Top Tips For Earning Crypto Revealed!

Dorothy Parker is said to have quipped that the two most beautiful words in the English language were ‘check enclosed.’ That’s a little 20th century in its sensibilities, so in the age of crypto we’d argue that ‘passive income’ makes for a good update. And who doesn’t love having their crypto earn more crypto?

Happily, there’s no shortage of ways in which to do this. That said, some are more straightforward than others and the crypto passive income space can be something of a minefield for the unwary.

So, in today’s video, we take you through the best and safest ways to put your crypto to work. From staking to DeFi to the products on offer from centralised exchanges, there’s something to suit everyone’s risk tolerance and level of experience. There is of course no substitute for keeping most of your stack securely stored on a hardware wallet, but there’s also no reason why some of it shouldn’t be put to work earning its keep.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

This week could be sunny with a chance of ETH. After all, it’s not a question of if, but when capital will start rotating out of BTC and into ETH. Remember that net flows for the spot Ethereum ETFs turned positive for the first time earlier this month. Even though these ETFs saw lots of outflows last week, nothing goes up in a straight line, especially not altcoins.

It’s not just the spot Ethereum ETFs either. The ETH/BTC pair recently hit its lowest point in almost four years - one of many brutal data points we’ve seen about Ethereum over the last twelve months. When you combine this with the incredibly bearish sentiment around ETH, it’s the perfect environment for a massive reversal. It’s possible last week’s ETH rally was just a glimpse of what’s coming next.

This begs the question of which cryptos could stand to benefit the most when capital starts rotating into Ethereum’s ecosystem, something which could happen as soon as this week. Believe it or not, but the answer could be memecoins, specifically cat memecoins. This is something we discussed at length in our video about cat memecoins being the next meta.  

The reason for this is twofold. First, most of the crypto market still consists of the same two cohorts: experienced retail investors, and crypto whales. This is ultimately why memecoins have gained so much traction, and why they will likely continue to be the focus for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, the theory of a ‘memecoin supercycle’ has become popular as a result.

Although a memecoin supercycle is unlikely, memecoins are likely to continue outperforming in the short term simply because that seems to be the first point of contact when capital rotates between crypto ecosystems. As such, the biggest beneficiaries of a rotation back into ETH will probably be memecoins on Ethereum. It’s possible PEPE is early evidence of exactly that.

This begs the bigger question of why this capital could find its way into cat coins. The short answer is because Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin is considered by many to be a cat person. This is just because he’s worn many cat-themed shirts and carried many cat-themed bags. It sounds stupid, but this is how memecoin apes think. Look no further than Cabal for evidence.

The silver lining to this kind of degeneracy is that it should result in more activity in Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem and pump the tokens of associated projects. At the same time, it will cause transaction fees on Ethereum to skyrocket, which will motivate users and memecoins to migrate to layer 2s. In turn, this could cause a surge in layer 2 activity which serves as the catalyst for layer 2 tokens to rally.

At some point, it's also likely that this capital will find its way into Ethereum’s NFTs. What’s interesting is that the floor for some of Ethereum’s blue-chip NFTs doubled shortly before ETH rallied. This could have been an early signal that crypto whales were getting ready to rotate out of BTC and into ETH. Consider that famous Bitcoin trader Bob Loukas recently announced a CryptoPunks buy.

The biggest question of all is what comes after the rotation into ETH and Ethereum’s ecosystem. The answer could be it’ll go back to Solana sometime early next year as the decision date for SOL’s spot ETF filings comes closer. After that, we could see rotation back into Aptos and Sui given that they’re the top competitors to Solana, just like we saw recently.

By that point, retail and institutional capital will be pouring into crypto, with other altcoin ecosystems like Cosmos coming back to life. Remember to always ask: what comes next?

🕹 YGG Play Summit 2024 🕹

This week, we had one of our researchers scout out GameFi alpha from the YGG Play Summit held in Manila, Philippines.

The event was a melting pot of all things web3 gaming. People from all over the world flew to Manila for a one-day conference and three-day game expo. Participants included gamers, founders, industry veterans and esports athletes.

The highlight of the event was the various esport tournaments with massive prize pools, the biggest of which was the $100,000 prize pool for the Parallel TCG game by Echelon Prime. Other games with smaller, but still considerable prize pools included Anichess, Arena of Faith and Indus Battle Royale.

Over the course of the conference, projects in the GameFi ecosystem made several announcements about their new partnerships and future plans. The most notable of these included event host Yield Guild Game’s (YGG) announcement about the upcoming launch of its Onchain Guilds platform on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer 2 network Base.

