Easy Money: Ways to Get Free Crypto in 2023

To paraphrase the song by the famous rhythm and blues musician Barrett Strong, "The best things in life are free; But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees. Now give me crypto." It is always pleasant to get something for free, especially if this "something" is a promising digital asset that holds the potential to revolutionize the financial system as we know it.

Many people believe that in order to profit from Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, it is necessary to invest a certain amount of hard-earned cash and then follow the markets rigorously in hopes to catch the moment when the peak and scoop those lucrative profits. Little do they know that there are tons of ways to earn free cryptocurrencies without having to invest a dime. Certainly, these coins wouldn't be free per se, as most of the methods described in this article require some sort of non-monetary investment like time and effort, but if we take into consideration how much time people waste sitting in front of the TV while they could be making at least some money in crypto without doing any physical labor, it doesn't look like such a big ordeal.

In fact, the industry is now offering a much broader scope of possibilities to make sats or other coins without investing, compared to the times when crypto has just begun entering the mainstream. Let us be frank, none of the methods described below will make you stupendously rich, but all of them represent legitimate ways to make some coins that, in a few years, could be worth ten times or more than their current cost. So, even if you get $10 worth of free cryptocurrencies, this sum may well turn into $100 even by the end of this year, especially if we see the continuation of the bull market that has recently taken a hard blow from the bears.

In reality, you could make hundreds of dollars a month if you know where and how to lay hands on free cryptocurrencies. It might not sound much, but in five to ten years, these free coins might buy you a car or something even more expensive. Therefore, if you don't fancy trading and don't have any fiat to spare, but got a lot of free time on your hands, these are the ways to make some extra dough and possibly even learn more about digital money along the way. Some of them will bring you peanuts, while the others could become a decent addition to your budget or lay the first stone of your future crypto portfolio.      

Faucets

Faucets are probably the oldest and still one of the most popular ways to make free cryptocurrencies by completing simple tasks that even a monkey could do. Cryptocurrency faucets usually come in the form of mobile applications or websites that reward users with small amounts of crypto in exchange for doing primitive tasks like solving a captcha, taking a survey, viewing sponsored ads, or playing a browser game. The rewards are very small, usually a small fraction of a coin, but faucets are probably the best way for enthusiasts, who are only beginning their journey to crypto riches, to get acquainted with the concept and learn how to make transactions from a faucet to a digital wallet.

The first faucet was introduced back in 2010 by Gavin Andresen, an American software developer who stood at the roots of Bitcoin creation. His initial purpose was to raise awareness about the new form of digital money among potential users who felt cautious about devoting their capital to a new and sophisticated asset class. The first faucets rewarded registered users with satoshis, the fractions of Bitcoin, but over time, other popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), etc., have been added to the list.

It might sound unbelievable now, but the first faucet created by Andresen had been giving out up to 5 BTC for completing a series of captchas. Amazingly enough, some users had actually complained to Andresen that his faucet had been giving “only” 5 BTC a day. Little did they know…

Nowadays, the most generous faucet offers no more than 200 satoshis per task, so it would literally take an eternity to collect the whole Bitcoin on these websites. And it’s not about raising the awareness anymore, but rather allowing the website owner to make profits from ad placement, which he then shares with devoted captcha solvers. 

The main things that you need to consider when using a faucet are the claim amount, the timer (a time span that has to pass before you can make another claim), the minimum withdrawal amount and withdrawal methods, and the whether or not a faucet imposes an earnings cap. The last one is especially important because if you exceed this limit without knowing it, and thus become unable to take out the coins made through hard grinding, the frustration could become unbearable to the point that you might abandon the idea of making money with crypto altogether.

Obviously, using one faucet wouldn’t be enough to make enough money to buy a cup of coffee because the majority of these websites have the recent time of around an hour or more. That is why many people are running several faucets at the same time using special aggregators or by simply opening a lot of tabs with different faucets and reset times to be able to make as many sats or altcoins as humanly possible.

Beware that there are a lot of scammy faucets that won’t pay you a single sat for doing hours of task solving. That’s why we have compiled a shortlist of trustworthy platforms that will let you make small amounts of crypto for free.

The first one is Cointiply; this faucet emerged in 2018 and, over time, has grown into one of the most popular (and generous) crypto-rewarding websites. Here you can make some crypto by watching short video clips and ads, playing browser games, solving captchas, or viewing offer walls. Coiniply claims to have 1.7 million registered users who had already handed $1.2 million worth of digital coins. However, you can turn those minuscule amounts into something more meaningful by playing the multiplier that could beef up your holding up to 61 times. The faucet also features loyalty and reward points, offers up to 5% interest on one’s coin balance, and 25% for referrals.

