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DeFi vs. Mining vs. HODLing vs. NaaS

Nothing in this article is a financial advise. 

It’s good to know what options exist out there for when it comes to investing in crypto projects. The information below is true at the time of writing and publishing of the article. Please do your own research to revalidate what is being shared in this article.

Below, you’ll find a list of projects that I personally have invested in to explore so that I can share the insights on how these investments would have panned out had you invested in these projects. The investments were made for research and exploration purposes. 

As the founder of Openiun, I wanted to see if there was a way to incorporate crypto into our business model and reward our users. Hence most investments made below were for the purpose of generating passive income for the business and for our users.

DeFi

Most DeFi uses staking or locking in tokens for liquidity to obtain ROI. These are risky investments and therefore the returns can be extremely high or extremely low. 

Sphere Finance

Sphere Finance, or Sphere for short, is a DeFi project built on top of the Polygon Network. They offer a range of services, QLaaS (Quantum Liquidity as a Service) being one of the most popular ones at the moment. 

The team is able to generate roughly 2% ROI on a daily basis, while setting the expectation that the ROI % will decline over time as the project attracts more investment.

The rewards are in Sphere token and are auto-compounded for even higher ROI. There is a buy tax, a sale tax and a transfer tax to introduce burning of the Sphere token, which makes the token deflationary. 

The price of the Sphere token has continued to trend alongside the overall state of the crypto market.  

Titano Finance

Titano is one of the OG projects in the space, built on the Binance Smart Chain and is very similar with Sphere, mentioned above. 

Titano also hands out about 2% ROI daily, which is auto-compounded for greater returns. 

Because I wanted to keep the investments diversified, I chose Titano for the visionary team behind the project and extremely open communication between the founders and the public. 

Olympus DAO

Olympus, another OG in the space, was one of the first DAOs to ever be formed. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that uses governance tokens to make decision making more decentralized while also offering a decent ROI for it’s investors by investing their capital to provide liquidity via staking. 

The price of Olympus, alongside many other DeFI and DAO projects, has fallen greatly. Not because the project or the concept had flaws, but rather due to faulty actors in the DeFi space. Since a few bad events, most team members are now working on regaining the trust by increasing the incentives offered to their investors. 

Olympus, at the time of writing, is on the Ethereum Main Network, which means a lot of projects that use ETH utilize this DAO for their ROIs. 

Mining

Buying crypto-currency miners are a great way to diversify passive income techniques as they often require very little technical knowledge and have an easy setup. 

Dogecoin and Litecoin Miners

A basic miner costs about $700 US dollars and are most often plug-and-play type devices that start earning you cryptocurrency instantly. 

The ROI is usually slow but steady and less volatile as mining has been around for many years now. Mining usually has a bad reputation for the electricity usage however there are energy efficient miners out there. 

You can easily earn Dogecoin and Litecoin simultaneously. In order to increase your payouts, you can get multiple machines as they will generate more tokens and help meet the payout threshold faster.

Helium Miner

Helium miners provide coverage to the area you place them in and earn HNT token as a reward for doing so. The price of HNT has seen a massive decline from $50 to nearly $10. The network has gone through a lot of changes and has upset a lot of miners. 

However, HNT is on a trajectory to continue growing and has over 800,000 miners around the world. This means that Helium is here to stay. The helium team has many professionals and have kept the communication clear with its users from day 1. 

Depending on your location, you can earn from anywhere of 1 HNT to 0.01 HNT a day. A variety of factors can change your earnings. I recommend doing additional research if you are considering an HNT miner.

Deeper Network Miner

Deeper Network sells devices that act has a machine that can protect your internet activity by providing you with a VPN network. Similarly, the platform rewards you with DPN tokens for allowing your device to become a gateway for other people around the world. 

Deeper is one of the first peer to peer VPN network. You can earn DPN tokens by staking as well, but the user must have a device plugged in, in order to continue earning staking rewards.

