Hearing about or owning cryptocurrencies is one thing, but how do you actually make money from it?
Millions of people around the world are learning more about cryptocurrencies every day. They’re hearing stories of people making life-changing gains from them and improving their standards of living in the process, but a good understanding of how they too can make money from cryptocurrencies remains a challenge.
While the general public mostly knows that people are making money trading cryptocurrencies as they do with forex trading, they don’t know how to trade, nor even realise that it’s just one method out of a plethora of ways to make money from cryptocurrencies.
If you’re wondering how to make money from cryptocurrencies in Nigeria, Africa, or anywhere around the world, here are 17+ proven ways to make money from cryptocurrencies:
See Also: What Is A Cryptocurrency & How Does It Work? Everything You Need To Know
1). Day trading:
Day trading is one of the most popular ways of making money from cryptocurrencies. And it could be spot or futures trading.
Spot trading involves trading a highly volatile coin that goes up and down quickly during the day by buying when the price comes down and selling when the price goes up. Here the trader may be looking for a 2-5% margin per trade with the hopes of doing up to 10 or more trades during the day.
In the case of futures trading, the trader can buy when the price is going up or buy when the price is coming down. Here, the trader is pretty much betting on either direction of the market and if it goes in the opposite direction the trader bets on they could lose their investment.
2). Buy & Hold Long-Term Investing (HODL):
This is the most popular way of making money from cryptocurrencies. If you had bought $1,000 worth of bitcoins at $1 in 2010, you’d have gotten 1,000 units of it, and going by the rate of bitcoin at the time of publishing this article at $48,900 per bitcoin, you’d have had $48,900,000 today.
Most cryptocurrencies rise by astronomical values over a period of many years, making the long-term investment method of buying to hold the best option for all types of traders, whether experienced or not.
3). Staking:
When cryptocurrency transactions happen on the blockchain network, they’re validated either via proof of work or proof of stake. In the case of proof of stake, cryptocurrencies are locked up and staked in the network to validate the transactions.
If you have cryptocurrencies that you do not plan to sell anytime soon but would want to earn an income from it, you can stake them in a proof of stake network and earn a monthly or yearly payment.
Some proof of stake networks could offer around 20% yearly, meaning that if the cryptocurrency you bought at $10,000 for instance, is now worth $200,000 and you stake the $200,000 at a 20% yearly premium, you’d get paid $2,000 monthly as payment for staking the cryptocurrency for that period of time.
The best part is you can be earning from it monthly without having to sell the cryptocurrency for the period and when the staking or lock-up period is over, if the cryptocurrency had risen by say 300%, you’d have $600,000 and could re-stake it on a platform that even pays a higher fee while your cryptocurrency continues to potentially rise in value.
4). Lending:
Just like staking, there are a host of decentralised cryptocurrency lending platforms that you could lend your cryptocurrency through to borrowers via a smart contract and get paid interest without having to sell the cryptocurrency or ever having to know or meet the person borrowing the cryptocurrency.
The way it usually works is that the borrower would have to lock up cryptocurrency worth about 130% or so of the value of the cryptocurrency they want to borrow as collateral before they can have access to the cryptocurrency you’re offering, which is usually a stable coin or a top coin.
See Also: How To Start Trading Cryptocurrencies In Nigeria or Africa: The Complete Guide
5). Bitcoin & Other Cryptocurrency Mining:
Mining was the original way to make money from cryptocurrencies when bitcoins were first introduced. It was basically a way of using computers and advanced cryptography to validate cryptocurrency transactions via a proof of work method and when each transaction is successful, the miner gets rewarded with bitcoin.
In simple terms, if you have a cryptocurrency mining device, you could connect to the network, let it automatically start mining, and every time it completes a task verification, you get rewarded with cryptocurrency which you could hold for longer-term value or sell for immediate gains.
6). Airdrops:
Airdrops are when free cryptocurrencies, also called tokens, are distributed by an exchange, a cryptocurrency creator, or a blockchain platform to create awareness for a specific project.
