If you want to get into the world of crypto but don’t have any money to invest, there are still good ways to earn crypto.
In this article, we go over a few ideas to get you started, and then mention a few more ideas for what to do once you have some crypto.
4 Ways to Earn Free Crypto Without Trading or Risking Money
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Crypto bounties
There are many companies and projects that offer bounties for completing certain tasks. These can range from simple things like testing a new feature to more complex tasks like writing an article or creating a video.
We list some crypto bounties in the airdrops page in their own list. The thing is, most people don’t care for bounties even though you can actually earn a decent money from them. People prefer airdrops because they take less work, even though these days most airdrops are a random draw and not everybody gets paid.
If you don’t mind the idea of crypto bounties, there is plenty of them. To participate, you just need to have a couple social media accounts with at least few hundred followers and a few accounts on Blogspot or similar.
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Become a bounty manager
Another way to earn actually a very good money from crypto bounties is to become the bounty campaign manager. I interviewed a couple of the top bounty managers and some of them did say they earned their first ever crypto from bounty management. All of them treat it as a social media marketing job and earn well from it, without trading or putting any of their money to risk.
Bounty managers are people who release bounty announcements on crypto outlets, hold the bounty escrow and check the submitted bounty work. They earn a fee for their work and their username collects reputation and merit if the bounties they release pay well and without any hiccups.
In the interviews, bounty managers mostly agreed that it is important for them to cross check the project that is running the bounty campaign. If you end up posting a scam campaign, your reputation will tank.
The advantage of being the manager is it pays far better than participating. The disadvantage is you have to have a reputation online, and you need to maintain it.
Building the reputation can take up to a year to build up. Some people buy used forum accounts to get a head start, but it is still important to maintain it afterwards.
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Airdrops and Gleam lucky draws
Crypto airdrops are marketing projects launched when a new token needs to be promoted to the community.
At AltcoinTrading.NET, we keep a list all upcoming crypto airdrops so that you don’t miss out on any free coins or tokens. If you prefer to get alerts, we post daily airdrop updates in a Medium publication Cryptolounge and you can also subscribe to the airdrop email alerts.
Crypto airdrops can be done in several ways. The most common airdrop type today is one where you are asked to retweet a bunch of things via a Gleam form or Telegram. You submit the retweets together with your wallet address in the form and a few weeks later the airdropped tokens should arrive.
Token Airdrop Spam & Scam Tokens
The oldest way is to distribute airdropped tokens would be to the holders of a different blockchain asset. This kind of airdrop is not very effective though and these days, it is called “token spam”.
If you have an ETH or a TRX address, you very likely have some tokens on it visible on Ethereum block explorers that you never heard of.
That’s token spam. Some of these tokens are fraudulent but most of token spam done as marketing. Here’s one such token. It promotes a website:
Just like with email spam, it is best to be cautious with any unexpected token airdrops. If those spam tokens are worth something and you’ll want to sell them, then first check the transaction in a block explorer. Block explorers like Tronscan clearly mark scam token contracts. If the token is marked as a scam token, just ignore it. Importing that token into your wallet is dangerous.
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Play to earn games (P2E)
Play to earn games got really popular with the rise of NFTs. New play to earn games are released all the time and they often promote the launch by doing an airdrop. It pays off to follow the #play2earn hashtag on Medium, as that’s where launches and events always show up.
In some P2E games you get paid in game tokens for activities that you accomplish in the game. The most common way you get to earn from P2E games is by developing your game character, which is an NFT, and then selling it.
So, to really earn you need to play a game that is quite popular because you need to have buyers for your character. While there are so many play to earn games, but only a few of them are actually really popular.
Polygon is the platform to watch
The most popularized P2E games as of June 2022 are Axie Infinity (ETH), The Sandbox (MATIC), Gods Unchained (ETH), Pegaxy (MATIC).
The MATIC blockchain is the one Web3 platform to watch right now, the GameFi industry on Polygon is booming.
On the other hand, all of GameFi is getting collectively slaughtered by the crypto bear market. As all of crypto costs less and less now, you will end up putting in the same amount of work developing your NFT game character but it will sell for a lot less, if at all - the numbers of active users are dropping as well, in some games quite dramatically.
Once you get some crypto: Hodl it or stake it
If you already have some crypto, you can stake it to earn more crypto. Staking is a process that involves holding your coins in a wallet to help verify transactions on the blockchain and in return, you earn a reward.
Because staking requires you to leave your coins in a wallet for some time, you should avoid custodial services and custodial crypto exchanges to stake your crypto. Custodial earn services can always lock up your deposited money like Celsius Network infamously did in June 2022.
- If you have only a small amount of crypto, you can stake it using staking pools. You will be charged a fee but a large pool has better chance to be selected by the network than a small holder. In a lot of pools, the minimum staked amount is only symbolic, such as 1 unit of the staking coin.
- Once you earn more crypto, the best way to stake crypto will be directly from your own wallet. Most popular staking wallets that cost nothing to purchase are Exodus wallet (most big cryptos), Trust wallet (Binance), Phantom wallet (Solana ecosystem)
These were just a few ideas to get you started on earning crypto without investing any money. With a little effort, you can start earning crypto and building up your portfolio, and all that without risking any money on trading.