This month has been my first full month in the Crypto-verse. It has involved a lot of very late nights reading a lot of articles about a wide range of CPU coins I could potentially mine, play-to-earn games to check out and general crypto holder culture. I’ve found a lot of very cool projects, most of which I don’t have adequate time, attention or money to produce a substantial return. As June wore on, I found that I was running into now familiar projects and names and recognized that several of the first arenas I had found myself in (ie. Splinterlands was one of the first names I latched on to) turned out to be the best in terms of low barriers to entry and staying power (that is, in maintaining my interest).

As a late-comer to crypto I am here to learn how to build crypto into my life and best practices on stacking satoshis and holding it forever so I will gladly receive any suggestions!

The 5 fields of passive income that I am cultivating are as follows: Blogging, Defi, Mining, Play-to-Earn and Stock dividends.

Blogging, $3.63:

I’ve always been interested in and apprehensive about blogging. Before I found PublishOx and the Hive communities, I thought that blogging was a difficult field to break into and I didn’t have the time to build a Wordpress website and optimize it for traffic. I’ll be the first to admit that I am not proud of my first handful of blog posts, I certainly did not spend an adequate amount of time constructing posts and it definitely shows. Now that I’m past the initial excitement of receiving crypto for writing, I am trying to find time during the week to commit to writing longer and more fulfilling posts that will hopefully gain more traction and be better than the trash I’ve put into these communities. Needless to say, I’ve slowed down on writing but I intend on putting more time and energy into future posts in order to benefit the community, and build it up as a source of income.

Defi, $2.90:

Being new to crypto, I’ve been slow to spread my hard-earned savings over too many defi dapps. However, the three I’ve dipped my toes into Cake Defi, Celsius and Yieldly, have started to return a small amount already. For Cake defi I wanted to take advantage of their introductory offer of receiving $20 worth of BTC for a $50 deposit. It was too good of a deal to pass up so I jumped on it (after a very long and frustrating KYC process.)

I saw a lot of individuals talking about using Celsius as a crypto bank account and after seeing that they offer 8.88% on stable coin holdings, I figured I would be a fool to not hop on that insane interest rate. My current fiat savings account only offers .5% interest (pre-covid it was 1.5%) and I thought that was an insane interest rate before seeing crypto interest rates. Needless to say, I am very excited and attracted to interest rates.

Finally, my first crypto holding is in Algorand so I was super excited when Yieldly.Finance started their weekly No-loss lottery based on Algorand with rewards in Algorand and their native Yieldly coin. I’ve been slowly adding to Yieldly as there was a lot of apprehension in the Algorand community about whether or not Yieldly was a rug pull or not. I haven’t earned any Algo from Yieldly yet as there are super whales that eat up the possibility of us smaller holders of getting a chance at the jackpot but, in the meantime I am happy to stack up some Yieldly and see where it ends up.

Mining, $12.99:

This number is a little misleading as my most successful mining venture is the PlanetWatch Atmotube program. After a frustrating week of trying to get the Planetwatch program to work, I had to buy an old Android phone that is now a fixture in my room as its only duty is to keep the Planetwatch app open 24/7 and produce Planets for me.

The two coins I mine on my desktop are TRTL and Theta Fuel. I mine TRTL as it is the only coin my desktop can mine without having to wait a year to be able to withdraw from a mining pool (I tried mining Monero for a hot minute but the withdrawal date wasn’t for 300 days so I moved on). I am considering buying a used GPU in order to upgrade my desktop and make it produce some coins that are more immediately valuable but, I don’t mind waiting a while for the current chip shortage to blow over.

I started running the Theta edge node on my desktop as I like the project (decentralized video streaming) and it’s not a constant workload (video encoding jobs sometimes come my way but not every day). I need to do some more research and reflection on whether or not my current desktop configuration is worth keeping on as this post has made me realize that the electricity cost of keeping the desktop running probably far out weighs the value of the coins I’ve collected this month.

The final coin I mine is actually on my Iphone on the Pi app. I don’t know much about Pi but I’m happy to keep the app going and the Pi rolling in until I discover a reason not to. As of now the Pi coin is not able to be traded or sold but that gives me time to stack more!

Play to Earn, $1.34:

I took a very roundabout path from starting with Splinterlands, ignoring it for most of the month (aside from daily quest) in order to check out the wide range of existing and upcoming play-to-earn games that folks are talking about and ultimately ending back at Splinterlands where I’ve started grinding for DEC in order to grow my deck. Along with Splinterlands, I also play Alienworlds, R-Planet, Prospectors, Kolobloks and Rollercoin.

Clearly play-to-earn doesn’t yield much Fiat, however, I’ve enjoyed digging into these games and seeing what they have to offer.

Dividends, $38.92:

This is not crypto but it is passive! This is my second year of trading stocks; year one was a lot of putting in pocket change and testing out how Robinhood works, how the market works, and how to hold during red days. I FOMO’d into the GME craze very late, ended up holding the bag near the top and I took the opportunity to take an online course on stocks in order to become a better trader and avoid making the same mistake in the future. I ended up holding those GME stocks until they were green, got out of them, and immediately started researching and investing into a dividend portfolio. I’ve found that I love dividends for the same reason I’ve been loving crypto and defi: you put your money in and let it grow on its own. When I was taking my stocks course I would spend hours researching potential stock plays and ended up becoming exhausted from staring at Tradingview, hoping to find the next big play.

Anyways, on top of the lessons I’ve learned in stocks, I opened my first credit card and have included the cash back rewards I’ve earned in my dividend calculations. I read on the Dividend stocks Reddit page from a user that treated their cashback rewards as a dividend that they can put back into their portfolio. From their post I gleaned the intention to never over charge a credit card so that the cashback actually comes back to my pocket and I don’t end up paying the credit card company the outrageous interest rates they demand.

Total, $59.68:

Considering this is my first full month of working towards passive income, I’ll take this total as a stepping stone towards bigger passive pay checks. Now that I’ve made the rounds through the play-to-earn, defi and mining circles I have a general idea of how to continue to move forward and I hope to make July a far more profitable month! I also started my first in-person job this month since losing my last job at the beginning of the Covid shutdown so I’ll have a steady source of fiat to fuel my crypto holdings.

After sleeping on the realization that my desktop has not produced a profit this month, I’ve started looking for used GPU’s. My current GPU is so old that mining software doesn’t recognize it as being useable! I’m excited to find and install a new-to-me GPU and explore GPU coin mining in the coming months.

Thank you for reading, if you have any suggestions or questions please let me know!