Crypto Passive Income: Staking, Grid Bots, DeFi and Referral Discounts

Proof-of-stake networks such as Ethereum and Solana pay rewards to people who lock up coins to help secure the network. Rewards are paid in the same coin, so a reward rate says nothing about what the coin will be worth in dollars: if the price falls further than the rewards add, you are still behind.

Many exchanges offer simpler earn products. They are convenient, but you are lending to the exchange, so its solvency and rules matter. Check whether funds are locked, how rewards are calculated, whether the rate is fixed or variable, and how to withdraw. Stablecoin products are not risk-free either: a stablecoin can lose its peg and the platform can fail.

A grid bot splits a price range into levels and places buy orders below the price and sell orders above it, trying to profit from the price moving back and forth. It works best in a sideways market. If the price leaves the range it can leave you holding a falling coin or sitting out of a rising one.

Bots make many small trades, so fees decide whether they pay. If a trade's profit is smaller than the fee, the bot is working for the exchange. Compare the maker and taker rates in our exchange fee comparison, and read how the strategy behaves in the grid trading guide.

Decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and Raydium use automated market makers, which need people to deposit pairs of tokens into liquidity pools. Providers earn a share of the trading fees on that pool. The main risks are impermanent loss (when the two tokens' prices diverge, you can end up with less value than if you had simply held them), smart-contract bugs and, in stablecoin pools, a depeg.

DeFi is self-custodial: there is no support desk to reverse a mistake. Start with an amount you can afford to lose and learn how the wallet and pool work before you add real money.

Two different things get lumped together here. A referral discount lowers your own trading costs where an exchange offers one to referred users; it saves money but does not earn any. An affiliate program pays the person who refers someone, and what it pays depends on whether the people they refer actually trade and on terms the exchange sets and can change. Many referrers earn little or nothing, so treat it as a possible side effect of writing or teaching about crypto, not as a plan.

Terms differ by exchange; see the guides for MEXC, Bybit, Bitget, OKX and KCEX.

• Rank the methods by what can go wrong, not by the headline rate.
• Never put in money you need, and never borrow to chase a yield.
• Keep fees in view: they quietly decide the outcome of anything that trades often.
• Spreading across methods reduces the damage of one failure, but it does not make the total safe.