Every way to passively generate free crypto, rated

In an effort to maximise my passive income, I've hunted for every way I can generate free crypto. I'm not including staking, lending, or liquidity provision, nor am I including mining, even though I do all of those.

Brave Browser + Basic Attention Token (8/10)

This is the way most of you are probably familiar with. Based on Chromium, it integrates an ad-block, with an option to earn BAT for seeing some adverts in new tabs.

I'm a BAT mega-bull, as completely flips the online advertising paradigm on its head, but using the Brave Browser is not going to make you rich. On a good month, I might get 5 BAT, on a bad one, I might get 0.1. It all depends on what campaigns are running in my country at the time.

That said, the Brave Browser is simply better than Chrome in every way. Faster, less bandwidth hungry, less memory hungry, and better privacy. The fact that it then pays me a little bit each month is a bonus, so although it's not a great way to generate a lot of free crypto, the fact that instead of requiring extra effort, it actively makes my life easier, wins it points.

Presearch - Crypto Powered Search Engine (9/10)

Presearch is a search engine that pays you in Presearch token for using it. This token is used to display adverts to Presearch users. And actually...it's a pretty good search engine. Not as good as Google, but better than DuckDuckGo, Brave, or any other privacy centred search engine I've come across.

You get ~0.1 PRE per search, up to 30 searches (so 3 PRE, or $1.2 at current price) per day. Again, not making bank here, but as a remote IT worker, I know I do more than 30 a day, so that's an easy $400+ a year, without significantly changing my habits.

Honeygain - Sell Your Spare Bandwidth. (4/10)

Honeygain uses your spare bandwidth to conduct searches for companies. Yeah, doesn't entirely add up to me either. I leave it on in the background and do the raffle every day.

These guys used to pay me quite a bit, relatively speaking. I've earned about $70 this year so far in Bitcoin with them, not accounting for price variation, but their payments have dropped in the last couple of months. This gets a lower ranking because I'm not sure how much I trust them.

They offer both USD payments via Paypal and Bitcoin.

StormX - Online Shopping Cashback(5/10)

Crypto cashback from online shopping, what's not to love? Well, I've found the selection of offers limited and the app/extension buggy. Worth having and checking if making big purchases, but not a big moneyspinner tbh. I have not had much success with StormX extension, and it's a bit of a pain using a separate app for shopping.

Crypto.com - 1% Cashback Card (7/10)

So I liked the first card so much that I've actually staked for both the Ruby (2%+Spotify) and then the Jade (3%+Spotify+Netflix) cards, but for this, I'm just counting the intro card, that doesn't require any stake.

1% cashback is significantly less than the 4% in XLM you can get with the Coinbase card in the US, but that's not available in the UK. There are other, less well-known ones, but I'm not reviewing those.

1% cashback is what you'd get with a top Amex in the UK (note the CRO card is a prepaid debit card, not a credit card, so you need to top it up). I found the whole process super simple, and the whole Crypto.com ecosystem is frankly, fantastic, with the App, Earn, Exchange, and Card features all being near seamless. I can feelessly turn my cashback into GBP stablecoins, then earn 6% on them in the ern feature, without sending them anywhere, and Crypto.com has the most responsive Customer Support out of any crypto app/website I've ever used. I would recommend this card to anyone.

However, it loses points because of the £50**(!)** fee for getting an upgraded card issued, and they obfuscate the fact you can get the rewards without getting a new card by just upgrading your stake.

Mysterium Node - Decentralised VPN (3/10)

Mysterium Network is a decentralised VPN, which anyone can run a node on. On windows, it was a pain to get running, having to enable virtualisation and run it through docker, and there are risks in running a VPN node, as you don't know what traffic is being routed through your computer. There is an option to only allow Mysterium vetted partners.

The pay is low (I've made ~$0.2 in the past week), and even if it, as a micro-cap, goes 10* or 20*, it's just not enough at the moment. I run it anyway, because my computer is on and mining 24/7 anyway.

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So clearly, you're not going to be able to live off of these, but for relatively little effort, the return is okay. If there's any I've missed, please comment and let me know, so I can start doing them as well!