For the last 6 years, all I've ever done was seek money! Hustle, hustle! What else can I do to make more money!
One of the first things I did was change degree, I was in veterinary medicine with 4 years still left to finish, and I didn't enjoy it. Not only that, but I knew that I was never going to have a good work/life balance with that degree, even worse I knew that it wasn't scalable.
Scalability is very important! Without scalability, your income will never scale.
With Veterinary Medicine the best I could do was own a clinic, and that would be an extremely risky bet, with high expenses and with extremely high rates of bankruptcy. My target customers would be the people close to the clinic with pets, so it was limited, and I could only see a limited number of clients per day. Everything would be limited... and because of this so would my wage be limited.
With Software Engineer I have a much easier to scale degree! I can build apps, I can build websites, I can build AI models, I can build SaaS (Software as a service), I can build so many things! My customers are limited to the population of the earth, yes, not everyone will want what I have to build, and so my target customers will probably diminish to people worldwide who want what I build, but still, it's not limited to the people in close proximity to a certain place!
Right now I work as an iOS developer and I'm doing my Master's degree at the same time, so I don't have that much time to build... but I will when I finish my Master's Degree.
But this was not the only thing I did to get more money...
The second thing was to start investing!
People severely underestimate the power of compound returns! On average the stock market goes up per year by around 6% (conservative), 6% might not seem much, you would need $100k just to get $6k per year, but see, here is the things that people don't understand, the following year it will be 6% on the $106k, which is $6360, $360 more than the previous year, and this is without adding anything to it!
Now let's go 10 years forward, I know, a lot of time, but things take time to build!
10 years, with just those $100k, would be $179k! And the portfolio would be growing $10.7k every year after, instead of $6k per year! $4k more than the first year!
Now, imagine that you would add $1k per month for those 10 years! Instead of $179k, the portfolio would be worth $337k! Almost 2x more than just adding the $100k.
And with these $337k, the portfolio would be growing $20.2k per year at 6%! $20k is a good salary in many countries!
Now... here is the thing, I didn't start in the stock market...
Instead of putting my wealth in the stock market, I decided to put it in crypto, this is because opportunities like this only come once in a lifetime! Crypto, just like AI currently is, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make generational money!
The start of a new financial system! A decentralized one, an economy for both friends and enemies, with no centralized control! The dream...
But I will have to say, lately, it has left me a little disappointed with the centralization that is happening all over the ecosystems. Just look at the Ethereum L2 or even Solana, it's becoming more and more centralized!
Hopefully, we can turn this centralization around and go back to trying to decentralize everything, or else, this whole thing will be for nothing.
With this said, I do plan to change my portfolio from crypto to the stock market in the future... Much safer and less volatile.
I've already started to reduce my risk by sticking with $BTC and $ETH mostly... Got a few other alts, like $BCB and $WOO, but I also plan to trade them for BTC and ETH later down the road.
The maximum risk I want to go in the future is staked $ETH, maybe, big maybe, staked $SOL, other than that, I consider it to risky.
A lot of people focus on the dollar values of alts, that's not the right way to do things, you see, what you want is not the dollar value to go up, it's for the alt to go up in sats! It doesn't make any sense to have an alt that doesn't go up in sats, because that's extra risk that you are incurring by having the altcoin when you could instead have $BTC which is less risky and get the same return.
I should have traded my $WOO and $BCB alts when the price pumped in sats, unfortunately, I married those two bags when I shouldn't have. The only reason to have some WOO is to have feeless trading with extreme liquidity, but I only need 1800 WOOs for that, not the absurd amount I have.
I do plan to trade most of my crypto portfolio for ETFs. Just like we are seeing now with the Bitcoin ETF, the crypto world and the stock world will touch and unite together, I expect to see cryptos that are used and that are big be added to big worldwide ETFs, like the SP500, in the future, and the companies over there to use and build in the decentralized financial system that is crypto. So, having the money in ETFs instead will probably be a long-term play on both worlds and will severely reduce the volatility and risk of my portfolio.
Investing is, after all, a game of risk management.
Another thing I did to get some money was start blogging. Now it hasn't done me that much money, honestly, especially when compared with my non-blogging portfolio... But every little helps.
When I started blogging on Steem, now called Hive, I wanted to make some money and cash out to BTC, this is because I saw no value in any of the things that were happening over here... And the HIVE chart in sats is honestly terrible.
Back then people were getting rewards from inflation, an inflationary supply with no limit, and the demand would come from where? Nobody could answer this simple question, it was all smoke and mirrors, "Oh it's because people want to have power in the blockchain", that doesn't mean anything... No actual big money would want to have power in an inflationary token with no real business model or revenue. "Oh it's because the content has value", again, no, the value is not being monetized, the value of content is views, and those views have to be monetized, without monetizing them the value is being wasted It's like opening up a hot dog stand and giving away free hot dogs and saying "You should invest in us because we have a lot of customers"... yeah right, and when will I make my money back if you are giving away your hot dogs for free?
Now things have changed a lot, for the better, with places like Inleo, we are seeing actual ad revenue coming in, with things like Splinterlands consuming resources, and this makes the token more interesting, and maybe a play on long-term blogging.
Basically I'm starting to see it as a potential play on me being a content creator and not an investor in it.
Another thing that I've done to get some extra money is start airdrop farming!
This all started in 2019 when Uniswap airdropped their token, I got it, and I sold it to buy a laptop that I needed to do my degree, but regardless... Ever since then, I've been farming airdrops as best as I could.
