Want to make money with almost no effort? Well, you can earn a passive income from crypto if you’re willing to make a few trade-offs.
Earn a Passive Income from Crypto
As the cryptocurrency industry matures, more services and innovations are cropping up to allow you to make the most of your assets. Just as what savers and investors do in traditional finance, crypto holders can also make their coins work for them if they want to do more than patiently HODL.
Mining may no longer be profitable for individuals on most coins and scouting out for airdrops is a bit passe. So, here’s a list of the top three ways to earn a passive income from crypto in 2019.
1. Earn Interest on Your Crypto
If you’re willing to part with your private keys and keep your crypto on a crypto lending platform, you can earn interest on your BTC, ETH, and several other coins and tokens by opening an interest account with a company like Celsius Network or BlockFi.
The above-mentioned companies have no lock-up periods or minimum deposits. However, the amount of interest you earn will obviously vary with the number of coins you have. BlockFi, for example, pays and Annual Percentage Yield of 6.2% on 0-5 BTC, but just 2.6% on anything over 5 BTC.
If you don’t have significant crypto holdings, another way to make your money work for you would be to convert some fiat into a stablecoin such as TRUEUSD. Rather than earn next to nothing in your bank, you can get up to 10% per annum at Celsius Network. You can also take out a loan using your crypto as collateral if you need access to fiat.
Be sure to do your own research before thinking about storing your crypto on any platform. If you’re going to risk not having your private keys in cold storage, at least know who the platform’s custodian is and whether they have any sort of insurance policy.
2. Proof of Stake Coins
Many people call staking the new mining, but staking requires a lot less effort. There are several Proof-of-Stake coins beyond Tezos, Dash, Stellar, and Decred, that allow you to earn coins simply by placing them in a designated wallet or stake pool.
You can even use your exchange wallet on Coinbase and Binance to stake Tezos. Users can stake XTZ from inside their accounts, although, of course, the exchange will take a percentage of your earnings.
Staking on Ethereum and Cardano will soon become hot topics of conversation as well, as Cardano completes its Shelley upgrade and ETH makes its long-waited move to PoS.
Be sure to check out the ROIs and lock-up periods each coin requires to see if it’s worth your while. Also, remember to ask whether it’s simple passive income you want or to earn the right to vote on the network as well.
3. Lend Your Crypto
Just as with interest-earning platforms, you can lend your crypto as well. There are plenty of providers in this area including peer-to-peer lending provider CoinLoan that lets you lend out your chosen crypto with up to 12% ROI.
You can choose your own lock-up period, from seven days to three years as well as the amount you want to loan out. A quick example, though. Loan out 35 ETH over six months and you’ll get 2.1 ETH back.
There is also Binance Lending that allows you to hold your crypto with its Lending Product to accrue interest.
Bitfinex also lets you lend out over 24 different assets including BTC, EOS, NEO, ETH, and DASH. The best rates are about 0.02% per day, which comes to around 7% a year. Although, most opportunities are for a short period of time as many traders won’t lock into a position for more than 30 days.
As with staking and interest accounts, be sure to DYOR. Not all these products are suitable for everyone. If you’re a firm believer that if you don’t have control over your private keys, you don’t have control over your coins; it’s probably better just to HODL.
What do you think is the best way to earn passive crypto income? Add your thoughts below!
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