Unless you opt to invest in cryptocurrency stocks, your first step is to buy crypto. After you’ve acquired your first crypto investment, try any or all of these tactics for making money with crypto:
1. Trading
You can buy crypto and hold it until its value rises, then sell for a profit — and even engage in day trading if your goal is quick income.
But be wary: cryptocurrency and day trading are both high risk, so never invest more than you can afford to lose.
2. Staking
If you’re interested in holding cryptocurrency, you can stake it — or agree to park it on an exchange or in a staking pool for a period of time. You’ll earn more crypto for keeping yours in place, because doing so helps fund blockchain operations.
Generally, you earn crypto by staking because you’ll receive interest or dividends, often at a high rate. However, you often have to commit to a period of time to lock your crypto in the blockchain, and you’ll be subject to the risks of keeping your crypto on an exchange.
3. Lending
You can also opt to loan your cryptocurrency holdings out, allowing you to charge interest — sometimes with annual percentage yields of 15% or more.
However, this makes your crypto less liquid, meaning it’s harder to sell. More than one crypto lending platform has struggled with liquidity in recent months.
4. Giveaways
You can earn free crypto in various ways, from looking for giveaways, also referred to as airdrops, to completing small tasks on websites in exchange for crypto coins, called faucets.
While it’s easy to get free crypto through airdrops or faucets, you’re not likely to earn much. And you’ll need to be careful, because some of these “free giveaways” are scams in disguise and will give you malware instead of free crypto.
5. Mining
Mining is the computing process through which new coins are released into circulation. Not all coins are created through mining, but many are, including bitcoin. It can be profitable but requires extensive equipment and is very energy inefficient, meaning it’s often expensive to get started and you might not make that investment back.
Know your local laws if you want to start mining for crypto. It’s illegal in several countries and some U.S. states.
6. Gaming
You can earn crypto through play-to-earn NFT games like Axie Infinity, Zed Run and Gods Unchained. Complete tasks and compete with other players to win crypto or NFTs, which you can then reinvest into the game, hold or sell.
Some of these games offer free demos, so you can try them out to make sure you enjoy them, but you’ll typically need to invest in NFTs to play for profit.