According to Google trends, there is a spike in the number of searches for the term “cryptocurrency”. The interest of people is understandable. Although it seems that many know about virtual currencies, in fact, there are a lot of people who are just opening this industry for themselves. Having read many stories about how crypto caused huge financial gains, they are interested in the ways to earn this virtual asset. If you are interested as well, this article is what you need.
Probably, you know that the fastest way to get crypto coins is to buy them on an exchange. However, that’s not the only way. Here we explain 4 more ways how people earn virtual tokens in 2022.
Staking
It’s important to specify that staking might not be available on all blockchains. However, the majority of them offer such a possibility, so it’s won’t be a big deal to find a good ecosystem for staking. At least you can consider the most popular options such as Ethereum and Solana. It’s also important to understand the difference between staking and yield farming.
Simply speaking, you stake some coins you’ve got before to earn more coins. When you stake coins, you power a blockchain network and help it to process transactions. The network rewards you for this. The staked coins will get frozen. A random system will choose whether you are chosen to validate a transaction. If yes, you will receive a reward. Bear in mind, that you can lose your turn and your stake will not provide any gains.
In order to validate transactions and earn rewards for them, you need to have some technical knowledge in working with blockchain through your computer. Or, you can find services that will validate transactions instead of you for a certain commission.
Requirements for validators are different across blockchains. Ethereum, for example, requires the minimum amount of a stake to be not less than 32 ETH. This is 38,313.60 USD as of December 16. With this, you can earn an annual percentage yield of about 5%.
The benefit of this method is that you don’t need a lot of special equipment. Nonetheless, it requires some upfront investments in coins to gain the minimum required amount to activate your validator on the blockchain network.
Mining
Mining is the opposite method of staking because usually the coins that can be staked cannot be mined. Bitcoin, which is the biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and value per token, is the most popular cryptocurrency among miners.
In order to mine such coins as BTC or DOGE, you need to have special hardware that will be able to provide solutions to complex mathematical problems. The one who solves it faster gets the reward.
Mining software where you mine coins can be installed for free but not every hardware will have enough capacity to run it. Actually, special hardware that suits crypto mining costs thousands of dollars. Besides, this hardware will consume a lot of electricity and monthly bills might surprise you a bit. Just consider that Bitcoin consumes more electricity than some countries, and this is only one network!
The big advantage of mining over staking is that rewards might be more lucrative and your personal involvement isn’t always necessary. For example, if your hardware succeeds in adding a block to the Bitcoin blockchain, you will get 6.25 bitcoins, which is around 105,396.88 USD. However, don’t expect to get this amount on Bitcoin if you are an individual miner since on Bitcoin you’ll have to compete against entire corporations that invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware.
Airdrops
The biggest advantage of airdrops over the above-mentioned method is that you get them for free. Usually, airdrops are provided by newly emerging projects. They include a certain amount of tokens, either NFTs or coins. You just provide the address of your crypto wallet and receive a reward.
It’s not a big deal to find out about upcoming airdrops. Usually, you can find these announcements on Reddit, Twitter, and other social networks. Follow the news in the crypto industry and you will not miss the most lucrative airdrops of crypto projects.
Faucets
You don’t necessarily need to do complicated technical tasks or buy expensive hardware to receive digital coins as rewards. Tasks can be much simpler – taking online quizzes, watching ads, playing games, etc.
As with airdrops, you don’t need to do any upfront investments to get started earning cryptocurrency from faucets. However, keep in mind that sharing your crypto wallet address or other credentials isn’t always the best idea. Before doing this, you should make sure that you aren’t dealing with a scam. Verify sources offering to earn cryptocurrencies through faucets and airdrops.
That’s it for now. We hope that with this guide, it will be easier for you to get started in the world of virtual money.
