Cryptocurrency, the world’s fastest-growing digital money and twin of Superman’s greatest weakness, Kryptonite.
Without doubts, you’ll admit that cryptocurrency, NFTs and Blockchain tech, in general, is slowly taking over the Fintech industry, it’s only a matter of time.
Those who joined in on Bitcoin 13 years ago are worth millions of dollars today and that’s not all.
NFTs or Non-fungible Tokens, whatever you want to call them, rose from a market cap of $125M in February 2021 to a high of $40B at the close of 2021 and I would have told you this came from selling Jpegs but I won’t.
With the growth of this industry, numerous means of earning have been developed which are carefully outlined in this article and maybe you might be quitting that stressful job soon after making a fortune by selling videos of you sucking your thumb as an adorable baby.
1 FIRST on this list is INVESTING
Just like buying land, holding it for a long time and selling it at a higher price, you can do the same with cryptocurrencies. You can buy cryptocurrencies at a lower price, hold them for a couple of years, say 2 to 5 years, and sell when the price is way up, this strategy is called the buy-hold strategy.
If you had invested $1000 in Shiba Inu in January 2021, it would have been worth $312,500 today- the power of a long-term investment. The benefits of investment are that it reduces the fear of risks but you have to know the best projects to put your money in.
Another way of investing is through DAOs- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. A DAO is an organization of a group of people who pool their resources and funds to collectively invest in other projects but are governed by rules voted into an agreement and generated by a smart contract. Just as they collectively pool their resources, the profits are shared according to how it is stated on the smart contract.
2 Another way of earning in crypto is TRADING
I don’t mean selling some groceries for Bitcoin or buying pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins, what I mean is that just as investing is a long-term way of earning in crypto, trading offers a way of getting short term profits and you can do this on some top crypto brokers/exchange like Binance, Coinbase, Kucoin, Kraken and so on.
The crypto market is a volatile market with prices going up and down within a short time and as a trader, you can learn to scoop some profits with its volatility. To be a successful trader, you must master fundamental, technical and sentimental analytical skills to be able to analyze the direction of the market to either Long– if you think the price will go up, or Short– if you think the price will go down. Lately the market has been entirely unpredictable that you might want to consider other options for earning with crypto if you want some more tranquility in your life.
A lot of traders tend to start with short term trading and move to HODLing. Buying the dip and HODLing (“hold on for dear life”) until the good time comes and price pumps to sell.
3 Staking & Lending
In staking and lending, the reward is similar to the interest a bank would pay you for a credit balance or the interest you get from loaning your money to investors to invest in projects. When you stake your fiat on a Proof of Stake network, the network uses your money to validate transactions and you receive rewards in form of the yield coin of that protocol. One of the most recent and most popular staking platforms is Titano which offers an Automatic staking protocol ensuring holders get constant rewards paid every 30minutes or 48 hours. More so it promises Highest Fixed APY – 102,483% (at the moment of writing this article, the number can change). Refer to our guide on DeFi projects to learn more about it.
4 Mining
🤔”Do you mean I can dig a hole at the back of my house and find some bitcoin there, just like gold?”
Well, something similar to that but you aren’t digging any hole and it’s completely digital. Cryptocurrency mining is the original way of earning cryptocurrencies. It is done by using a device to solve complex mathematical equations thereby completing “blocks” of verified transactions in place of digging holes. The conventional mining method required some level of technical expertise and a mining machine which consumed a lot of electricity but thankfully, new projects that have sprung up recently, have developed better ways of mining. Now you can mine cryptocurrencies on your smartphones too using some kind of application and consume less power. Through cryptocurrency mining, you can earn in crypto without having to put money down for it and it is both safe and risk-free. There are a number of caveats to it with major being choosing the alt coin to mine that will bring you profits too and not only huge electricity bills.
5 Airdrops
After the success of Bitcoin’s algorithm, a lot of techy people went into creating their cryptocurrencies referred to as Altcoins either by forking Bitcoin, creating tokens on already existing Blockchains or building their Blockchain and coin from scratch and then distributing a percentage of their total supply to new users as a means of generating awareness and growing their community. In simple words, you are getting free coins for being part of this newly or already established cryptocurrency community.
