CLAM coins are a cryptocurrency based on a proof-of-stake mining method. One new CLAM coin is generated each minute and awarded to users by proportional lottery based on the number of CLAMs they have working on their miner. This means there will be 60 new CLAMs created per hour, 1,440 created per day, and 525,600 CLAMs created each year.
The value of each CLAM simply depends on the interaction of supply and demand; there is no central authority that controls the value of CLAMs and their price is completely up to markets. Since their inception, the value of CLAMs has generally been rising against the US & Canadian dollars much like most other crypto currencies. CLAM users can consult blockchain explorers to check addresses, monitor transactions, etc, and can view the market cap of CLAMs on sites such as CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, there are about 2.7 million CLAMs outstanding worth about $20,000,000 US dollars.
To get into the CLAM economy, the first thing you should do is buy some CLAMS; since CLAMs are based on proof-of-stake, you can’t mine any CLAMs without first having some CLAMs to stake.
To buy CLAMs, the first step is to get some bitcoins. If you’re Canadian or American, use QuadrigaCX since you can make Canadian dollar deposits using Interac online and then exchange Canadian dollars for bitcoins. For Americans, try a service such as Coinbase.
Once you have your bitcoins, you have a few choices. If you want to trade your bitcoins for CLAMs, you can find 77% of the volume for CLAMs on Poloniex and the balance of volume on Bittrex. If you are a little wary about using exchanges, you can also use a service such as ShapeShift. At the time of writing Changelly does not offer CLAMs.
In my opinion, Poloniex is the best place to trade CLAMs. The market is fairly liquid, but it jumps around enough (this is CLAM coins after-all) that there are opportunities for traders. But keep in mind that you can really only trade the CLAM/BTC pair: there is no other markets for CLAMs to fiat other than private sales between friends, so unless your friends are really into trading CLAMs, it’s probably best to trade on Poloniex.
The nice feature about trading CLAMs on Poloniex is you can both borrow and lend CLAMs. This means you can jack up your leverage at pretty cheap rates. At the time of writing, you can borrow bitcoins against CLAMs for less than 0.001% per day, and you can borrow CLAMs for less than 0.001%. You can also get some pretty cheap leverage on Poloniex.
At the time of writing, here is the current bid/ask spread on both Poloniex and Bittrex:
Poloniex 0.00047464 bid / 0.00047500 ask
Bittrex 0.00047483 bid / 0.00048195 ask
So you can see the bid/ask spread is much tighter on Poloniex, representing their greater volume/liquidity, but interestingly, there is more than a 1% gap between the bid/offer for CLAM/BTC on Bittrex. This presents an opportunity for traders who can arbitrage the different prices between exchanges. The fees on Bittrex are 0.25% per trade, so there is certainly an opportunity for some market making using a bot. Here is a link to Bittrex API documentation.
One funny thing to be aware of when trading CLAMs: since the market is only worth about $20 mil USD in total, and more than half of those CLAMs are tied up on just-dice, the trading for CLAMs can be cornered in an old fashioned way. This happened a few months ago on Poloniex. My friend and I noticed the lending/borrowing rate for CLAMs on Poloniex jumped very high, over 1% per day, much higher than the mining rate, so we moved a few CLAMs to the exchange to lend them out. It looked bullish for CLAMs at the time as the market was well bid. A few weeks went by, and the price of CLAMs kept rising. All of a sudden the market fell out, and the price crashed by half in a few hours. We suspect a small number of traders were borrowing CLAMs at high rates (thereby getting short CLAMs in the process) and feeding the order book with stink bids, and then as they pulled their bids and started selling their CLAMs, the bottom fell out (into air pocket).
The lesson from this experience is to beware when margin interest rates move dramatically: when you wonder what is happening, and you don’t have what you believe is the answer, take it slow. Move with caution, or, if you’re super bold, take the opposite position and help bring the market back in line.
