Our Top 5 Crypto Hustles for 2021

Hello everyone out there in the HiveHustlers land! Hope your hustles are all treating you well! Today I want to dig into some of our favorite ways to make money in the crypto world!

Not all of these methods are for everyone. Some choose to focus on one or two methods to consolidate their investments, some like to delve into all of these ways to earn.

We are doing a count down from 5-1. The way we ranked them was due to initial investments and income expectations.

5. Proof of Work Mining

Proof of work, is the original hustle in the crypto space. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero and others are all known to be some of the top mined coins. Mining is the way that the blockchains run and verify transactions. The more miners on the network, the more secure. But on the flip side of this, the more miners, the more difficult it can be to compete for blocks to earn more coins.

The initial investment can get quite expensive if you are really wanting to use mining as a hustle that is going to show you any real returns. Currently, you can mine Ethereum on high powered GPUs (graphic cards in a computer), but these days you have to have a minimum of 8GB Ram GPUs to even mine Ethereum.

There are other tokens that you can mine using GPUs but they are more speculative. You can use a service like NiceHash to mine out the most profitable algorithm and it will auto convert to Bitcoin. Mining on CPUs are also a possibility, but currently Monero is the only token that can be mined due to its Randomx algorithm. I am sure there are others at this point, but we haven't looked too much into lately as we are not currently mining anything. Home miners though are doing pretty well and most are making money mining some of the more speculative algorithms. Ethereum miners have lost revenue since the latest updates that integrated the transaction fee burn feature. This led to many miners moving to other algorithms.

If you want to get into mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, or even Dogecoin, you will need specialized ASIC computers that do nothing but run those algorithms, but they are really getting expensive these days and they aren't exactly something you want to run in an apartment. They are really loud and they make a room hot real quick.

If you want to build a commercial style mining facility these days you are going to have to come at it with about $1 Million to start with the most recent ASIC machines and the infrastructure needed to run them effectively and safely.

4. Proof of Stake Investor - Node Operator

Proof of stake is the other major consensus model for cryptocurrencies and like mining, can take a large investment to start earning a decent income. Staking is much less energy intensive than mining and only requires you to purchase tokens and stake them in your wallet which will help run transactions on the blockchain. This earns transaction fees in return for locking up your tokens. It is much easier to get into staking than it is mining and really does the same function. The issue with proof of stake models, they are easy to centralize due to the founding teams or large whales holding a large stake in the network.

Staking tokens range in the APR that they offer. Some have certain lock up periods where it will take a certain amount of time for your funds to become liquid. So you need to take this into account if you like to have your funds available at any time.

Tokens like ATOM, which is the token for the Cosmos blockchain, earns an average of 9-10% APR for staking rewards but has a lock up time of 21 days. Where a token like BNB earns upwards of 25% at times and only has to be locked up for 7 days.

If you look at staking tokens like a real estate cash flowing investment, then you are looking more long term and don't really care about the lock up time.

There are a couple of different methods of staking. One is just directly staking in a wallet that works as the transaction processor, but most chains still have to run nodes, or servers, and many proof of stake chains are actually more delegated proof of stake in that you are staking your tokens with a particular node.

You can also make some serious money running a blockchain node, but that can get into a bit more overhead and technical knowledge as you will need to know how to get the node up and running and be able to maintain it. On Hive we call these nodes, witnesses. Hive members stake their Hive power which gives them voting power and we vote for the witnesses that we support to run the chain. Other chains like Cosmos, you delegate your tokens directly to the node and you earn your share of the transaction fees or rewards.

Staking and node operation are both great ways to earn passive income in crypto.

3. NFT Blockchain Gaming

It is no surprise that the NFT world has absolutely taken the globe by storm and is quickly becoming a way that the mainstream is picking up on the crypto game. NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens for those who have been living under a rock for the last year, represent digital ownership of a particular piece of... whatever...

They have been used to tokenize ownership rights for things like art and collectibles and have certainly found a use case in the low res digital 'beanie baby' craze with all the different Punks, Apes, and Turtles that have been selling for hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Even the top auction houses are getting in the NFT game.

People have made some serious money in this game buy jumping in and buying or minting these NFTs and then reselling them for a much higher price.

Some NFTs have some good utility while others are really just, I hate to say it, but a fad. I don't believe we have seen the true use case for NFTs take flight yet, like with the music industry, real estate, physical art galleries, deeds, property rights, and royalty rights. This industry is still in its extreme early stages and is ripe with hustling opportunities.

NFTs are taking the gaming world by store by giving players ownership over their game pieces and cards like in the game @splinterlands and @dcity. Splinterlands, as we all know is an NFT based card game that players can play their way up the ranks and eventually can start earning crypto. Players can also rent out their cards to other players for passive income as well as there is a market for players to buy and sell their cards for a profit.

