If you have been invested into cryptocurrency this year, you may have seen some tokens with small costs that have had some surprisingly high increases.
I have been invested in some of them, and joined Coinbase.com earlier in the year. I have held my money there mainly in DAI tokens, bought in at $0.98 per share, since they have a steady 2.00 annual percentage rate, and have the support of them being a stablecoin and therefore have quite a bit of people holding them for a longer time than some of the tokens that have shorter-lived highs and lows due to people buying and selling quicker than you can watch. Being a truly stable stablecoin in these turbulent times personally helps me out, as well as many other less advantaged people quite a lot when they can't afford to lose to anything that is too new and/or risky of a financial move at the time. It is also convenient for when I don't want to have to be engaged in taking my time to watch for price drops late in the day when I am engaged in preparing dinner, or just when I don't want to have a total possible loss for a maximum of $0.06 per share. That variation being only if they drop from their highest price to their lowest price very quickly, which they tend to not do. It seems to drop only to $0.98 in the lower end during short time periods, and has highs going slowly up from $1.00 exactly, to $1.04 before settling down to it's aimed price of $1.00 on the dot.
These tokens as well as other stablecoins can serve as an anchor for holding the bulk of your cryptocurrency total that you hold for a longer-term investment, are good for staking, and also for trading into it by taking advantage of the quickly rising prices of other tokens. Even if for simply profiting $0.10 per share, it adds up with larger amounts of tokens held, as some coins like Stellar Lumens ($0.11) and Basic Attention Tokens ($0.25) to name a couple are very cheap. Having 100 $0.50 shares that gain $0.10 each on a quick spike that can be converted to $60.00 in DAI at that high price in just a few seconds is better than 10 $5.00 shares going up $0.25 each in a somewhat slower increase to be converted to $52.50 when they do finish ascending. One drawback with DAI and other cryptocurrencies, is that it may take a little time for funds to clear, up to 5 days, although staking rewards will begin immediately after deposit or transfer. Once you hold the funds in there long enough to clear, if they need to clear, then at that time they can be used for selling to USD and deposited to the bank account that you linked to the online wallet, or for trading for other tokens when they are at a lower price to be sold at later profit if you know the movements up and down for some more reliable shares.
Tezos (XTZ) was the 2nd token to be in the staking program, and has had a very high second spike up from $2.29 to $4.49 in 5 weeks from July 5th to August 12th, to follow the initial very high spike nearing 500% growth from $0.75 on the morning of October 23rd, 2019, to a whopping $3.62 the following February on the 20th of 2020. It had just been added to the Coinbase's staking rewards program previous to being added. It holds a 4.67% reward to be earned, however is quite volatile now.
The last thing that I have to communicate about is ATOM, or Cosmos. It isn't a new token, starting last year as it has had a bad crash from their initial release price of $3.95. They quickly rose to over $6.00 that December, and February 22nd they plummeted from their current value of $5.02 to $1.13 March 12th. Coinbase.com offered staking rewards starting October 1st for most members. It has the highest return rate of any currently tokens that are able to be staked at a solid 5.00%. They have been going up with a couple of decent spikes, and currently it is 86% buy, 14% sell. I have put 90% of the DAI shares I was holding to ATOM for a while to get the good staking and APR rate. Nobody knows what will happen in the next few weeks, but based on the past, Cosmos will have a decent increase if Tezos has taught us anything about massive gains after being opened for staking.
Of course, do your own research on ATOM before dropping very much money into it, but, in my opinion, feel safe in DAI until you have made the decision to convert to ATOM or XTZ. I would however suggest buying 1 share of each, DAI, ATOM, and XTZ, costing under $10.00 total, as soon as possible, as it takes up to a 45 day holding period before releasing staking rewards gained by holding at least 1 share in them without dropping below that. After that, they will start getting awarded to you more frequently.
If you have the time, you can make decent money staking, and with ATOM having the highest return yet, I imagine that it will have pretty darn good money-making ability.
I just started learning about cryptocurrency late this June, and I hope that this can help someone out there who is still learning with my first post!
Happy investing.
Cole Matuschka