6 DeFi yield farming
In yield farming or liquidity mining, you lock up your crypto or fiat on a decentralized finance project thereby granting liquidity to the DeFi token and receiving rewards and interest for doing so. In simple terms, you are providing the market for the token to be traded upon and you’ll be paid rewards and interests from the fees generated when people trade the token. In DeFi yield farming, you can get additional tokens besides the yield token. Let’s say you lock some USDT and you can get rewarded in BNB and Ethereum. It is also a form of long-term investment where your money will be locked over a specific time. Some Defi platforms allow investors to take back their investment anytime they want while some have to be on the specific date they had initially filled to take back their investment. Of recent, the Cronos Ecosystem has started to gain popularity with DeFi yield farm platforms on its network such as Mad Meerkat Finance-allows you to earn yield by staking your asset or by referring friends, Crobank-a USDC reward token that pays 8% of every transaction made with its token, $BANK, back to holders of $BANK in USDC and CronaSwap– which allows you to stake your asset and receive yield every time a transaction is done on the swap system.
7 Become a freelancer & get paid in crypto
With the outbreak of COVID-19 back in 2019/20, freelancing and remote jobs became popular to meet up with the world’s failing economy and due to banks being closed, many freelancing platforms moved to cryptocurrencies as means of payment to facilitate freelancing through Blockchain technology. Two well known freelancing platforms that pay in cryptocurrencies are Ethlance and cryptocurrency jobs.
8 Earn crypto from faucets
Faucets are quite simple to understand unlike why Trump wears a wig. All you have to do is watch ads, complete surveys and play games to be rewarded a small portion of crypto. Although this can be relatively slow you can earn some decent coins if you’ve got the time and determination.
9 Run crypto master nodes
Many cryptocurrencies pay node operators to maintain a real-time record of their activities on their Blockchain, in simple words, perform utility functions such as storing metadata, processing transactions, and signing blocks. Since the process is a bit too much to be handled by the owners of the Blockchain alone, they sell nodes to investors who purchase them and get rewards for owning these Nodes. Lately a lot of Nodes-as-a-service (NAAS) projects has been launched that provide it’s owners different type of benefits. Check our passive income with nodes guide to learn more.
Examples of some popular current node projects include: StrongBlock, Thor, CroNode, Essential and so on.
10 NFTs
No-Fried Turkeys. Just kidding
NFTs stand for Non-fungible Tokens.
You may have probably heard these words over and over again on TV broadcasts or YouTube and then you see a headline ” Indonesian student sells his selfies for over $1m in crypto”, “Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sells Twitter’s first tweet for $2.5m in Ethereum” and you ask,”these are just Jpegs, why are they so expensive?” And funny thing is that some of these “artworks” being sold, you could have done far better but the truth is this, it wasn’t just the artworks or selfies, it was their uniqueness as Non-fungible Tokens and time & space factor when they were launched.
NFTs are unique digital collectibles, unique in a way that there can only be one or a few digital copies of that artwork, video, selfie, document, existing in the entire world making them so priceless – practically they have prices but you know what I mean. Imagine a digital autograph signed by Messi or Ronaldo minted as an NFT, they will surely sell for millions of dollars in crypto. What I mean is that NFTs can be anything, it can be an original record of you singing a song you wrote, a video of you changing your baby’s diaper or a game character you own – anything at all!
These NFTs can be traded, staked or rented out for crypto rewards or payments. You can mint and list your NFTs for sale on Opensea, SuperRare, Mintable, AirNFTs and so on.
Note – Polygon network on Opensea offers gas-free NFT minting – you can mint your NFTs for free instead of paying high gas fees on Ethereum. As well as you can do so with Solana NFT space, Binance, Cronos and many more.
In conclusion, cryptocurrency has sure surpassed the expectation of the world since it first started back in 2009, it has grown so exponentially. More ways to earn in crypto are being developed every day and there’s a very big future for crypto, NFTs and Blockchain at large. Time to go get my selfie stick, produce some good content, build a community and launch some NFTs. Want to see the progress of that – head to our Youtube channel!
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions for entertainment and educational purposes and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.