In our last guide, we looked at faucets as a means of claiming free cryptocurrency in return for watching adverts and completing surveys.
As we noted, faucets are fine for getting a feel for how crypto works, but are limited in terms of the amount you can claim. If you’re serious about acquiring cryptocurrency without risk, you’ll need to look to alternatives for earning that promise a greater payout.
One such option is through the earning and learning system popularised by Coinbase.com. This has the dual benefit of gifting you with cryptocurrency, while also increasing your knowledge of how it can be used.
Here’s how it works, and the steps you can take to maximise your earnings as you learn.
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Visit“Earn crypto while learning about crypto” is the simple slogan of the educational portal from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
In return for watching videos and taking quizzes on cryptocurrency projects whose tokens are listed on Coinbase, you can earn a small portion of that token.
For example, you can earn $6 of MKR tokens for learning about how Maker works, and an impressive $50 of XLM for learning about Stellar.
The table below shows that if you look at all the Learn and Earn courses Coinbase have ever supported and held on to the crypto rewards you have you would have made $460 as of January 18th 2022, with an aggregate price increase for all the coins rewarded of 58%.
Bear in mind that these figures will have come down since the All Time Highs hit by most cryptocurrencies in August 2021 but still show that with patience, you can earn significant sums of crypto over the long run just for learning about new projects.
| Crypto | Date Added | Reward ($) | Value At Launch | Value 18/01/2022 | Reward 01/07/21 | % Change | |
| BAT | 06/02/2019 | 10 | 0.1 | 0.98 | 98 | 880 | |
| ZEC | 15/02/2019 | 3 | 51.43 | 133.06 | 7.76 | 158.72 | |
| XLM | 26/03/2019 | 50 | 0.10 | 0.25 | 125 | 150 | |
| ZRX | 01/04/2019 | 3 | 0.34 | 0.71 | 6.26 | 109 | |
| DAI | 23/04/2019 | 20 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 20 | 0 | |
| EOS | 01/06/2019 | 50 | 7.85 | 2.80 | 17.83 | -64 | |
| XTZ | 06/11/2019 | 6 | 1.31 | 3.95 | 18.27 | 205 | |
| OXT | 18/12/2019 | 52 | 0.34 | 0.31 | 47.41 | -9 | |
| COMP | 23/07/2020 | 9 | 160.93 | 176.82 | 9.89 | 9.9 | |
| CELO | 3/09/2020 | 6 | 4.32 | 4.45 | 6.18 | 3 | |
| MKR | 01/10/2020 | 6 | 574.57 | 2,057 | 21.49 | 258 | |
| ALGO | 16/11/2020 | 6 | 0.27 | 1.32 | 29.33 | 389 | |
| BAND | 09/12/2020 | 3 | 6.65 | 5.10 | 2.30 | -23 | |
| GRT | 10/12/2020 | 3 | 0.27 | 0.53 | 5.89 | 96.30 | |
| FIL | 10/12/2020 | 6 | 30.70 | 60.37 | 11.80 | 96.7 | |
| NU | 21/01/2021 | 3 | 0.21 | 0.60 | 8.57 | 186 | |
| KNC | 27/07/2020 | 6 | 1.37 | 1.55 | 6.79 | 13 | |
| NMR | 26/02/2021 | 3 | 37.01 | 27.22 | 2.20 | -26 | |
| UMA | 26/03/2021 | 6 | 21.89 | 8.00 | 2.19 | -63 | |
| FORTH | 23/04/2021 | 3 | 39.41 | 7.13 | 0.54 | -82 | |
| SKL | 13/05/2021 | 3 | 0.47 | 0.15 | 0.96 | -68 | |
| MATIC | 19/05/2021 | 3 | 1.66 | 2.13 | 3.85 | -28.3 | |
| AMP | 11/06/2021 | 3 | 0.073 | 0.04 | 1.64 | -45 | |
| BOND | 28/06/2021 | 3 | 28.38 | 14.60 | 1.54 | -47 | |
| CLV | 16/07/2021 | 3 | 0.78 | 0.56 | 2.15 | -28 | |
| FET | 12/08/2021 | 3 | 0.49 | 0.45 | 2.76 | -8 | |
| RLY | 24/08/2021 | 3 | 0.58 | 0.33 | 1.71 | -43 | |
| BAL | 23/07/2021 | 3 | 18.65 | 15.57 | 2.50 | -17 | |
| MLN | 16/11/2021 | 3 | 116.62 | 73.7 | 1.90 | -37 | |
| Total | $291 | $459.59 | 58% |
Coinbase is a trusted and regulated US exchange now a publicly listed company, and thus the quality of the content on its educational portal is high. Unlike many of the bitcoin faucet sites on the web, Coinbase’s platform doesn’t feel spammy, and the information you will acquire through completing its educational primers is very useful.
