Adding some extra coins to a personal cryptocurrency portfolio is in everyone’s dream. Moreover, it is possible without buying any.
With Ethereum being back on track and trending due to the rallies of decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency might look quite an option to have. Moreover, you may increase your digital wallet with free Ethereum, as there are more than a few legit ways to get extra coins. In this article, you will find the most common options that include:
- Ethereum faucets
- Ethereum airdrops and giveaways
- Surveys, games & videos
- Freelance ETH jobs
- Trading
- Mining
1. Ethereum faucets
One of the common ways to obtain some Ethereum is to get them as a reward. There is a demand across the markets for fulfilling various technical tasks, that can be rewarded. This is where Ethereum faucets, the reward systems for fulfilling tasks, come into the light.
Basically Ethereum faucets are various websites or applications, that give you a very simple task to solve. The task might include watching an ad or solving captchas, which means simply clicking on a button to prove that you are human. That’s all. You get free Ethereum for that. The only thing you need to have is a valid Ethereum wallet address.
Sponsored
What’s the point of giving away coins for doing almost nothing, you may ask. The idea here is that these websites seek to increase their traffic to gain better positions and better prices for advertising. They reward you with the small amounts but get paid by advertisers as well. Most of these sites allow participation only if your Adblock is disabled. Thus be prepared for lots of ads to pop-up.
Here are a few examples of faucets to get free Ethereum:
You should keep in mind though, that the rewards for simple tasks are minuscule. The common bounty might come in smaller than decimals (e.g. 0.00000012 ETH). Moreover, you will have to obtain a certain amount of ETH to withdraw to your wallet.
2. Ethereum airdrops and giveaways
Companies do promotional stuff. They also reward their active community members. Becoming one of them might also be a good way to earn extra free Ethereum coins via airdrops or.
Sponsored
Airdrops or simply giveaways are the legit marketing tools, commonly used by various blockchain projects. The idea behind them is simple: they are new, they need awareness and have free tokens to give away for their users as a part of self-promotion. They are ready to grant their community for simple tasks like following them on social media, commenting for simply sharing their post.
The Ethereum here is the most popular platform that uses airdrops. This is due to the fact that the majority of tokens are ERC-20 standard, thus built on the Ethereum network. And although the network itself has never done airdrops and giveaways, there are other ERC-20 token giveaways. These tokens can be transferred to the Ethereum wallet and later on exchanged for Ethereum.
Here are a few examples of where you may find cryptocurrency airdrops:
Despite the fact that giveaways and airdrops are a legit marketing tool, it is also widely used by scammers. The fraudsters usually impersonate blockchain projects, cryptocurrency exchanges or even celebrities that are ready to grant their followers with tokens. However, they always ask for a certain amount of crypto to be transferred for them in order to participate in a giveaway. Scammers usually argue that such transfer is necessary to verify your wallet address. They also promise to return funds with a much higher amount of reward but, guess, never do so.
Thus our advice would be to stay critical and check the credibility of the source: who is offering free coins, why do they ask payments for things that are basically free? Be extra aware when someone asks for payment in order to give a free reward. Credible companies grant users without asking to pay for wallet address verification.
3. Surveys, games & videos
If you have free time and are open to answer questions and help companies with market research, taking surveys might be a good way to earn extra funds.
There are various websites that recruit new members from around the world to complete sponsor surveys, download and play games, watch the videos, or simply refer to a friend. Some of these sites offer payments in digital currencies. The ones that offer payments in Ethereum are:
The process of earning ETHs is quite simple if you are willing to start. All you need to do is to sign up to the website, choose among the tasks which one you would like to complete, earn points, convert them to Ethereum and withdraw the reward.
In addition to online surveys, such websites also offer rewards for watching videos and playing the games, downloading free applications or inviting friends to join various projects. And although payments for completing such tasks are usually small, adding them one to another may result in a nice amount of free Ethereum as a reward.
4. Freelance ETH jobs
Your skills and talents also might be used as a good means to earn Ethereum. Maybe you know how to code or could write a compelling copy for blockchain entrepreneurs or even Ethereum Foundation itself.
There are sites across the internet, where companies are looking to hire freelancers or even full-time employees paid in cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. Here are the most common ones, offering the biggest numbers of job offers:
The platforms of hiring for cryptocurrencies are relatively new compared to well-known freelance sites like Upwork or PeoplePerHour. On the other hand, this might be an advantage as the competition is accordingly lower there and thus gives you better chances to win a project.
5. Staking
Cryptocurrency staking is the hottest buzz word in the crypto industry this year. The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocols allow earning interest for locking your funds into a wallet on their platform. These protocols then borrow the locked funds from you and later return them together with interest, your reward for lending.
The rate of interest could come quite high on the DeFi lending protocols like Compound or Aave. This is why lending became a way to earn nice profits and brought another trendy name of “yield farming” to the market. The recent yield farming craze made total value locked (TVL) on decentralized finance skyrocket to all-time highs of $9.5 billion.
The most liquid protocols and the ones that process the biggest amount of value at the time of publishing are:
The majority of the protocols are based on the Ethereum network and allow trading their coins for Ethereum. Thus you may easily exchange your ETH to DeFi protocol’s tokens and then lock them up into a wallet for staking. The interests you get later can be easily exchanged back into ETHs generating you some free Ethereum coins.
6. Trading
If you know how to read technical charts, trading Ethereum is a very real way to earn from its price fluctuations. Trading though is a risky activity, requiring knowledge and strategy. Despite that, it can also be highly profitable.
If you are determined to use trading on cryptocurrency exchanges for increasing your cryptocurrency portfolio, the first thing to decide is the timeframe on which you would like to trade. There are different types of traders depending on the time frame they use – day trader, swing trader, position trader, or scalper.
The strategies and tools they use differ from each other. Thus it is important to know what you want and determine your goals before diving deeper. You should evaluate your risk tolerance as well by deciding how much you may afford to lose and setting up your personal Stop Loss to feel comfortable.
In a further step evaluate which technical tools (EMA, MACD, Fibonacci) you would like to use to enter the position. There are plenty of tools and some depend on a specific trading timeframe.
Then choose the reputable, secure and liquid cryptocurrency exchange to trade your Ethereum. There are lots of trading platforms online from centralized ones like Coinbase, Bitfinex, Binance to fully decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges like Uniswap, Balancer or Curve Finance.
7. Mining
The last option in this list of how to get free Ethereum coins is to mine some. Mining the second-biggest digital currency is not a rocket since. If you have some knowledge or hardware, you may become an Ethereum miner.
There are several ways of mining the second-biggest digital currency: solo mining, mining in a pool cloud mining. All of them are legal ways to mine ETH and depend on your personal preferences.
Mining on your own (or on your own personal computer, to be precise) could be cost worthy and as the price of the energy used for mining could exceed the cost of the asset. However, in case of success, a solo miner does not need to share the block reward with others.
The most popular option of mining Ethereum is mining in a pool together with other miners. This means that miners join their hash power resources to increase the chances of confirming the Ethereum block and getting a reward. On the other hand, mining in a pool means that a reward will be split into equal parties among all the miners.
The third option, cloud mining, allows you to mine Ethereum coins by renting computing power from hosting companies that run Ethereum mining hardware. The option however requires thorough research first as lots of cloud mining services available online are usually scams.
Despite choosing a way of mining, you should also evaluate other factors like electricity cost, the mining pool fees, how powerful your hardware is, and even the price of Ethereum itself. Do your own calculation to make Ethereum mining a profitable process.
