How to earn crypto, DeFi, NFT in 2024

Disclaimer: This article presents activities on how to make money in the crypto market from simple to complex. The more complex the instrument, the higher your risks. All responsibility for using these applications is yours.

In this article, we will do an extensive review of ways to earn various tokens in the current crypto market.

Airdrops

For simplicity, we will call all types of drops airdrops. We can distinguish the following types of drops:

• Retrospective or retrodrop is a form of airdrop, involving the retrospective distribution of free tokens to holders.(for example Uniswap),

• Recurrent drop occurring often or repeatedly (Optimism),

• Prospective or potential drop it's like a retrodrop, but one that hasn't happened yet. You interact with the project in the hope that your efforts will be rewarded in the future (Metamask).

 In order to participate in airdrops, a number of typical actions are usually required:

1. Subscribe to the social media of the project you are interested in;

2. Write posts, articles, create memes etc.

3. Wait for a test network or dAapp (it can be MVP, alpha version);

4. Perform the necessary actions. This could be token swap, mint an NFT, bridge token, staking, etc;

5. Wait and hope that you have been selected and the project will give you the tokens.

Airdrop Disadvantages

1. You don't know exactly if and when there will be a reward. 

2. Not all actions in airdrop can be accessed by a beginner user. Often specialized knowledge is required (e.g. about installing nodes, proving zero knowledge, DeFi, Bridge, etc.);

3. If drop hunters (industrial drop farmers with tens of thousands of accounts) are involved, your reward size is significantly reduced.

Where find recent airdrops

1. AirdropAlert.com is the crypto industry’s #1 rated library to find trusted airdrop campaigns, giveaways and more. 
2. Airdrops.io is a free aggregator for crypto airdrops.
3. NFT 2.0 aggregator drop page (coming soon)

Bounty

Lately, the difference between a confirmed airdrop and a bounty has been getting smaller and smaller. The main thing to know about bounty programs is that they have clear requirements for participation, deadlines and the size of the rewards.

A bounty campaign often takes place in two phases:

1. Before fundraising, when the primary community is built;

2. After fundraising, when the main core of the community has already been created and its growth and increased engagement is required.

The main services that track new activity, providing an opportunity to earn money from crypto projects by performing simple tasks:

• Dropsearn

• Icodrops

• Coinlaunch

Bug bounty

If you have development skills and in-depth knowledge of how decentralized networks and protocols work, then you should check out a special category of campaigns for rewarding bug bounty and application vulnerability hunting.

The main platforms for bug bounty searches are:

1. Immunefi is a Web3's leading bug bounty platform;

2. Hackenproof is an Expert web3 bug bounty and crowdsourced audit platform

3. HackerOne is a Trusted Security Platform and Hacker Program

Faucets

Often when performing tasks in test networks you may need test cryptocurrency, which can be obtained on special services - faucets:

1. Alchemy

2. Paradigm

In addition, in new networks, developers themselves often deploy such faucets. You should look for links to them in the project documentation.

Actions to Earn

The crypto industry is constantly evolving and new ways to attract the mass user are emerging. In general, this is a logical evolution of bounty programs, which are lately automated and often embedded in protocols and applications. Usually such programs are allocated to a special area that we call “Action to Earn”. This included projects whose mechanics are based on activity of a certain type: move-to-earn, play-to-earn, sleep-to-earn (yes, there is such a thing) and finally tap-to-earn.

The mechanics of earning money in such applications can vary greatly, but in general the algorithm  is as follows:

1. Buy a cheap NFT character or attribute (like sneakers in step-to-earn games). Although now there are more and more applications that do not require an initial financial investment other than your time and attention;

2. Regular interaction with the application and the collection of points and boost attributes;

Here you can find such applications:

• PlayToEarn is the world's leading Blockchain Games data aggregator.
• Chainplay helps you find the next big NFT-powered, blockchain games to play and invest in. 

