Your time is precious. I’ll try to keep this short and sweet. 

Who is this for?

• Practical people who want to earn income. That means I won’t be recommended buying and holding whatever ‘potential’ coins. I would recommend converting all gains to stablecoins and thereafter converting to fiat. If you insist on converting it to a ‘store of value’ cryptocurrency, that would be your choice to do so.

• You understand that to make money you have to spend money. Spend only what you can, never more than that. It’s a chicken and egg issue: the more money you can sink in, the faster and greater the quantity of rewards. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme but a grow-income-over-time scheme.

• People who understand that these methods will make you income, but they are not :

1. 100% guaranteed OR risk-free ( anyone who tells you they have a method that’s 100% safe is trying to scam you) 
2. Take time and are not instant.

• People who are just getting into cryptocurrencies, but not in a big way. I’ll try to explain as much as I can, but if you do not understand any terms, please comment below and I’ll help you along if I know the answers. There’s a lot to know but I’ll point you to further reading and links along the way. I’ll also write deeper into each topic if the reception is good for this one.

• People who don’t like volatility. Let’s be real. You got into crypto cos you thought it would get you mad money. Didn’t happen, did it? This space is very volatile. However, these methods I recommend aren’t as volatile as other methods like trading.

What can I do to get passive income?

Broadly speaking there are 4 main methods:

• Investments
• Activities
• Lending
• Staking

Each method has its own risks and advantages. I’ll discuss each method, recommend services I’ve used personally and done research on. As with all articles, please do your own diligence/research into these services.

Investments

RealT 

Right off the bat, I’ll introduce you to an emerging trend in cryptocurrency: Security tokens.

Security tokens are tokens that are regulated by law. The simplest way to understand it is: A digital form of traditional security like shares of a company, or rights of ownership.

RealT allows investors to buy into the US real estate market through fully-compliant, fractional ownership. In other words, you can own a fractional portion of a US property, like a house, and earn rental income daily. The more tokens you own = the bigger the ownership percentage = more rental income into your digital wallet.

Tenant pays monthly rental to property management > Management converts funds into a USD stablecoin > Sends Stablecoin to RealT token owners daily.

I’ve explained it simply here but I invite you to check out their website/discord/telegram for yourself. 

Advantages:

• It is a security token, meaning it is regulated by U.S law. 
• You get daily rental income in the form of a stablecoin
• Real Estate prices generally appreciate in value over time
• The team has extensive experience in real estate and the blockchain industry.

Risks:

• Real Estate valuation goes down. That scenario is generally not that likely to happen. The RealT team has carefully curated the properties they are listing.

Activities

Activities are what I term as things you need to do to get something. It’s not entirely passive, but still.

Coinbase Earn

Coinbase has a section on its website called Coinbase Earn. Fantastic way to learn about various cryptocurrency projects and earn tokens. It’s up to you if you want to hold on to that particular token, or if you want to convert it into a stablecoin.

Writing on publish0x

I don’t have much to say here. This IS my maiden article after all. But I’ve seen pretty good income earned by the other authors on this website. So here’s me taking a stab at it.

Faucets

Faucets. Most of them are ridden with ads, or worse, malware. I tend to stay away from these sites. Do not expect great amounts of cryptocurrencies at one shot. Use faucets with the expectation that they build up over time.

These are what I recommend.

Horizen

A word of caution when using Horizen’s faucet. Do NOT use a VPN when logging into the website or you’ll be banned. Tips: Link up your social media accounts, verify your Sphere (Horizen’s official wallet) wallet, and use Brave browser when claiming ZEN. You’ll earn bonus ZEN. Other bonuses, check out the site to find out more.

Nimiq

Nimiq is an interesting one. You can actually mine with just your browser if you like. But they have a faucet too. Now, you might mock the price value of NIM. But if you leave on your browser to do some mining, or use their dedicated miner to mine, and/or use their faucet, over time you could make quite a bit to sell (or hold on to it if you like).

Earning BAT using Brave browser.

There’s been tons of talk in here about how to use the Brave browser to earn BAT so I won’t go further into it. One thing I’ll like to add though. Use a VPN set to the U.S when using Brave. Your ads will pop up much more frequently.

Lending

You can lend out your cryptocurrency and earn interest on them. There are generally two main types of lending service providers: CEFI or DEFI ( in other words, Centralized Finance or Decentralized Finance.) 

Cut the story short (damn, this IS getting long), there is NO true DEFI lending service provider yet. What’s the difference? That’s a story for another day.

To check lending rates, I’d recommend https://loanscan.io/ or https://www.coingecko.com/en/earn/dai

Fulcrum
Fulcrum is one of the nearest to achieving true defi lending. They have excellent team contact with the community, solid guys all around. Now, they suffered two major hacks recently, but they are shoring up their defenses. Expect to see them come out with great features out soon. In the meantime, you can lend a variety of cryptocurrencies in their service.

Celsius Network

Celsius Network. Centralized service. Excellent support, great promos from time to time, and they are well regarded in the industry. Can’t speak highly enough of them. They do not have a web portal; they only have mobile apps. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is trying to scam you.

Compound.finance

One of the biggest lending service providers. Regarded as reputable and they are also in the process of steering towards true decentralization.

iearn.finance/Curve.fi

Technically speaking these are two separate services but they work well in synergy with each other. A word of warning: IF you are fairly new to cryptocurrencies, these two services might be fairly hard to understand at first. Despite relatively clean interfaces, their user experience leaves much to be desired. However, what they lack in polish, they make up for in returns. Read their documentation to find out more.

Binance Lending

Binance is a giant in the cryptocurrency industry. And if you have spent some time in this space you would have heard of them. Love or hate them, they do offer lending services, either fixed or flexible terms. 

Staking

Staking is somewhat like lending. The main difference is you are actually using a specific cryptocurrency to help secure their own native blockchain in return for rewards. (Very generalized, but that’s the rough idea)

Some cryptocurrencies have minimum amounts to stake, and some allow any amount, etc,etc. Do your own research on which to stake. Look at a particular project and decide on the following factors:

1. Is the project reputable?
2. Is the blockchain actually in use by enterprises/people/real-world usage?
3. How affordable is each coin/token? If it's too expensive for your budget, skip it or slowly accumulate over time.
4. What are the returns like? If the returns aren’t good, it’s not worth your time.
5. IF the RETURNS ARE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, I’d recommend extreme caution. 
6. Are there unlocking periods? Some projects impose a long unlocking time before you can actually unstake your tokens when you decide to exit.

Look at staking coins using stakingrewards.com and choose one. Lots of people recommend Tezos. I stake Tezos(XTZ) myself, and I’m looking forward to staking ETH. Unfortunately, I do not have the requisite minimum amount of 32 ETH. So I’ll just have to slowly accumulate it.

As for staking providers, again, I’d recommend looking at Binance.com. They offer staking services for quite a large variety of cryptocurrencies. Now, for those of you who are afraid of putting all your eggs in one basket, you’d have to look for other staking providers. Bear in mind the fees they charge.

Conclusion:

So that’s about it. I have considered adding more services/methods that offer passive/semi-passive income but ultimately decided not to because they carry more uncertainty and risk.

Thank you for reading and I hope this has been useful. 

If you like it, some tips would be much appreciated:

ETH/DAI/USDC : 0x614971bfe55692C315344008B0B7e0D35D586F19

ZEN : znk4eun18t6rQZhA2ttF3d4x9kBrbf2xTfU