10 Ways To Earn Money On Blockchains
How to profit without holding or trading Cryptos.
Most of us are into Crypto to make money. But what other options are there to profit from Crypto besides holding or trading?
Here are 10 new and old ways how you can earn money with blockchain technology, ranked from easy to difficult.
Disclaimer: this article uses a lot of projects as examples. These are not endorsements. Please do your own research before investing in any of them.
Money Earning With Crypto For Beginners
1. Watch ads with Brave browser.
Brave browser is based on Google Chrome and has several cool features. It puts a very strong focus on privacy and security by blocking annoying ads, trackers, etc. On the other hand it lets you earn money through its own ecosystem.
By (optionally) watching privacy-protecting ads you can earn BAT tokens, keep them in your wallet and sell them for other Cryptos on exchanges. How many BAT you earn depends on how many ads you are willing to watch. Though, in all honesty, for most people the money you can earn with this is probably not much more than beer money. I make about $5 per month with BAT.
Still, it’s a start.
2. Buy and hold coins that will give you interest or dividend.
Some cryptocurrencies will let you earn money in the form of interest or dividends by simply holding them in a wallet. Here are two examples:
NEO: Holding NEO allows you to accumulate NEO GAS (make sure to use the right wallet) which you can sell for BTC on multiple exchanges. Returns per year lie somewhere around 5%.
KuCoin Token: KuCoin is a big Crypto exchange that launched in 2017. By holding KuCoin Shares you earn a daily dividend coming from 50% of the trading fees generated on the exchange each day. This means that the more shares you hold the greater is your share of these 50%. The annual return varies depending on the given trading volume for each day.
3. Get some Airdrops.
In order to attract more users, many projects give out free coins or tokens in the form of airdrops. Usually, individual airdrops aren’t worth more than a few USD. But if a project develops well, even a small amount of coins or tokens can turn into a nice sum of money after some time.
Below are a few websites giving information on how to check for airdrop events and how to participate in them:
https://coinmarketcap.com/airdrop/
4. Play DeFi games to earn Crypto.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) games are all about play-to-earn. By playing you can earn things inside the game such as pieces of land and outfits(skins) for your avatar. These things are represented as non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) which you can sell to other players. One famous example is the DeFi game Decentraland where you can create, buy, and sell virtual property, art, and other things using the ecosystem’s currency MANA. The token is tradable on all major exchanges.
Other popular games involve Sandbox which recently released their test version, Axie Infinity, and Illuvium.
5. Write and share content to earn Crypto.
Several platforms allow users to post content and earn money with it. This usually works so that users can upvote the content of others, who then receive coins or tokens from a pool. Well-known platforms are Steemit, Leo Finance and Publish0x.
How much you can earn as a content creator depends on a number of things. The income per article or posting can range from a few US cents to several hundred US dollars. Key influencing factors are the frequency with which content is posted, the weighting of users who rate the content and, of course, the quality of the published content. One disadvantage is that the adoption rate is still pretty low.
Money Earning With Crypto For Advanced Users
6. Mine Cryptocurrencies.
Although the proportion of proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies has increased significantly, there are still many proof-of-work (PoW) coins that you can mine relatively easily.
Much, however, depends on the circumstances.
First you have to decide whether you want to mine solo or join a pool. For many coins solo mining only makes sense if you have a lot of money to invest in the necessary equipment. In pool mining, several miners bundle their resources and then receive their corresponding share of the coins mined.
It is also important to do some thinking about which cryptocurrency you want to mine. You should make sure that the coin is being traded on major exchanges and that it is a legitimate project. If in doubt, you should start your mining journey with established coins. These include RavenCoin (RAV), Monero (XMR) and LiteCoin (LTC). But as I said, there are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that you can mine. Careful research is therefore a must.
Here is a guide a wrote to researching Crypto projects. It’s probably the most in-depth guide you can read for free on the internet:
7. Stake Cryptocurrencies.
Staking on blockchains which use the proof of stake (PoS) consensus algorithm is a great way to earn passive income. Usually, there is a minimal amount of coins you need to stake. For example, you need to stake 32 Ether in order to run one node. But if you do not own so many Ether, you can also choose to join a staking pool and get your share of the reward.
As there are many PoS projects out there, you should go to stakingrewards.com to get an overview of which coins and tokens can be staked, what are the yearly returns, etc.
There are different ways how to stake your coins.
- If you want to stake without any technical knowledge, Binance is a practical option. And this is how it works: users give Binance access to their coins stored by Binance for a certain period of time. Binance uses the coins to generate returns (e.g. through lending or for DeFi Yield Farming). This return is distributed to the users. Caution: Binance sometimes advertises absurd interest rates (APR) of over 50%. These interest rates only refer to the current day.While Binance is one of the most convenient solutions for staking, this variant also comes with disadvantages. Because with Binance you don’t have sole control over your keys.
- If you want to run your own nodes and keep more control over your coins but don’t want to go through all the hustles of setting up your own hardware, service providers like Allnodes are ideal. Here is a very detailed video by Boxmining explaining how to set up the ETH nodes on Allnodes. The advantage of using Allnodes for staking is that the rewards will be sent directly to a wallet where only you hold your own private keys.
- For coins like DOT, you can also stake through your Ledger hardware wallet. The benefit is that your coins stay in your own wallet, it is secure and the instructions are pretty easy to follow.
Money Earning With Crypto For Pros
8. Become a liquidity provider (LP).
On decentralized exchanges, users can swap tokens. For example, swap Ether to USDT. Liquidity providers lock their tokens in the liquidity pools so that there will be enough tokens when users want to exchange one token to another. In return, liquidity providers get a share of the fees generated from all swaps as reward. This is proportionate to the share of the token you provided to the pool.
However, there are also risks involved. It is important to choose a DEX which is a solid project to avoid getting scammed or rug-pulled. Due to the fluctuation of token prices in the pool, LPs could lose money (a so called impermanent loss). As a result, it is better to choose pools that are highly liquid and contain less volatile Crypto assets.
9. Stake LP tokens.
By being a LP, in addition of getting a share of the fees as a reward, you will also receive tokens issued by the DeFi platform. Often the platform allows you to stake these tokens to earn additional interest.
10. Lend Cryptocurrencies.
You can lend your cryptocurrencies to others on DeFi platforms such as AAVE, compound and get paid an interest rate. Some pros even do leveraged lending to profit more.
If you don’t know where to start, you can check out platforms such as Feeder Finance which offers one-stop DeFi services to help investors optimize their investment return.