Another one is called BonusBitcoin. Here the claim period is considerably smaller, only 15 minutes, though the rewards rarely exceed 24 satoshis per turn. Mind the fact that if you withdraw less than 50,000 satoshis, you would have to pay an additional withdrawal fee that could eat up a significant portion of earnings.

The third one is Moon Bitcoin, a real old-timer among cryptocurrency faucets since it was launched in 2015, at the very dawn of the crypto era. This faucet offers the smallest claim period of only 5 minutes, though the payout rarely exceeds 10 satoshis.    

Airdrop and bounty hunting campaigns

If you are too ambitious a crypto holder to be making a few hundred satoshis per hour, then you should consider other, more rewarding options like airdrop and bounty programs. Airdrops have nothing to do with military or parachuting; it’s the term that defines a marketing stunt organized by new blockchain projects to raise their popularity and build up a community on social media outlets like Twitter or Telegram.

In order to receive free coins to the designated cryptocurrency wallet, you would also have to perform a series of easy tasks, which usually involve some promotional services like retweeting a project’s announcement or joining the social media group of the corresponding crypto startup. The airdrops are usually organized before the initial coin offering (ICO) or exchange listing for the purpose of getting more people involved in holding or trading a given coin or token.

Please remember that a legitimate airdrop would never involve you buying any of the coins with your own money; otherwise, such a promotion can definitely be labeled as a dusting scam that could open up access to your digital wallet to hackers and other malicious actors, who track the transactional activity and often find ways to hack the wallet that received a small fraction of crypto (dust) from the website of their making. 

You must also be careful not to get involved with airdrops that promote pump-and-dump schemes. The coins distributed through such a scheme are usually pre-mined en masse, with a significant portion being held by the developers, who then bait the gullible investors with all kinds of sweet promises of rapid price appreciation as soon as the coin gets listed on a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Once the coin becomes tradable, they start doing wash trading, frequently trading coins back and forth between themselves in order to artificially inflate their price. In doing so, the scammers lure the unsuspecting (and greedy) investors through social media forums, offering them a way to make a quick buck on violent price fluctuations. And while pump-and-dump is the natural occurrence on the cryptocurrency market, the scammers usually begin actively shilling for a coin only when the price had already skyrocketed. Once the price reaches a certain point when they can cash out at a great profit, most of the coins get blatantly dumped onto the market, ultimately causing a cascading crash, after which the price rarely comes back to the previous levels while the defrauded investors are being hanged out to dry.

To avoid being scammed on an airdrop, always make sure to carry out sufficient research of the cryptocurrency and the team that stands behind it; and never try to chase the pumping markets, let alone dialing up the position with your own money in hopes of gigantic profits. More often than not, you would be left holding the bags of utterly useless coins.  

To find the trustworthy airdrops and bounty programs, we recommend using services like airdrops.io or coinmarketcap.com/airdrop that list dozens of projects that want to gain a better traction of their tokens or boost the trading activity by supplying free coins straight to users’ digital wallets, usually the ones that operate on the Ethereum network. The requirements differ from project to project: some of them give away tokens simply for registering on the respective platform and completing several social media tasks, while others demand that users stake the coins on a platform for a certain period of time - this applies mostly to the bounty hunting programs.

Truth be told, bounties that pay decent coin are much harder to find than airdrops, but we have discovered the aggregator called bounty0x.io that lists the most recent bounty hosts that are willing to shower you with coins for completing slightly more complicated social media tasks. Some projects are rewarding blockchain developers for giving their products a trial run and providing feedback regarding possible bugs or other network malfunctions - these are called bug reporting campaigns.

There are also content creation campaigns that require the participants to create quality written or visual content related to the coin, which then gets distributed across multiple social media outlets. Also, most bounties require users to perform KYC, which could be an issue for those who value the integrity of their personal data.

A legit airdrop or bounty is a win-win for both parties: the users get to lay their hands on potentially promising coins that could provide 10x or more gains at some point in the future, while the developers get a chance to establish a populated online community, the members of which would be either staking or trading the offered free cryptocurrencies.

While most airdrops provide for relatively small amounts of coins, the total value of which rarely exceeds $50 per drop, the crypto history knows the instances when the participants were given coins that experienced a significant price appreciation afterward. The most notable of them involved the decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, particularly those that fuel decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap or 1inch. Back in the day, Uniswap gave away 400 UNI tokens to anyone who traded on that platform (49 million UNI in total had been distributed during that campaign). Amazingly, the tokens were awarded even to those accounts that performed a single failed transaction. There were no additional tasks to be performed - all those who used the platform before the airdrop had 400 tokens allocated to their accounts. Given that the current price of UNI stands at around $20, while it was traded at $44 at the peak of the bullish cycle, each user could have cashed anywhere from $8,000 to $17,600, definitely way more than anyone could possibly earn even on hundreds of faucets.