At first, I only spent my allowance, which was not much, so I almost didn't get any airdrops, I got the $ARB one, almost got the $OP one, still pissed about that one, and got a few Cosmos ones, which have been converted into $BTC and $ETH, got some $DERI from holding $WOO.
But now I've boosted this method.
Ever since I got a job I've boosted my monthly buys! And every time I buy, I also do a bunch of transactions to maybe get an airdrop in the future.
Right now I'm currently farming by doing transactions:
On ZkSync I mostly use SyncSwap and ZeroLend, this also has the added benefit that neither of these has their own token, so I might get an airdrop in the future from both of these.
I know for certain that ZeroLend will have an airdrop in the future, they already have the point system on their website and everything, you get points from depositing money in there. Works similiar to Aave.
SyncSwap I'm a Liquidity Provider (LP), but I honestly don't like the protocol much, they charged me a bunch in protocol fees (not gas) when I provided the Liquidity. They were lucky that I didn't know their fees were so high and that ZeroLend existed.
Base I've been using Zora and StargateFinance.
Zora actually mints NFTs on multiple layers if the person wants, which is great because you do transactions on all the layers! MultiFarming!
StargateFinance is a cross-chain, cross-layer swap protocol, it uses the LayerZero protocol, so, when I do a transaction on it, especially swaps, I'm farming both Base and LayerZero, which is great!
I try to do a couple of transactions in it every month, and I'm a Liquidity Provider in the Stargate protocol on the Base chain using $ETH. This also has the added benefit that by being a liquidity provider I'm getting free STG tokens, which I can swap to another chain, just to farm more transactions, and stake to earn **Stargate Finance **fees.
I know, it looks complex, but it's actually very easy for anyone that has been in crypto for a while and that actually tries! Because trying is half the battle in this cases.
I honestly don't know if Base will ever have a token, they might very well keep the sequencer centralized, with Coinbase running things, and getting the fees to the COIN shareholders. But I'll still try to farm it...
StarkNet I kinda of missed the opportunity, I first heard about StarkNet in 2020 (maybe 2019), but I didn't have much money, so I used the Argent Wallet very briefly and stopped after. They had the airdrop a few weeks ago, which mostly went to developers, and I got nothing ... They had some weird airdrop requirements, like holding 0.005ETH in the wallet at the time of the snapshot!
I'm still going to try to farm it though, going to use the wallet to hold staked ETH or be a liquidity provider in the ETH/stETH pair. They say they will airdrop again to users, let's wait and see...
But this is not the only thing I'm doing!
These are just the farming with transactions, but I'm also farming points!
For some reason, developers decided to implement a point system where farmers get points when using their protocols. These points are public, everyone can check them.
Currently, I'm farming points in:
I honestly don't know what some of these are, but since they are easy to farm I shut up and just do it.
Grass I started farming months ago. So far I've gotten 80k points! Which, according to WhalesMarket OTC point market is worth around $300. They are supposedly going to airdrop soon in Solana.
It's actually quite easy to farm, farmers just need to install a plugin in their browser that starts data-scrapping websites and users get points for doing that. It runs in the background and users don't even notice it.
Also, referrals give a bunch of points to the people who referred them and some extra points to the referred user. In case you want to join, use mine:
EtherFi and EigenLayer I farm together. Basically, EigenLayer is a restaking protocol that will allow further expansion of Ethereum by providing a Data Availability Layer... It sounds like Mandarin, but it's not, it's similar to Celestia, but on Ethereum.
To farm EigenLayer I use EtherFi, which stakes and restakes my ETH for me and I get EtherFi points at the same time as EigenLayer points, plus the staking yield.
The EigenLayer points I've farmed are worth around $350, and the EtherFi ones don't have enough volume for me to be sure of their worth.
In case you want to farm (You'll need ETH):
I've mentioned ZeroLend in the transaction farming part, I don't know the point's worth but I also got quite a few ZeroLend points just by providing liquidity to their lending protocol. I want to increase my exposure a little in the future to their protocol, the only reason why I haven't is because their gas fees estimation was bugged and they wanted me to pay $20 instead of cents. No way...
Referral for anyone that wants to start:
Link
Now the fun part...
**Block, Gmrx, Param, onunblocked **I farm together, I have no idea with the last three do or what they are, but they are easy to farm.
They basically give out points for every Tweet, every comment, like retweet on a post that has their name. I've even joined a group of circle-jerk farmers that go around posting about them and liking each other's comments, some of them even tag all 4 at the same time.
I haven't farmed them much, but since it is so easy to farm I just do it.
**Block **is probably the only one that I know a little because I've used their app. They are basically an app that gives game recommendations, if you install the game via them and actually play and reach some goals, you'll get points that will be converted to tokens later.
I've started playing WarPath, because of them, the game is fun to play but it's a lot Pay2Win, I'll soon stop playing once I reach level 21 Command Center and get the points. I could try to go for level 30, which is the last goal they have, but I think it becomes increasingly hard to get there without spending my own money, and they have a 1-month time limit to reach the goals.
Here are the referrals, in case you want to try them out:
Link
Use this code: YzCi5U5wL5
I also do 2 other things... I daily go to each projects discord and write "gm" in the gm channel, and I try to get the Discord roles that they are giving out. It's stupid but...
In the past both of these have translated into point multipliers, which boosted the final airdrop. ZeroLend for example is giving 10 points for each gm in their discord!
Look, I'll be honest, out of all of these, the only ones that are really worth it in my opinion are Grass, EigenLayer and ZeroLend, being that, Grass is the only free one to do, the other two require money to be put in...
This started out as me wanting people to start investing and ended up with me chilling my Referrals. Oh well...
Hopefully I brought a couple of potential airdrops and protocols to you attention.
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