Best Platforms To Kickstart Your Passive Income Journey

Secure Financial Independence With Crypto

Dear Reader👐

Things have changed so fast that you can now deposit crypto in an exchange and start earning interest or better still you can stake your coins in a wallet and generate rewards. Crypto has simply plugged the gap that was created by the traditional banking system and in doing so, revolutionized how people save and interact with their money.

Read & Share. Help others get unbanked.🙏

✳Staking vs A Crypto Savings Account

In crypto, the term “savings account” is used interchangeably with lending. This is because when you deposit coins in a platform, that platform will then loan out those assets to borrowers in order to generate interest. You’ll then get paid part of the interest, as profit.

Staking in particular, may interest retail investors who do not wish to participate in active trading. Staking allows a coin holder to receive passive income through a reward system.

When you run the numbers, you’ll find that staking has far better returns than a savings account on any given day.

The number of coins or tokens that you stake will affect the quantity of staking rewards.

Right now, you can get kick-ass rates above 20% when you stake crypto.

But if you want to secure future financial independence through crypto, you have to choose the right platform.

✳Understanding the risks

While staking and crypto savings accounts can generate profitable passive income, there are still risks.

For instance, staking requires you to operate your own wallet and there is no wallet that can make up for user error. You have to secure your PC properly, no matter the wallet you’re using and also secure your seed phrases and passwords.

So, take the time to get through the learning curve to avoid heartaches.

Additionally, fees and the minimum trade limits on some platforms can be ridiculously high and off-putting for beginners.

The next important thing to note is that Bitcoin staking isn’t really a thing. You’ll surely see DeFi yield farming options for BTC, but they all involve converting your BTC into an equivalent version on another blockchain (also called wrapped BTC), which is a taxable event, and carries risk of rug pulls, smart contract failures, etc.

Moving on, the platforms mentioned below that offer crypto savings accounts are licensed in the US, except Binance. This means they are well regulated, (Binance self regulates) and that alone reduces your risk immensely if you send your assets to these platforms.

The key takeaway here is that there are definite inherent risks and you shouldn’t put all of your assets in any one platform or even split up between several staking sites, but you probably shouldn’t exclude it entirely.

☑If you can find a balance you’re comfortable with, you’ll be fine.

☞We will discuss staking on third party wallets and also exchange staking, which is ultimately a good starting point for beginners.

✳What you should look out for

✅Reputation

✅Ease of staking/ Ease of operating a savings account

✅User experience

Platforms you should try out:💯

1️⃣ Binance Earn

Binance is still, by far, the most popular crypto platform in the world, so reputation is out of question. But keep in mind, Binance is an exchange. Exchanges want you to keep your coin on their platform. And, as the saying goes, not your keys, not your coins.

On the bright side though, Binance Earn offers a variety of good offers. It’s mostly useful if you want to keep your coins inside the exchange and have them available for trading when needed. If this is the case, you would opt for Flexible Savings, as you can take your coins out at any time.

If you plan to hold crypto for much longer (15–30–60 days), Binance Locked Staking would be your best bet. You will earn good interest. The downside is that many options are sold out or have a high minimum amount that you need to stake.

2️⃣Celsius Network

You can easily open a crypto savings account with Celsius. In other words, the Celsius Network is a cryptocurrency lender, which is how they generate interest.

Celsius requires you to first download their mobile app so as to create and verifty your account. You can then log in to their web interface with your credentials.

Once the account is ready and you’ve deposited funds to your Celsius wallet, interest starts accruing and compounding weekly (Annual Percentage Yield (APY) has been above 10% for stablecoins for a while). No further action is needed.

And if you have at least 5% of your assets in the native Celsius Token, you earn a bonus reward, that’s if you choose the reward to be paid in Celsius.

Earnings are calculated every Friday and paid out on every Monday.

Celsius has no limitations on withdrawing funds. But if the withdrawal exceeds $100k, it needs to be manually approved by Celsius and this takes a few days.

Other than that, you can withdraw for free.

Another thing is you can only have one approved withdrawal address per wallet at a time and it takes 24 hours to change the wallet address for security reasons and withdrawals are sometimes delayed.

In terms of security, you have the HODL mode that blocks any money going out of your wallet. In fact, you can set a secure address for each altcoin ( imagine that someone stole your wallet, they can only send money to the address you had set in HODL mode, and they can’t change that). Even so, you can send money from other wallets to your Celsius wallet, still in HODL mode.

3️⃣BlockFi

BlockFi does not offer staking, rather when you deposit your crypto with them, they loan it out to borrowers. In turn, you earn interest.

Great way to earn passive income on your crypto. BlockFi offers up to 6% APY on Bitcoin and up to 8.6% on stablecoins. Interest payments are paid out monthly.

Another cool thing is that BlockFi keeps your ETH unconverted and available for withdrawal. So, if you want to lend and still retain the ability to sell or move your ETH, BlockFi is your best shot.

✔Pros

Beginner friendly user interface.

Credible — Licensed in the US & backed by Gemini (Exchange).

No native token needed for higher rates.

No lock-up period (you can move your crypto anytime).

Available as a mobile app and web interface.

Interest payments can be set to another currency (for example interest on USDC can be paid in BTC).

One free withdrawal per month.

✖Cons

To earn higher rates on Bitcoin you must deposit up to 2.5 BTC.

BlockFi interest rates can be slightly lower than on other platforms.

Trading fees are high.

Expensive credit card.

4️⃣Nexo

Nexo secured a commercial lender’s license in the State of California in March (2021). If you are wondering why this is important, CA has some of the most onerous licensing requirements for commercial lending activities in the US. This alone should tell you Nexo won’t be going under anytime soon.

Nexo is actually great. It offers more of a “banking” structure that pays you interest for the coins that you hold in their wallet.

There are two ways to earn interest on your coins with Nexo.

Just leave them there & earn the minimum interest (this option has flexible terms and you can withdraw crypto any time).

Lock up your coins for recurring 30 day intervals (with this option, you will earn a higher interest on your coins).

✔ Pros

High interest rates.

Interest on fiat like EUR (which is great since there’s no EUR stablecoin).

Mobile app and web interface (modern and beginner friendly user experience).

✖Cons

Native tokens needed for higher rates (the amount scales up to 10% of holdings).

To access the highest rates, you have to accept payment in the native token.

Additionally, Nexo only has a few crypto tokens in their wallet.

5️⃣Exodus

The Exodus wallet is another great wallet where you could diversify your staked portfolio. It’s free and very popular among investors.

Here, you can stake a range of cryptos including Algorand (ALGO) Cardano (ADA), Neo (NEO), VeChain (VET), Ontology (ONT), Tezos (XTZ) and Cosmos (ATOM).

Exodus comes both as a mobile and desktop wallet. Such a cool feature, considering that you can have both fully synchronized.

✔ Pros

Supports many coins.

Exodus also makes it easy to swap one crypto for another within the wallet.

The UI design of the wallet is really nice on both mobile and desktop versions.

Dope customer support.

✖Cons

Fees and exchange rates are too high.

The minimum trade limits are ridiculously high.

Fees charged for the exchange/swap feature are usually not worth the convenience.

That’s all for now!

Disclosure

We only recommend products we use ourself and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy crypto assets, you will get a discount and we may earn a commission. Thanks.

Disclaimer

This post is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as financial advice. Any purchase of financial products should be done at your own discretion.