At the tail end of 2020, 1inch had carried out an airdrop of its own; only this one had been done in two stages. The second stage saw 6 million 1INCH tokens distributed among the users of the said platform as well as traders on Uniswap. All that was needed for the tokens to land in the wallets was to perform at least four trades for a total profit of at least $20, which is a laughable sum even for a nascent cryptocurrency trader. The qualified addresses received a minimum of 600 1INCH tokens, while the average distributed amount was 1,629 tokens or $6,500 at the time of the airdrop. Certainly, these airdrops did require a small investment on the part of crypto users, but the resulting reward was so overwhelmingly large - literally dollars on the pennies - that they can be deemed as free money.

The takeaway from the story is that if you want to make really good money on airdrops, you ought to look for blockchain projects, preferably those that represent the DeFi sector, that have a working product and hadn’t distributed any tokens before the actual airdrop. In that case, these projects might follow the example of Uniswap and 1inch and drop a nice batch of tokens into your wallet, which might bring you a buttload of money out of thin air.           

Learn and earn free cryptocurrencies

The last two examples of free cryptocurrency distribution involved tasks that didn't offer their performers any benefits apart from the actual coins. But what if you could get paid for learning about the fundamentals of popular cryptocurrencies? Enter Coinbase, the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange platform that serves a huge user base in North America. The team behind that popular platform created a series of educational courses named Coinbase Earn that teach users about the essential features of different cryptocurrencies.

Each course consists of several videos that showcase the underlying technology of a specific coin, its use cases, and its fundamental advantages. Every lesson lasts for no longer than several minutes, upon which a "student" has to pass a small quiz test based on the presented learning material. For every successfully completed quiz, the system automatically allocates the set amount of coin straight to the exchange wallet. In our opinion, that is probably the best way to make free crypto because this initiative allows you to combine education with the pleasure of having free coins being dropped straight to your wallet without any meaningless registrations, reposts, and other social media tasks. You have to have a verified Coinbase account to be eligible for learning and earning, though, it would definitely involve KYC, but it's a little price to pay for a chance to gain better insight into the intricacies of each cryptocurrency and instantly get a small amount of it to trade or hold. 

Don't count on getting piles of money from those educational courses because, on average, they pay between $3 and $5 per course, so the overall amount earned would be barely higher than $20. But as the saying goes, "You don't look a gift horse in the mouth." Besides, knowing the fundamental advantages of each given coin, and having some trading skills, would allow you to flip those measly $20 into $40, and so on. Or you could invest this sum into some "moon rocket" that has the potential to make 10x or even 100x; we have seen that happening time and again on the cryptocurrency market.

At the moment, there are five courses available on Coinbase that pay actual money, namely BarnBridge (BOND), a coin behind the blockchain network that mitigates the risks associated with DeFi lending, which is a burning issue for this entire sector right now since none of the existing crypto lending platforms offer any comprehensible insurance policy, which puts one's investment at a greater risk. You can earn $3 worth of BOND tokens for learning about this fundamentally sound coin.

The second coin on the list is Amp (AMP) that backs the system that offers instant settlement assurances. The reward for passing the quiz about this coin is also $3 in AMP. The Graph (GRT) is another coin that could supplement your crypto purse with an additional $3. GRT represents a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from the blockchain, which also gives it a significant fundamental advantage. By the way, GRT is set to pump hard this week - in the last three days, it pumped more than 30%. Now it seems to be gearing up for the 70% - 100% bull run. It's not too late to grab and trade even a small amount of this cryptocurrency, which is presently priced at $0.72, after falling victim to a huge bullish explosion that lifted its price from $0.43. You can earn a bit more free crypto - $10 to be precise - if you are fond of Stellar Lumens (XLM), the coin that powers an effective blockchain-based remittance system.

Lastly, Coinbase offers you an opportunity to scoop the additional $9 for learning about Compound (COMP) - the coin that represents one of the largest DeFi lending protocols. Coincidentally, COMP has also been pumping harder than a rabbit's heart - in the past seven days, COMP saw its value appreciated by a whopping 92%, which is a miraculous result in the current market condition. If you had completed the course a week ago, you could now be a proud holder of around $16 worth of COMP. Sarcasm aside, it would have been a magnificent experience seeing the coin that you have just got absolutely for free exploding so vehemently to the upside, even if the trade brought you a negligible profit. Right now, Coinbase offers you a chance to scoop $28 worth of free coins that could be traded immediately on one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the industry, and become more crypto-savvy in the process.      

