the types of permissions you will allow for the specific dApp. Push accept and you are connected. Please keep in mind that for everPay the permissions will differ slightly, as you can see I exemplified the sign-in sequence using the one from Permacast (a cool project nevertheless, check it and you’ll see), so, don’t be confused.

Interacting with everPay

The UI overview

Voila! You are connected. Let’s try to familiarise ourselves a little with the UI:

In the right corner (in the blue box), you have your wallet address, left-clicking on it will allow you to disconnect. Then you have the first menu (in the yellow box), the second menu (in the green box), and lastly, a list of supported tokens (the red box).  By default, you will be prompted in the “Wallet” mode. If you move your cursor on top of one of the tokens highlighted in the red box, another menu will become visible, as you can see below:

Depositing tokens

If you play a little more with the interface you will see that certain features could be accessed from more than one place. For example, you can make the same actions, respectively depositing tokens from ArConnect (or any other supported wallet that is connected with everPay) to everPay, or withdrawing them by accessing the “deposit” and “withdraw” buttons shown above or by accessing the “bridge” menu.

I don’t mind it, on the contrary, I suppose that this is a matter of taste and for some, the OCD may be triggered. Anyway, the first step you may want to take in order to fully enjoy everPay is to deposit some tokens. You’ll end up with the same view regardless of your chosen menu path. The dApp will tell you how many tokens you have in your ArConnect wallet (the red box from above), and obviously, it will let you send them to the everPay account to the maximum available. After you hit “deposit”, you will have to wait 20 minutes or so until the sum is credited to your account. That is happening because both the deposit and withdrawal transactions are happening on Layer 1, and you are bound to Layer 1 fees and transaction times.

Transferring tokens

Once the tokens are inside your everPay account, you have several options. One of the most simple and powerful is the one that lets you transfer tokens to any Arweave or Ethereum wallet. The best part is that the recipient does not even have to have an everPay account at the time of the transaction. The funds will remain in a pending state until that specific wallet signs in everPay. On top of that, the transaction being conducted on the Layer 2 will happen instantaneously and gasless.

As you can see, there is a warning – respectively, you can not transfer funds to exchange or smart contract addresses as those not being able to connect with everPay will result in being locked in a permanent pending state.

Withdrawing tokens

You can access the “withdraw” either by selecting “bridge” from the main menu and then “withdraw” or by interacting with the token you want to withdraw when you are inside the wallet. Given the fact that you are basically withdrawing funds from everPay to another mainnet, the duration of the transfer and the fees you have to sustain are calculated based on the standards of the targeted chain. So, if you want to withdraw the ETH chain, you will pay ETH fees and you will have to wait for the ETH usual TX validation time.

The nice part is that you don’t need to have any ETH for the gas fees inside the everPay wallet. As you can see above, the system will automatically deduct the ETH gas fee from my $AR holdings. So, for this particular trade, I could redeem on ETH network 3 wAR (wrapped AR – a token that is backed 1:1 by a native AR coin) for a total cost of 4.183616 $AR.

Swap function

Thinking of everPay as a decentralised exchange is wrong. The native Arweave DEXs are still to be opened in the incoming months. Only then you can swap between many tokens, including Arweave native token standard, PST (similar to what the ERC20 standard is for the Ethereum network). Still, until PermaswapDEX or Verto is fully operational, you can swap a limited number of pairs directly on everpay:

You can access the swap function by selecting “swap” from the main menu. The swap will happen feeless and instantaneous inside the everPay network. With this function, you could actually buy $AR outside the control of centralised exchanges. Let’s say that you have some $ETH on the Ethereum network. You can log in with that wallet on everPay, deposit $ETH, swap it for $AR, and transfer or withdraw the resulting $AR to a new Arweave wallet.

Other use cases for everPay

Ok, but besides swapping, transferring, depositing, and withdrawing, what else could we do with everPay? Well, there are at least two other use cases.

The underlying technology that powers everPay represents the foundation for PermaswapDEX. One of the core features in the first stages of PermaswapDEX is the capacity to become a liquidity provider if you own one of the special NFTs everPay put up for auction. If you want to get a fresh one you have to participate in an auction that is held – you guessed it, on everPay.

For more details about evePay auctions, you can check our articles here, here, and here. Besides bidding on NFTs, you will use everPay if you will interact with Metaforo products. Given the fact that it is speedy and does not charge any fees while doing actions inside it, we think that with time everPay will be integrated with more and more Web3 projects.

We’ll talk more about Metaforo’s products in a dedicated tutorial. Until then, you can check this article that highlights the use of their Discord tipping bot.

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