NFT Renting

Even inexpensive NFTs for play-to-earn games aren't always available, let alone expensive and rare ones. But there is already a market for renting NFTs, where you can rent the right character or land in the metaverse for an event without a pledge for a minimal fee. On some platforms you can even pay for rentals from the loot gained by your rented character.

Here are some examples of NFT rental platforms:

• LootRush - rent all gaming NFTs
• Double Protocol is an open-source protocol for lending and renting NFTs.
• IQ Space is a universal solution for renting digital assets.

On-chain distribution platform

While earlier projects conducted bounty campaigns on their own, now there are entire aggregators that automate tasks and promote community growth. On such platforms you will find tasks from a wide variety of projects from different networks and can participate in a lot of campaigns with rewards in tokens, NFTs, stablecoins, places in whitelists, or roles in Discord. 

Here are just a few of these platforms:

• Galxe is a decentralized super app and Web3's largest on-chain distribution platform.
• SoQuest Is A Web3 Quest Portal To Earn Rewards.
• Intract Quests – your ultimate platform for Quest to Earn opportunities.

DAO Contribution

Most modern decentralized applications (dApps) are governed by decentralized autonomous organizations DAOs .

Just select the DAO you are participating in and submit a detailed proposal. Then wait a confirm and get a reward from the treasury for your proposal.

Here are some of the DAO aggregators

• DAOBase is a comprehensive DAO aggregator and search engine.
• DeepDAO is the leading discovery and analytics engine for the DAO ecosystem.

Soulbound token SBT

Lately, more and more projects are using SBTs to confirm your participation in some campaign, protocol, etc. SBTs are not transferable, you can’t buy them or transfer them to your other wallet. 

However, today there are services such as Myshch, which more closely connects projects and users by using NFT tickets and SBT certificates. In addition we can highlight:

• Guild.xyz

• Unlock

• Collab.land

Moreover, Envelop gives you the ability to create upgradable SBTs, which as you develop your skills and achievements, will increase the corresponding trait in the SBT.

Become a crypto influencer

By having an active social media community you can monetize it by becoming a crypto influencer. Don't chase more followers, but improve the specialization and engagement of your community. For example, a lending protocol is more likely to engage with an Influencer with 5,000 followers and a channel that only talks about defi, rather than an Influencer with 25,000 followers that talks about everything in the crypto industry. Smaller influencers with specialized expertise will become increasingly influential, offering targeted marketing opportunities.

Keep an eye out for trends in content formats. Video and live streaming will continue to be popular for providing engaging experiences for audiences, but advanced technologies such as AR and VR will also play an important role in creating immersive and interactive experiences for audiences.

Focus on long-term partnerships. Brands will move to long-term relationships with influencers to create authentic stories and connect with audiences on a deeper level.

Create quality content.

Utilize creator and influencer platforms, like Creator.co, Taggermedia, Joinbrands.

If you already have crypto assets and intend to increase them, then next we will look at advanced ways to make money.

Onchain Royalties

Creators (independent authors or even DAOs) can add a royalty option independent of any NFT marketplace.

Such royalties can be added to any NFT, such as NFT art, collectibles, or derivatives such as indexes.

Multiple participants may also be the recipient of royalties. Add royalties to an NFT (use advanced tab).

Staking

By staking, you lock your tokens for a period of time during which you will receive rewards.

On the Stakingrewards you can choose the right network and check out the rewards.

In addition to the network's native coin, there are staking for protocols’ tokens. Information about these should be found in the project documentation.

Liquidity Providing

In this case, you add your liquidity to pools of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and receive fees for the swaps. Nowadays, the most common are concentrated liquidity pools, introduced in the Uniswap v3 protocol, in which your position is represented by an NFT. 

Farming

To maximize your return on liquidity providing you can deposit the token of your position into the yield protocols.

