Cake Defi is one of the sites I've used to earn and then stake free crypto - below are the steps needed to get the free crypto.  Further down is my analysis and opinion of the site.

  - Join up at Cake Defi and then undertake verification (use my referral code 877089 for an extra bonus) 

 - One you have been verified, go to the learn menu and take the DeFiChain lesson - its pretty straight forward and doing it will give you $5 of the crypto currency DFI.  There are 5 lessons with a question at the end, the answers are as follows:

        Lesson 1 - A - DeFiChain is a blockchain dedicated to Native Decentralized Finance for Bitcoin

        Lesson 2 - B - Decentralized Finance are all types of financial applications without the need of a third party intermediary like a bank

        Lesson 3 - C - Native DeFi is more secure than non-Native DeFi because the consensus happens directly on the native blockchain layer, instead of            getting compiled and running through a virtual machine like on Ethereum.

        Lesson 4 - D - Staking and Liquidity Mining offer great and easy ways for anyone to earn block rewards with over 50% yearly returns.

        Lesson 5 - D - DeFiChain’s decentralized exchange is the cornerstone of most decentralized financial applications in the DeFiChain ecosystem,                  enabling trading, liquidity mining and more

 - Then the next part to this is the part I really like - your new DFI crypto currency gets automatically staked for you.  It pays out every 12 hours and auto-compounds, with an APY of around 56% - whats not to like !  You can check this under the 'all products' menu by selecting 'staking':

In the screen print about you can see the total amount I have staked in the DFI staking box on the top left, and then my payouts under 'My activity' in the bottom left. 

I joined on the 1st of Nov, and since then my value in USD has grown to 6.74 (from $5).   A lot of that growth has come from the coins performance since I got it (which I think is largely luck):

Graph is from CoinMarketCap at 2:04pm (GMT) on 06/11/21 - graph is 7 day DefiChain to USD Chart

My opinion on Cake Defi so far is:

 - It works - I can see the staking payments being added every 12 hours,

 - The interface is very easy to use - and it basically does it all for you, you just have to sit back and let it happen,

 - DFI seems to be a legit coin, with Cake Defi being a legit company based in Singapore 

 - A staking APY at ~55% is quite incredible

 - I havent added any of my own crypto/fiat to it yet, but I will probably add around $7 (a sum I can afford to loose - if it all goes wrong) in the next week or so just to increase the growth.  For info, I'll probably transfer that value in using LTC - I find LTC network charges are quite low, so I wont loose much due to the transfer - then once in, I will convert to DFI, which should just get auto-staked again.

The only thing I havent tested yet is withdrawing any funds.  I dont have enough to try that, but I will at some point in the future and report back on it.  

A few numbers based on my experience to date:

So if I'm just relying on compound interest alone on the initial $5, then I'll die a long time before I get rich !  However, as said above, I intend to dump some additional money in, which will speed up the process a little - and may add more in the future once my confidence grows.  But also, hopefully the coin gets some growth as well - which will make all the difference.

On the whole - I like CAKE DEFI and I intend to use it as one of my key accumulating tools going forward.  However, I will spread my staked crypto across a number of platforms/tools so that I'm not overly exposed to the risk of collapse, scams, etc from just one site.

Many thanks for reading

Links:

CAKE DEFI https://app.cakedefi.com/ Referral code 877089 - Free $5 crypto and ~55% APY staking