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1 January 2022
5 Side hustles that pay you in cryptos
Unsplash © Jievani Weerasinghe

5 side hustles that pay you in cryptocurrency

From putting your skills to work to playing online games for money to creating passive income streams that will help you reach financial freedom, the possibilities to earn extra income are endless. However, if you're interested in getting paid in cryptos, things tend to narrow down considerably.

Buying crypto as a long-term investment

Investing is all about passive income. You buy assets today in the hopes that they will increase in value in the future so that, when you sell, you make a profit from the difference. In the meantime, all you have to do is wait. Many savvy investors have been focusing on very popular assets for a while – cryptocurrencies.

To successfully invest in cryptos, you have to start by learning all you can about cryptocurrencies, blockchain, exchanges and everything relevant to the crypto market. Then, you need to choose a good crypto exchange where you’ll be able to buy and sell your cryptos. Once your account is set up, you simply buy coins in the amount you want to invest and hold them until they increase in price.

If you had bought Bitcoin or Ethereum one year ago, today, you would have doubled or sextupled your investment.

However, it’s important to note that whenever you invest in any asset, there’s a risk that the value will go down instead of up, making you lose money. With cryptos, this risk is high since these are very volatile assets. On the other hand, the potential earnings are also very high.

Play online games that pay in crypto

One great way to make extra digital cash is by playing games that pay in cryptocurrencies. While there are many popping up all over the place, here are a few to give you an idea:

Axie Infinity

If you’re new to Axie Infinity, it’s a blockchain game in which players earn cryptocurrency tokens as rewards, which they can then sell for real money. Tokens in the game are AXS or Axie Infinity Shards, which are tradable in many crypto exchanges.

There are numerous ways to earn money in Axie Infinity. For example, you can farm Smooth Love Potion (SLP), which is needed to breed collectable Axie pets. You can sell SLP on crypto exchanges or sell your Axies as pets. You can also become a real estate agent inside the game and invest in Lunacia Land, wait for it to increase in value, then sell it. Both Axies and Lunacia Land are NFTs, which are all the rage right now.

There is a catch, though: to play Axie Infinity, you need to invest around $500 to buy at least three Axies. However, considering the limited amount of AXS, which tend to go up in price, it’s well worth it.

Ember Sword

Ember Sword is an MMORPG built on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a straightforward RPG where players develop characters, choose a home nation, and go into the open world of Thanabus to complete missions, gather resources, make items, and fight monsters, bosses, and other players. In the meantime, they earn Embers (the game’s tokens) which they can then sell on different exchanges.

Star Atlas

Like the two previous options, Star Atlas is also an NFT game based on space travel and adventure. Just as any of its non-NFT predecessors, you can choose different storylines and roles within the game, including resource production, industrial production, trading and combating.

Land parcels in Star Atlas are NFTs representing ownership of different parts of the territory, which opens the game to digital real estate agents. The game has two value tokes: ATLAS and POLIS, one inflationary and the other revenue-bearing.

Play, complete tasks, shop or stake on StormX

Storm Play, now rebranded StormX is a sort of crypto Swagbucks. You earn cryptocurrency rewards in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dai, Litecoin, and Storm Token, completing different tasks, which include playing games and reaching a certain level or score, answering surveys and shopping online.

As you successfully finish each task, you will earn a commission in one of the aforementioned cryptocurrencies. Then, your earnings will go to a linked personal wallet such as Coinbase.

StormX works through an app you can download on your phone (Android and iOs) or as a browser extension for your PC or Mac. Besides giving you access to the games and surveys, the app also lets you earn crypto back on your purchases, much like a cash back credit card gives you cash back rewards on your spending.

Finally, another way StormX lets you earn cryptos is by staking. This means that you put some of your cryptos to work by using them to help verify transactions in the blockchain, and, in return, you receive a certain amount of coins as a form of fee.

Make money with NFTs

NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are a hot item in the crypto world right now. And with good reason: they have a tonne of potential use cases and offer several ways to make money. 

NFTs are basically digital assets stored on a ledger and use blockchain technology to trace ownership back to their creator. This enables you, as a creator, to sell digital assets such as a digital image, and charge a fee every time someone views it, a percentage of the sale every time someone sells it, or any other form of royalty.

In short, NFTs are unique digital assets, so another way to make money with NFTs is by buying them low and then selling them high. This is especially true for rare items or those that represent something valuable. For example, Twitter’s CEO sold his first-ever tweet for a staggering £2.1m.

Finally, another popular way to make money with NFTs is by collecting them. Many public addresses hold hundreds or even thousands of items, which you can trade on exchanges. Some items are simply great investment opportunities, like the Axies mentioned above or any form of digital assets like digital art, video clips, sound clips, or anything any talented creator cares to publish.

Crypto lending

If you have some coins lying around, an easy way to make a passive crypto income from them is to lend them in exchange for interest. There are several ways to do this, starting with lending some cryptos to a friend, family, or other acquaintance you trust will pay you back. You can also use an online peer-to-peer lending platform to help you invest your cryptos by finding borrowers and protecting you from scams.

Today, a fairly new concept is decentralised finance, which lets users lend and borrow money safely without getting banks involved. These usually work by letting the borrower who needs physical money (fiat currency) put a set amount of crypto as collateral. After that, as an investor, you lend them the money, and when they pay you back with interest, the borrower gets his cryptos back. However, if the borrower defaults, you’ll get the collateral cryptos instead.

There are many ways to earn cryptos on the side, and these seven are but the tip of the iceberg. There’s something out there for every taste, from passive income to selling NFTs to playing online video games for money. It all comes down to your personal preference, skillset, and how much time you have on your hands.

Once you have that sorted out, there’s really no excuse not to start making more money today.