Dcity is a DEFI NFT game that allows players to purchase NFT cards that represent different buildings, businesses, citizens, technology, etc. You build your city to be as profitable as possible. There are many ways you can earn in this game, like buy and hold like real estate, earn different tokens like BEER for holding Brewery cards and WEED tokens for having Weed Farm cards, as well as the native SIM token for everything else. There is also a built in card market where players can buy and sell cards with each other.

At this point, to get going in NFT games, it can get a bit expensive to get started big, but if you start small and spend some time with the games, you can earn you way up the ranks.

2. Content Creator - Content Curation - Proof of Brain

One of the best ways we have found to earn crypto in 2021 is to create cryptocurrency related content. Platforms like the one we are one now, Hive, offers so many different communities to create or just curate content which will earn you crypto. Not to mention the proof of stake mechanisms, Defi, and NFT games we have available, which you can write about your experiences and earn crypto!

There are other decentralized networks on which you can post content and earn cryptocurrencies like Publish0x, Noise.cash, read.cash, and more! I prefer Hive over all other chains for content creation because of the structure of the network and the community that is involved. The people really make the difference.

And of course you can become an influencer on the main stream networks like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We have found that at this point in time, that it has become more difficult on the mainstream networks to get attention due to the over saturation of content creators, so that is why we put our focus on creating content for the community that we are wanting to focus on anyway.

Most influencers just post on other platforms to throw their content to as wide of an audience as possible without actually supporting the Web3 networks themselves. If you focus on a particular platform, not just for earning content rewards, but to help strengthen the network, and support others in the community to do the same, then it is good to concentrate your focus on one or two platforms that seem to get the most reactions out of your content.

People are making their full livings creating and curating content on the blockchain. Look at people like @taskmaster4450 and @jongolsen, those two are machines. Taskmaster is the biggest earners on the Hive blockchain with Jon not far behind, and is making a killing just in the content he creates, not to mention the cash flowing investments he is involved with. People all over the world are changing their lives by becoming content creators or curators on the blockchain! So if you set your mind and stick to your goals, you can do it as well!

1. DEFI - Yield Farming - Liquidity Mining - Lending

And it should be no surprise that our favorite way to earn income in the crypto space in 2021 has been in the DEFI or Decentralized Finance world. There are so many ways you can earn in DEFI that we haven't even gotten to all of it, haha.

The easiest way to earn in DEFI is in the lending platforms where you just put your tokens to work earning you interest and you can move out of the investment at any time. Platforms like Compound and Venus.io allow you to lend your tokens and use them as collateral to then loan against your crypto so you can use it without spending the original investment. You can also use this as leverage to get more money to build you DEFI cash flowing investments then pay back the loans.

Our favorite method is yield farming and liquidity mining, which at their cores, are really somewhat the same thing. Basically, our main game is to provide liquidity to markets, mainly pairing tokens with a stablecoin to keep our risk factor lower but still in yield farms that make a really good return.

For example, one of our largest holdings is in the CUB-BUSD liquidity farm on https://cubdefi.com ran by the @leofinance team. What this does is provide liquidity to that market which we earn a small transaction fee for being the market maker, and then we earn a farming yield for having the liquidity locked up in the CUB farm where we earn an average of 130% APY. Pretty insane numbers!

This method can also come with allot of risk if you are not careful in finding out about the platform you are using before you put your money into it. One major risk is by 'rug pulls' which is where the development team will pump their token then removed all their liquidity once the market has built up and dump all their coins on the other holders, thus pulling the rug out from underneath them and leaving them holding the bags.

This is why it is very important to do your research on a project before putting any money into it. We like to find projects that either, we know who the developers are and know their long term vision, like CubFinance, or you look for the strongest projects that are working with allot of the other DEFI platforms on their perspective blockchains, or now many offer a multitude of blockchains.

One way I look for reputable platforms is to look at autofarm.network and see what DEXs and DEFI platforms they have listed. Generally they only work with reputable exchange platforms. Just be careful which tokens you are investing in. The higher the APY can be attractive, but can also be deceiving and deadly to your portfolio.

As long as you play your risk to reward correctly, you can make a great living in DEFI!

Wrapping it up

As you can see by the article, we are fans of building up cash flowing incomes in crypto. Building a good income driven foundation can help you fund your future in ways you would never have imagined. As you noticed, trading is not on the list. That is because trading is not one of our favorite ways to earn. In these crazy, volatile markets, it is easy to get caught in the hype and lose money extremely fast when going things like leverage trading or something. Plus you are constantly staring at charts and worrying about what your next move is going to be... I will take the safer route and just provide liquidity to the markets for the traders to trade and earn money on a much less risk involved method like yield farming.

There are certainly more ways to earn than what we have listed. These just happen to be our favorite methods to earn crypto and has helped make us full time crypto earners at this point in time!

And remember, this isn't financial advise... blah blah blah, lol...

Keep calm and Hustle on!

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