Gaming is no longer a profitless exercise in futility

Our readers who are aged over 30 must remember how parents had been nagging them for playing video games, calling it an exercise in futility or even worse. Now, gaming has transformed into a huge industry that is even considered a professional sport, alongside poker. And while professional teams and "athletes" are making piles of money on different international tournaments, casual gaming remains more of a recreational activity than a way to make some money. At least it was until recently when the concept of blockchain-based gaming emerged together with the associated gaming tokens that hold the promise of transforming the largely meaningless button slapping into a source of decent income, at least for those who have enough free time on their hands to devote it to different virtual worlds or whatnot.

The thing is that before the concept of blockchain gaming arrived on the scene, practically all virtual in-game items were worthless in the real world. One could have grinded for days to collect some rare item, only for it to lay around meaninglessly in the storage and traded at the local virtual market for another meaningless artifact. There was no way to make a dime from selling these possessions because of the absence of a solution that would allow for cross-platform exchange and trading. Not to mention that a player had no means to convert the amassed in-game currency into the real-world one or even digital money, not even for a fraction of its cost in the game.

But this situation has changed dramatically with the incorporation of blockchain into the world of gaming because this technology has opened up the window of opportunity for avid gamers to make some money by utilizing their skills.

Lately, we have seen the integration of crypto as a means for in-game payments, while the introduction of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) transformed the said in-game items into a unique type of assets that are provenly scarce and can be traded across different gaming platforms, even those that don't belong to a certain franchise. Besides, we have seen the development of a whole new class of games where data is stored solely on a blockchain while its items are valued in a specific token or cryptocurrency. The gaming industry has welcomed blockchain and all of the solutions it brought along with open arms because the majority of gamers actually appreciate the concept behind this revolutionary tech and are eager to put it to good use. Here is a concise list of games that you can play not only for fun but also for profit.

Town Star

This simulation game was developed by the Gala Games studio, the same one that gave the world the ultra-popular Farm Ville. Here you will get to build and improve your own settlement in the blockchain ecosystem while striving to make it into the list of the best 200 towns, the rank that is renewed each week. If you manage to achieve that goal, you would be rewarded with a certain amount of GALA tokens. Here you can also collect unique items and buildings that can be subsequently sold for real crypto at the local marketplace. For instance, you could sell a simple water tower for 0.042 ETH, which is approximately $100 in today's prices. You can also collect and sell rare skins that go for an even higher price: the Mirandus-themed collection of town skins is currently on sale for 0.106 ETH (around $250). Sell a few of those items a week, and you can make a pretty penny absolutely for free.   

Sorare Fantasy Football

With the Euro 2020 tournament being in full swing, we thought that it would be appropriate to include a blockchain-based fantasy football game in our list. Besides, this game has been acknowledged by the French National Football Federation who had struck a partnership deal with Sorare, under which the blockchain company will create a collection of unique NFTs that depict each footballer that plays for The Blues.

The platform has its proprietary marketplace where these collectibles digital cards are being sold on a daily basis, sometimes for hefty sums of money, especially if those cards belong to the Unique or Super Rare categories. For example, the unique card that depicts the French football star Kylian Mbappe had been auctioned out for $45,000. You won't get unique cards for free, of course, but the game offers ten free common cards for newly registered players that could also be flipped for some profit.  

The essence of the game is to assemble a team of five players (five cards); the rarer, the better. The team is awarded points on the basis of players' performance in real life, which are then translated to payouts in ETH.

Lost Relics

Lost Relics is a free-to-play action-adventure RPG created by Codebit Labs. Here you will get to roam around the virtual world called Talmuth and participate in thrilling quests, looking for precious relics that come in the form of non-fungible tokens. The game was created by Enjin, a blockchain project that produced a proprietary ecosystem of interconnected blockchain games, powered by Enjin Coin (ENJ), which now occupies the 72nd place in global cryptocurrency ranks, priced at $1.19, as of the time of writing.

The main objective of this game is to engage with different characters and monsters and get loot from them. Each virtual item in this game is a non-fungible token that can be sold for crypto at a marketplace called Royal Emporium. With some persistence and luck, you can lay your hands on super-rare NFTs that can be sold for thousands of dollars. The game also features regular airdrops, so you can still make some crypto. The team claims that there are over 10,000 monthly active players roaming the blockchain ecosystem, so you would definitely have someone to sell those NFTs to and earn that free cryptocurrency.