I guess this is going to go through waves. I keep thinking that I'm fully invested in crypto and really need to get on to focusing on other things. Life is for living.
But you know, the entire industry just fascinates me!
It's like playing this insanely fun game with endless new passageways to discover leading to treasure stashes you can use to purchase real world prizes.
Did you get that clue in time? There for that airdrop?
Did you find the key and use it to unlock the correct keychain door?
Are you going to run out of power (mana) before you move up to the next level (orca)?
So yeah, my novels have been set aside for the last few days and I've been a bit obsessed with crypto again, particularly passive earning right now. That way I'll still be benefiting from the current obsession once I'm ready to take a break from being online again.
Current obsession? Dividend paying crypto investments.
In a previous post I listed lots of ways you can earn free crypto. If you haven't read that, do go back and make sure you've taken advantage of all that low hanging fruit.
The additional thing I'm doing now requires some investing. That's building up my stash of coins that can easily be staked in a wallet without having to run any special hardware, plus one that does in fact require running a node but provides the specialized hardware for you to buy. Here are my favorites among this category:
VeChain: I'd sum up VET as a tracking blockchain that works with RFID chips. They are being used to prevent counterfeiting, maintain car service/repair records, and in transportation logistics thus far, but the possibilities are pretty expansive. You earn their gas token, VHTHO, by simply keeping VET in their VeChain Thor mobile wallet. A ledger hardware device can be used to access the desktop app. Either way, by storing any amount of VET in the wallet you'll earn at a rate of 0.000432 VTHO per day. Since I think it's a really solid token selling for a great discount of a price given how many customers it has gained in the pilot phase without a commensurate price rise, it seems a win-win. If you want to go so far as locking up at least 600,000 VET indefinitely you can get a VeThor X Node (about $3,600 today) which will double your staking reward. The rewards go up from there along with the amount of VET you need to stake. Binance exchange also pays out VTHO staking rewards for its customers, but you really should use your own wallet to store your coins, especially if you're planning to keep them long enough for staking to pay off.
LOOM: This is an ERC20 token that provides a layer of interoperability for blockchain games. A developer can build a game that will run on both ETH and EOS, for example. You can stake any amount by simply 1) holding the coin in a wallet that can be accessed with a hardware wallet or Metamask; 2) follow the instructions in his article from their team. The staking reward will vary depending on how long you lock the coins up for. This chart should help:
Clearly the longer you stake for the higher the payout is. 20% annually is pretty good even for a masternode, only you don't have to run any hardware and there is no minimum number of coins you need to buy. Given this coin is going for about $0.045 (0.00000444 BTC) right now, this is an easy "dividend paying" investment to start with.
Algorand: This is honestly a project I don't know all that much about. I researched it at one point, then promptly forgot most of what I'd learned. Before I did though, I bought a small amount of the coin. I now stake it in a mobile wallet (which basically just means storing it in the wallet and earning more). They have wallets for both Android and iOS. You earn about 1 ALGO per year for every 10 ALGOs you own (10%). So if you buy 500 ALGOs, after a year you'll have about 550, except that it compounds in more like 20 minute cycles than annual cycles. I don't know of any exchanges that pay out this one. You really do need to move it to your own wallet. Also the desktop wallet for this is a set of sdk files, so if you aren't technical, just use the mobile wallet. Learn more in their FAQ here.
Here's what they say about themselves: "The Algorand Foundation is dedicated to fulfilling the global promise of blockchain technology by leveraging the Algorand protocol and open source software, which was initially designed by Silvio Micali and a team of leading scientists. With core beliefs in the establishment of an open, public and permissionless blockchain, the Algorand Foundation has a vision for an inclusive ecosystem that provides an opportunity for everyone to harness the potential of an equitable and truly borderless economy." They've got a pretty heavy hitter technical team, including a Turing Award winner from MIT who is a co-inventor of Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Learn more about the project on their website.
Helium: This is my favorite idea behind the coin of all four, though I care about what each of these projects is doing and want to see them all succeed. Helium offers a community operated wifi service that pays node operators (you and me) for providing connectivity. Known customers right now include a scooter rental company, a dog collar tracking company and another I forget. Basically it's tracking like VET but for everyday people, not big businesses. Right now solutions like this trying to work over cellular service is too expensive for these small businesses to get consumers to want their products. How much would you pay in monthly fees for the ability to locate your dog anywhere in your town with just your cell phone? Probably not as much as Sprint would require. But using Helium the cost drops to minor amounts. Those of us with nodes get paid pieces of those minor amounts, only by thousands and possibly some day even millions of people.
The only catch is that this one has a minimum investment to get started, because you have to buy the node from the company. This makes the barriers to entry lower for non-techies, since you get a node you can follow step-by-step instructions to use with your cell phone, but probably not so attractive to techies, who already have hardware they know how to use and would rather download free software they can easily adapt to. With this referral link you can at least get $50 off the device cost, but that will still put it at $450, perhaps more than you want to invest in any of these crypto projects.
Another issue with this node is that it is a local network and you get paid when people use it. That means that if you're in Austin, TX, USA you're probably making pretty good bank. That's the first city they roll out in. But if you're in Accra, Ghana you may be waiting a while for there to be enough other devices for local businesses to be able to offer services that use it. You only need about 50 devices to provide coverage for an entire city, but it will be a while before many cities have that many.
Steem Engine: Are you remembering to stake your various airdropped Steem Engine coins? I confess that I hadn't until today. Honestly I just didn't get the whole thing. I seemed to have been in my offline phase when all that was going on. Then all the sudden I followed some links from 
Well that's probably enough for one post. I'm continuing to sort through my favorite crypto projects for earning passive crypto returns after a modest initial investment. (Or larger if you want, I guess.) I love hearing your favorites too, so feel encouraged to share in the comments.
It's great to see the entire crypto universe maturing and offering more and more of the investment vehicles that the legacy financial system offers for that fake money.