Not only this, but because of Coinbase's influence, when it lists new coins it tends to have a very significant impact on their price, as a huge new audience are exposed to them, bringing volume. This has been estimated at an average of 91% increase in the price of newly listed coins over five days, according to Messari.
The relevance here is that Coinbase Earn and Learn campaigns go live in tandem with the coins being listed for trading.
As always, though, there’s a trade-off when it comes to claiming something for free on the web. In the case of Coinbase Earn, you are required to register an account and verify your identity. This means supplying a driving license, passport or national ID card
It is for you to decide whether that is a price worth paying just to get your hands on $100 or so of free cryptocurrency.
Because Coinbase has applied for an IPO, and operates in the US, whose cryptocurrency industry is tightly regulated, it is obliged to comply with all official requests for user data.
You might have heard about a controversial proposal by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposing that cryptocurrency wallets be linked to verified identities in the US. If this rule passes, it could mean that any cryptocurrency you withdraw from Coinbase Earn would have to be sent to a personal wallet that is linked with your Coinbase verified identity, which isn’t ideal from a privacy perspective.
This law may not pass, or may be watered so that it doesn’t cover low-value customer withdrawals, but it’s something you should be aware of. In the meantime, if you’re considering using Coinbase Earn, be mindful of the privacy trade-offs it carries, and may carry in the future.
The approach taken by Coinbase has been replicated with varying success. Coinmarketcap for example hastily put together a similar program, but the rewards were very small by comparison and the program poorly implemented.
Read our blog post for a full comparison of learn and earn models from Coinbase Earn and Coinmarketcap.
There’s another crypto-friendly company that allows you to earn cryptocurrency, and you may have heard of it: Brave, the web browser that has its own token called BAT.
Brave is part of the attention economy which describes people giving their time to engage with content that brands would like them to see. Short for Basic Attention Token, BAT is rewarded to users who provide advertisers with their time by watching ads.
You don’t get paid for watching an advert on YouTube or Facebook, but on Brave it’s different. As Brave explains, when you turn on Brave Rewards within the browser, you can earn “frequent flier-like tokens for viewing privacy-respecting ads. You can set the number of ads you see per hour.”
Watching ads isn’t most people’s idea of fun, and you’re not going to get rich off watching ads every hour. However, the Brave Rewards program is well designed and integrated into the web browser, and will help you learn about cryptocurrency wallets, and ways to use them, as you browse. The user experience is superior to that provided by bitcoin faucets that also force you to watch ads.
Because Brave has created an entire economy based around BAT, you can even use the token to reward your favourite live streamers or to tip content creators.
Even if you decide against watching ads to earn BAT, you should find from interacting with Brave, earning, spending, and receiving crypto using the built-in wallet, is a great way to increase your knowledge and appreciation for what crypto can do.
With average browsing time you can earn €10-20 a month, which you might spend on NFTs and could be worth a whole lot more further down the road.
Compared to Coinbase Earn, Brave Rewards requires less personal information to sign up and participate. Thus, it’s the better of the two options from a privacy perspective if you’d like to earn crypto but don’t want to disclose all of your precious personal details to do so.
In this article, we’ve looked at two easy ways of earning crypto that don’t involve faucets, forks or airdrops. Coinbase Earn and Brave Rewards are well designed products from well established companies that deeply understand crypto. Both products will help to increase your crypto knowledge, in addition to awarding free tokens:
Neither of these solutions is perfect from a user perspective though. Coinbase requires you to fully verify your identity, and have reduce the scope of their reward scheme. Brave Rewards, meanwhile, involves watching ads, and it will take a long time to earn a reasonable number of BAT.
In our next guide, we’ll look at ways you can earn more significant amounts of crypto, through participating in referral, bounty and affiliate schemes.