Free crypto? Whether you believe that crypto is the future of finance or just one big Ponzi scheme, you’d be foolish to look a gift horse in the mouth. Here are 3 ways to get free crypto without spending a single penny.
Disclaimer:
I’ve said before that it’s probably best to be cautious about using crypto as part of a financial independence strategy. This article is more about freebies than about touting the benefits of crypto assets, and should be read with this in mind.
Get paid to learn with Coinmarketcap and Coinbase Earn
Coinmarketcap is a crypto information website that’s mainly used to look up statistics on the hundreds of crypto projects out there. Importantly for financial independence campaigners, it has a free crypto for answering some quizzes site. Coinbase has a “Coinbase Earn” programme that works the same way, but from the (reassuring?) position of being a US-regulated public company.
The general idea is that you register and pass Know Your Customer checks (which is a UK-mandated requirement – you didn’t have to do this until quite recently). You then watch a couple of videos of around 2-3 minutes and answer questions to check that you’ve watched the video. In exchange, you’re given a small amount of free crypto in that video.
How to earn free crypto from Coinbase Earn
- Register with Coinbase. This is the longest part of the process.
- Go go the “rewards” tab on the account dashboard.
- Coinbase will start to give you access to the free crypto videos. Sometimes there is a waiting time, usually if the freebies are popular and people get there first. I guess it takes time to add more tokens to the freebies pile?
- Watch the videos – answer the quizzes.
- Your account will be credited on the home page within a very short space of time, usually within 5 minutes.
You’ll probably earn an obscure token that’s new to market. Don’t worry about it – you can trade them on Coinbase itself for something you really want. Alternatively, hold on to it (hodl) and sell it later for free cash. I think I’ve earned around $40 from Coinbase in tokens that I later sold for about £150, so it’s worth the time.
How to earn free crypto from Coinmarketcap
- Register with Binance. Binance is an exchange for crypto located in China, but it owns Coinmarketcap and generally does good work in the crypto space. However, like anything based in China, use at your own risk.
- Go to coinmarketcap.com/earn.
- Select projects and watch the videos. NOTE: sometimes the videos are left up after the free crypto has stopped being given away. There will be a banner just below the headline image if this is the case!
- Answer the quizzes.
- Receive an amount of free crypto in your Binance account. This takes quite a bit longer than Coinbase. I think it took me 4 weeks to earn SAND when I did the Sandbox quiz earlier this year. Fortunately, I managed to get like $30 of SAND that doubled in value before I traded it. Woohoo!
Binance is a bit more of a complicated exchange to use than Coinbase. It’s one of the more popular exchanges, but you need to swap crypto tokens in matched pairs, working out the best combo to get from the token you have to a token you want. Still, better to learn with free crypto than to buy it and lose money, eh?
Install and use Brave web browser to get free crypto
Brave is a web browser that runs on the Chromium system, like Google Chrome. However, unlike Google Chrome, it’s quite fast and can either earn you money or block ads by default.
Brave has a built-in ad blocker and the incognito search equivalent on it uses the privacy search engine, Tor. I don’t feel the need to hide my tracks with Tor, but it’s nice to have anyway as an alternative to Google search (the default window search engine). It’s completely free to use and as a browser it’s incredibly fast.
There are two ways to use Brave:
- As a fast, ad-free browser with privacy built in.
- As a fast browser with privacy built-in, but receiving some discreet pop-up adverts that advertisers give you free crypto for receiving them.
I use the second option for both mobile and my laptop.
How to earn free crypto with Brave
Brave has its own crypto token, Basic Attention Token (BAT). When someone wants to advertise to Brave users, they have to buy BAT and pay their advertising fees in it. This gives BAT a real-world value. If they don’t play by Brave’s rules, their advert won’t appear to Brave users.
Brave gives you a percentage of the BAT paid in exchange for showing you the pop-up advert, which you then accumulate. You can set the frequency of the adverts to a degree, or decide not to receive any. This steadily builds up until you have about 25 BAT, when you can “verify” your wallet on the browser and send the BAT to an exchange to swap for other crypto or money.
Your browser can also send a tip in BAT to websites you’re reading that are verified by Brave – such as this one! This is enabled by default, but you can turn it off or configure it in the Brave menu. You can also make monthly contributions of your BAT to your favourite creators, essentially offering to replace their ad revenue – or you can remove all tips and keep the BAT. Your call.
How much do you actually earn from Brave?
Honestly: not a lot. £25 a year would be a reasonable estimate. That said, if Brave becomes hugely popular, more advertisers will flock to buy BAT to reach the otherwise protected audience, so BAT will grow in value. If that doesn’t happen, it’s at least something you earned without any real effort. Free crypto is free crypto, I’m not going to whinge that it’s a small amount.
When I say that ads are discreet, I mean that they appear in a smaller box on your screen than an e-mail notification. That’s it. No pictures, just a few words to state their pitch, with a big “dismiss” button. It’s just a small ribbon on mobile.
Brave does have some glitches. Accepting the BAT at the end of each month requires a simple verification puzzle of dragging the BAT shape to a target shape, but the puzzle often doesn’t work for the first dozen attempts. There have also been times when the wallet has stopped showing your balance. Despite all this, the browser side of the package is really good, and I’d be tempted to use it even without the BAT element anyway. It’s like Chrome on steroids.
Free crypto faucets
Everyone’s heard about Bitcoin by now, so don’t expect to find Bitcoin faucets anymore. However, back in the days when magic internet money didn’t feature in the popular media as a legitimate option, cryptocurrencies were limited by uptake. Unless people were willing to try them out, they weren’t going to catch on.
To solve this problem, a lot of crypto enthusiasts used to give out small amounts of free crypto for people who turned up to a website once a day and accepted it. This is called a crypto faucet in that, like a tap, it drips free crypto at a slow rate.
You can still find some of these crypto faucets around today. A lot of them have adverts on the site and the rewarding crypto is less than the revenue that the site gets from the ads, which is what incentivises the site owner. However, it’s free crypto, so it’s on my list.
The coolest faucet ever is Nanoquakejs.com, which lets you play Quake 3 in your internet browser and rewards you in the Nano cryptocurrency for doing so. Sadly, it was down at the time of writing. You can also visit earn-nano.com for other ways to get Nano for free, like by playing Just Cause 2 or turning up to a Nano faucet website every day and just putting in an appropriate crypto wallet address.
Unfortunately, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. There are quite a few scam crypto faucets out there that do nefarious things. If they ask for your personal details, just avoid them. There’s a good primer on faucets on Hackernoon.
Sweet! When can I buy that Lambo?!
You’re not going to earn enough through free quizzes, Brave adverts and obscure Nano faucets to ride the next crypto bull run to the moon. Sorry to ruin the illusion, it’s not going to happen. However, you’ll at least learn how the technology is going to make opportunities happen in the future, and you might make a few pennies to play with on the crypto exchanges to get a nice side pot together to add to your financial independence money later. You can have all of the excitement of being involved in crypto without risking a penny of your own money. Nice!
I have admitted on a couple of occasions to buying crypto. I’ve tried it for cryptocurrency interest and I’ve mentioned it in my 2021 financial independence campaign plan. Even then, I would still strongly counsel anyone interested in speculating on crypto assets to be cautious about relying on crypto for financial independence. At least if it’s free crypto, you won’t be disappointed if you enter the market at the wrong time.