MXC Match X Miner

Match X MXC Miner is one of my favorite miners. It uses extremely low electricity and generates about $10 worth of MXC tokens every day. There are other factors that can change your earnings.

MXC token is listed on very few exchanges and therefore has potential for a price uptick for when it is listed. 

I see MXC mining as early days of Helium Mining. It’s never a bad idea to also invest in a competitor company to diversify your investment. 

MXC miners are more expensive than any of the options listed on this article, however, they have been a very reliable company from the start, which makes up for the risk aspect of this investment. 

The 100% ROI is about 300-350 days, assuming that price remains the same. 

Planet Watch Sensor

It’s hard to call these miners. These sensors are aggregating data from your personal home and then selling that data for the PLANETS token to the Planet Watch company. 

You are additionally rewarded by being given the opportunity to stake your tokens for Algorand. This project is built on the Algorand network and is extremely environmentally friendly. 

PLANETS token has seen a massive decline due to some challenges with the Awair Element team as they had provided majority of the sensors. 

There is a lot of potential here as the founder is very communicative of the challenges him and the project face. The community is very strong and that plays a huge role in the success of this project. 

ROI is usually less than 1 year. However, the project is in it’s early days and the time to break even can vary based on decisions being made by the team. 

HODLing

You can buy and HODL (hold) these currencies and get paid for just simply holding onto them. 

Ethereum

Ethereum is transitioning to Ethereum 2.0, which relies on proof of stake. Therefore, users who hold ethereum coins will automatically be given interest in their holdings. The APY or API will vary depending on a variety of factors. 

Not a bad idea to earn interest if you are going to buy the coin anyways. The APY has changed a few times since my initial investment. 

Algorand

Algorand is a cryptocurrency that Ethereum is aiming to be. The team does not do a lot of marketing, which I think is the reason for it’s price today. Algorand also gives out interest by using the Algo tokens in their proof of stake mechanism. 

Cosmos

Cosmos is not really an ethereum competitor and therefore more of a middle man for future crypto projects. They too give our interest on holding their token. 

*All the 3 coins mentioned above tend to give out an APY of about 5% or less. 

Nodes as a Service (Naas)

StrongBlock

StrongBlock has seen a lot of price action. StrongBlock offers a variety of different types of node setup options, and are considered the OG in the Nodes as a service space. 

StrongBlock team decided to move off of the Ethereum network due to high gas prices, and since then have lost a lot in it’s token price due to extremely poor communication. Their community is extremely strong and avery hopeful that the founding team will do the right thing and just require time. 

There is a maintenance fee of about $15 per month per node. This continues to provide the team with more capital, which they can use to further advance the StrongBlock chain and may even potentially outperform Ethereum and it’s competitors strictly on the foundation of securing a monthly investment from their investors. 

Tavern Games

Tavern Games is an NFT game that is NOT a Node, but your NFT behaves like one. Each NFT generates the MEAD token, which has a USD value associated with it. The MEAD token currently has in-game utility. 

The game mechanics can be found on their website, and if played well, can provide ROI in less than 60 days. 

The best part about Tavern Games is that there is no monthly maintenance fee. In my eyes, this is the projects strong value proposition. 

Pirate Nodes

If Tavern Games and StrongBlock had a baby, I would call it Pirate Nodes. You buy an NFT, which gives you more NFTs, which behave just like Nodes and get you ROI in form of the $DOUB token. 

There is a monthly maintenance fee associated with the NFTs. The project has yet to launch and it is in it’s infancy days at the moment. 

It’s important to realize that these are mostly degen plays. Here at Openiun, we make the investment in these projects to further explore utility opportunities. As a result, our investment can increase, decrease, or stay the same. 

We are not affiliated with any of the projects at the time of writing this article with the exception of Match X MXC mIner. I hope you enjoyed this article. If interested for more content on how these investments are panning out, follow me on openiun.com/app @doctrq. 

What do you think?

Written by Openiun