An unofficial marketing asset for AEON

I’ve been watching the cryptocurrency space from the sidelines for quite a while. I haven’t become engrained with it largely out of my own naiveté for the space and already experience enough angst from actual securities. Sigh.

That being said: what’s happening with cryptocurrencies is hard to ignore at this point. The aggregate value continues to rise and currently stands in the realms of hundreds of billions of dollars.

I recently selected a small-cap cryptocurrency, AEON, to begin getting involved in. I won’t be getting terribly deep into the “why” of why I bought AEON but would encourage you to read this overview of AEON to understand its appeal. AEON is a fork of Monero (which currently has a market cap of $2B USD) that focuses on privacy and security and is geared towards mobile — all things which I enjoy.

Finally, as a disclaimer, I own a negligible amount of AEON. This post isn’t meant to be advice or endorsement but merely instructions on how to purchase AEON should you deem it an interesting option for yourself.

Beginning with Bitcoin

In order to purchase AEON, you’ll need to have some Bitcoin (BTC). A single Bitcoin currently is worth just over $4,000 USD. However, you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin so your initial “investment” can be as small as you’d like to test the waters. If you already own BTC, you can skip to the next section and continue on.

If you don’t have Bitcoin, Coinbase is where you should get started. Coinbase is a reputable digital asset exchange that makes buying more popular cryptocurrencies very simple. You can connect your bank account or credit card and purchase Bitcoin (or Ethereum or Litecoin) very easily [despite the high commission fees.]

Transferring Bitcoin to Bittrex

Bittrex is similar to Coinbase except that they have support for a variety of different cryptocurrencies, including AEON. If you don’t have an account on Bittrex, go ahead and sign up for one for free. I’d also highly recommend turning on two-factor authentication for Bittrex (and also on Coinbase).

Once you get up with an account on Bittrex you’ll want to transfer in your Bitcoin from Coinbase (or wherever else you may have it). On Bittrex, click the “Wallets” tab and you should see a Bitcoin wallet there. Click the “+” next to Bitcoin and it should pop-up with an address, which is essentially just a hash.

Once you have this hash, head over to your Coinbase account, tap into your Bitcoin wallet and hit “Send”. Go ahead and enter in this hash of where to send your Bitcoin (and double-check it is correct). You’re essentially telling Coinbase that you’d like to move your Bitcoin from Coinbase to Bittrex. You can think of this like moving money from one bank to another. It will take some time for this transaction to finish so just refresh Bittrex every 10–15 minutes until you see that your BTC wallet on Bittrex has been populated.

Buying AEON on Bittrex with your BTC

You’re almost finished up — and this step is the most confusing. To buy, AEON on Bittrex you’ll want to head to the BTC-AEON marketplace which you can click from that link for convenience. This page contains information like the current price, current trade volume and specific bids and asks for AEON. You’ll see that everything is expressed in terms of Bitcoin and not USD. This means when you enter in your trade, you’ll be putting in a price equivalent to Bitcoin and not USD.

If you scroll down this page a bit you’ll see a form like the following:

The buy form for AEON on Bittrex

This is the form where you’ll enter your order for AEON. You can buy whatever number of units your heart desires. As example, if you transferred in 1 Bitcoin (~$4,300 USD) you could put in an order for 4000 AEON at a bid price of 0.00025 BTC as AEON trades at roughly a dollar at the time of this post.

Once you feel good, hit the “Buy AEON” button and complete the order. Depending on the market and your price, you’ll see your order begin to be fulfilled. Once your transaction is complete, you’ll see your resulting balance in your AEON wallet and the proper amount deducted from your Bitcoin wallet. If you have a larger order that takes more time to fill, you can see the progress of the order on the “Orders“ page at the top of Bittrex.

That’s all for now

Hopefully this post is helpful. Watching these markets with low volume is really interesting to witness and you’ll likely learn a lot from this whole experience.