Usually, users are supposed to register to be eligible for an airdrop and when it happens they get free cryptocurrencies that they could hold, trade or more.
See Also: What Is Blockchain Technology & How Does It Work? Everything You Need To Know
7). Forks:
Forks happen on the blockchain network sometimes and what this means is that whenever there’s an upgrade or change in a protocol on a blockchain network, new coins are usually created, and if you had coins on the original blockchain, you will mostly be awarded free new coins or tokens on the new blockchain network which you could trade, invest or do anything else with.
8). Arbitrage:
Cryptocurrencies that are traded on multiple exchanges usually have different prices across the different exchanges. What this means is that while the price of bitcoin on one exchange could be $50,157, the price of bitcoin on another exchange could be $50,178 at that very moment as the way they’re bought and sold usually varies across platforms. But usually, the prices are always very close to each other.
Once in a while, a cryptocurrency’s price could become lower by over 20% in one exchange and stabilize on another. In that instance, traders could take advantage of arbitrage on that exchange to quickly buy at the low price, transfer to another exchange and sell at the high price.
Someone who took great advantage of this was Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder of the FTX exchange who would buy bitcoins at low prices in other global markets many years ago and sell in the Japanese market for higher prices before going on to found his exchange.
With arbitrage, you can buy cryptocurrency low on one market and sell high on another market.
See Also: What Is Bitcoin And How Does It Work? Everything you Need To Know
9). Play To Earn Crypto From Blockchain Games:
Many video games like Axie Infinity, Decentraland and the likes are cropping up with a play-to-earn model where the players can earn cryptocurrencies as they play the video games. This way, the gamers don’t just waste so much time online playing video games for nothing, but can actually earn cryptocurrency they can do anything with in real life from the gaming experience.
10). Cryptocurrency Blogging:
You could start blogging about cryptocurrencies to a wide audience looking to learn about it and earn an income in cryptocurrency from advertisement, affiliate marketing, online courses and more.
See Also: How To Start A Blog — The Complete Beginner Guide
11). Become A Cryptocurrency, NFT, Or Blockchain Consultant:
As more people and businesses choose to enter the cryptocurrency, NFT and blockchain space, they look forward to finding experienced consultants they can talk to or work with.
By building a successful track record with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or building blockchain applications, you can offer your services to individuals or corporations as an expert In the space and get paid in cryptocurrency.
12). Cryptocurrency Faucets:
If you enjoy watching youtube videos and taking surveys, cryptocurrency faucets are an easy way for you to get free cryptocurrency that you can convert to fiat money easily. Here, every time you watch a video, take a survey or perform a certain task, you get rewarded.
13). Invest In Cryptocurrency Focused Mutual Or Exchange Traded Funds:
You could invest your money in mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that invest funds in various platforms or technologies that power cryptocurrency.
14). Buy The Stocks Of Cryptocurrency Companies:
Just like Mutual or Exchange Traded funds, you can also buy the stock of companies operating in the cryptocurrency space and make money from the industry indirectly.
15). Work For A Cryptocurrency Company:
You could work for a cryptocurrency company and get rewarded for your services in both cash and cryptocurrencies depending on what your job role in the company is.
16). Receiving Payments For Services In Cryptocurrencies:
If you already offer a wide range of services to clients for various business activities, you could choose to opt-out of receiving your payments in fiat currency to cryptocurrencies.
17). Trading Competitions:
Various cryptocurrency platforms like Kucoin, Binance and the likes usually host cryptocurrency trading competitions where the winner could win a few hundred, thousand or sometimes millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
If you think you can win some of these competitions, you too can participate and get your winnings paid in cryptocurrency.
18). Build & Launch Defi Applications:
Defi applications are also called decentralised finance applications. Essentially, they’re finance applications that are hosted on a decentralised network. The apps could have certain features like trading abilities, lending features, and much more, and if people use your application, they pay commissions in cryptocurrency.
To Sum It Up
There are a wide range of methods to make money from cryptocurrency, and while many others may not have been covered by this article, it talks about a lot and will put you on track to earning an income trading cryptocurrencies in no time.