If you are wondering how to make money with cryptocurrency, look no further!  Strategies for making money with crypto rely on three mechanisms: 

• Firstly, you can invest or trade in the crypto exchange market. You can do this without owning any crypto yourself, like investing in gold on the stock market.
• Secondly, you can use the coin you already own to stake and lend coins to the system or other users.
• Thirdly, you can participate in the blockchain system by mining or receiving coin rewards for work done in the system. 

Based on these three mechanisms, here are the six strategies for making money with cryptocurrency:

• Investing
• Trading
• Staking and Lending
• Crypto Social Media
• Mining
• Airdrops and Forks

Each of these strategies is explored in more detail below.

1. Investing

Investing is the long-term strategy of buying and holding crypto assets for some time. Crypto assets are generally well suited to a buy-and-hold strategy. They are extremely volatile in the short term but have tremendous long-term potential for growth.

The investing strategy requires you to identify more stable assets that will be around for the long term. Assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have been known to show a long-term price increase and can be considered a safe investment in this regard.

2. Trading

While investing is a long-term endeavor based on the buy-and-hold strategy, trading is meant to exploit short-term opportunities.

The crypto market is volatile. This means the prices of assets can increase and decrease in price dramatically over the short term. 

To be a successful trader, you need to have the proper analytical and technical skills. You’ll need to analyze market charts on the performance of the listed assets so that you can make accurate predictions about price increases and decreases. 

When trading, you can either take a long or short position, depending on whether you expect the price of an asset to rise or fall. This means you can make a profit regardless of whether the crypto market is bullish or bearish.

To learn more about trading crypto, check our guide to day trading crypto.

3. Staking and Lending

Staking is a way of validating crypto transactions. If you are staking, you own coins but you don’t spend them. Instead, you lock the coins in a cryptocurrency wallet. A Proof of Stake network then uses your coins to validate transactions. You receive rewards for doing so. In essence, you are lending coins to the network. This allows the network to maintain its security and verify transactions. The reward you receive is similar to the interest a bank would pay you for a credit balance.

The Proof of Stake algorithm chooses transaction validators based on the number of coins you have committed to stake. This makes it’s much more energy-efficient than crypto mining and does not require you to own expensive hardware. 

You can also choose to lend coins to other investors and generate interest on that loan. Many platforms facilitate crypto lending.

To learn more about lending crypto, check our guide to lending crypto.

4. Crypto Social Media

Multiple blockchain-based social media platforms will reward you for creating and curating content. You are often rewarded with the native coin of the platform.

5. Mining

Cryptocurrency mining is how to make money with cryptocurrency like the original pioneers. Mining is still a crucial component of the Proof of Work mechanism. It is where the value of a cryptocurrency is generated.

If you mine a cryptocurrency, you are rewarded with new coins. To mine, you need technical expertise and upfront investment in specialized hardware.

Running a master node as a subset of mining. It requires expertise and significant upfront and ongoing investment.

6. Airdrops and Forks

Airdrops and free tokens are distributed to generate awareness. An exchange might do an airdrop to create a large user base for a project. Being part of an airdrop can get you a free coin that you can then use to buy things or to invest or trade.

A blockchain forks because of changes or upgrades in a protocol that create new coins. If you hold coins on the original chain, you will typically get free tokens on the new network. This means you get a free coin because you were in the right place at the right time.