There are some examples:

• Defillama
• Yieldyak
• Rehold

Liquid farming

The Envelop Protocol offers Web3 projects the creation of liquid farming where not only multiple assets can be locked, but also multiple asset types (coins, fungible and non-fungible tokens). This is achieved  by creating a collateralized wrapped NFT containing not only tokens but also future returns.

You can't unwrap the NFT and get liquidity until the locktime expires, but you can sell or transfer it. This makes this type of farming liquid.

Incentivizing

Another way to increase the return on liquidity provided is to participate in incentive programs from protocols and networks. In this case, in addition to exchange commissions, you get additional rewards.

It is easy to track such programs via Merkl.

Lending

If the tokens earned are valuable to you and you don't want to sell them, you can borrow against them. You can use the lending protocols for both fungible and non-fungible tokens. The best known NFT lending protocols are BendDAO, Blend, Gondi.

The most advanced protocols, such as Parallel Finance, support as collateral not only NFT's bluechip collections but also Uniswap's liquidity positions.

Blue Chips hunting

The most expensive NFTs with large trading volumes have a large community and many integrations including lending protocols. But is there any way to get such NFTs cheaper? Yes, there is, and more than one.

1. Returnable NFTs. The BLASTR protocol involves locking ETH in the NFT contract for a certain amount of time at minting. After the locking period ends, these NFTs become effectively free, as you can get a full refund. Don't want to do that? Simply request a refund, the NFT will be burned and your ETH returned, making NFT ownership flexible and risk-free.
2. The eesee platform takes a lottery approach, where by owning one ticket at the lowest price you can get a whole NFT.
3. Buying NFT parts (fractions) on NFT DEXs, e.g. NFTx. By collecting all fractions you can unlock the original NFT.
4. Participate in liquidation auctions of lending protocols. The liquidation price is always lower than the floor price pledged by the NFT.

SAFT wNFT

SAFT is one use case of the Envelop protocol. 

SAFT wNFT stands for Safe Automated Future Tokens, Wrapped with Non Fungible Tokens;

The idea is to provide a collateralized derivative for funds with limited liquidity on one hand, and on the other hand to provide a fundraising tool for startups with cliff and vesting period customizations.

Here, just like in liquid farming, the project tokens are locked for the lock time inside wNFT and they cannot be sold and the price dropped, but the wNFT itself remains liquid. Trading such wNFTs forms a secondary market.

This is extremely important for the project, community and contributors.

Indices

In general, an index is a calculated indicator that characterizes the

change in a set of certain parameters. Using, for example, the Envelop protocol, you can create indices in many different forms.

In most cases, these are collateralized derivatives, i.e. derivatives that are backed by primary assets such as:

• native coins (ETH, MATIC, etc.),

• fungible tokens (ERC-20, BEP-20, etc.),

• non- fungible tokens (ERC-721, ERC-1155, etc.).

The collateralization of a trustless index is extremely important because in most of the world, crises in one way or another  are due to the fact that liquidity in derivatives markets is not collateralized and unverifiable.

Once you add the wNFT collateral inside, they become financial NFTs. 

Itэs impossible to know which asset may grow in the future, but by researching trends you can identify market sectors that are more likely to grow. You can form an index for tokens of any sector, for example, an index of NFT lending projects. You don’t know which of the projects will remain on the market in a few years and will be successful, but you realize that in general it’s a tool that the market needs. By creating an index of NFT lending projects you increase the probability of your earnings.

In addition, you can create indices of the whole market, not of specific market segments.

You can easily create a crypto index in Envelop dApp.

Arbitrage

Due to the fact that NFT 2.0 is a fairly new product on the market and contains many features, offers more options for arbitrage transactions, such as:

• Collateral arbitrage between exchanges and a wNFT that holds traded coins, tokens or NFTs. 

• Interest rate arbitrage between farming wNFTs, where you can trade wNFTs with different yield levels.

• Managing the floor price in wNFTs by changing the collateral level