For context, YGG’s Onchain Guilds platform allows web3 gaming communities to build an onchain record of their gaming achievements. This is expected to play a huge role in helping the best or even newer teams get better opportunities, including early play testing, sponsorships, etc.

Another notable announcement was the upcoming launch of the Prime Chain by Parallel TCG creator Echelon Prime. The Prime Chain is reportedly being launched with the help of NPC Labs (the team behind B3 - a layer 3 built on top of Base). While the details about the launch remain unconfirmed, this is expected to boost the utility for the game studio’s native token $PRIME.

On that note, another GameFi infrastructure project Ronin officially confirmed that it will be transitioning its Ethereum layer 2 chain to a permissionless ecosystem starting Q1 2025. For context, every game currently on the Ronin network has been pre-approved by the Sky Mavis team prior to onboarding. However, once the chain becomes permissionless, game teams can start building on Ronin without the approval of Sky Mavis. This transition is expected to happen sometime in February 2025.

Finally, YGG also announced a partnership with the Philippines’s leading crypto exchange Coins.ph. Under the partnership, the entities plan to introduce a launchpool that will allow users to earn token rewards in exchange for depositing stablecoins and the YGG token on the exchange platform. The token rewards will be paid out in select new tokens from partnered projects in the YGG ecosystem. This new feature will launch on both Coins.ph (Philippines) and Coins.xyz (international platform).

Aside from the announcements, our researcher made four key observations about the current state of the web3 gaming industry while at the event.

The first is that the Philippines has managed to retain its reputation as the web3 gaming capital of the world. Notably, the country’s relatively low cost of living encouraged many Filipino youngsters to make a living playing play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity during the last crypto market cycle. While such earnings from web3 games have long since disappeared, the country has managed to retain a good portion of its web3 gamer base.

The only difference now is that most web3 gamers in the Philippines either play competitively as esport athletes for web3 games like Parallel, or are content creators helping push marketing efforts for partnered projects of larger guild organisations like YGG and YGG Pilipinas. Notably, this has changed the quality of life for many younger Filipinos.

The existence of better income opportunities provided by internet organisations like those in web3 have helped create a new category of Filipino workers who earn income paid in dollars from the comfort of home. Some have labelled this new lifestyle as the age of the ‘Metaverse Filipino Workers.’ Notably, this is a play on the name ‘Overseas Filipino Workers’ (OFW), which refers to Filipinos who’ve previously had to leave their home country and family to earn a better wage abroad.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Base is focusing on web3 gaming as its core strategy for onboarding users in the Philippines. This is part of the reason why they’ve onboarded YGG as a partner. We expect to hear more web3 gaming news coming out of Base in the near future.

Second, the web3 gaming industry is taking huge strides to look and feel like regular gaming. One of the overarching sentiments from project founders at the conference was that they wanted web3 gaming to be as normalised as web2 gaming. They preferred referring to themselves as ‘gaming’ projects instead of ‘web3’ gaming projects.

This stance has two sides to it. On one end of the spectrum, there seems to be an exhaustion these projects feel from ‘web3 gamers.’ One speaker at the conference, who was visibly frustrated, joked there were no ‘gamers’ but only ‘farmers’ in web3 - hinting at the trend of web3 gamers jumping from one game to the next with the goal of farming airdrops as efficiently as possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, web3 gaming projects are trying to bring web2 players into their games by replicating familiar experiences. These include projects trying to replicate what Steam and Epic Games have done for PC games. In fact, we saw three projects within this category - HyperPlay, Eragon and B3 (bsmnt.fun) - attend the conference.

Most of the projects within this category are building chain-agnostic marketplaces for web3 games. B3 (aka BSMNT) in particular claimed it offered better distribution for games on its platform by encouraging games to refer their player base to explore other games in the ecosystem through cleverly-aligned incentives. Essentially, any game on BSMNT that refers its players to another game earns royalties paid in B3 tokens from the other game. It calls this incentive program B3 Open Gaming.

Third, Telegram mini apps appear to be gaining some serious traction within the game developer community.

Almost every game that showcased at the expo this week had a Telegram mini-app version. Projects either went direct to Telegram or ported a version of their browser game there. Many of the founders our researcher spoke to during the conference acknowledged that Telegram mini-games were the best form of distribution for getting new users into their ecosystem/IP.

Games porting over to Telegram have realised that they have a reliable revenue stream from micro-transactions paid via Telegram Stars or TON. In fact, Mantle appears to be one of the Ethereum ecosystem chains especially bullish on the potential of Telegram mini games. Specifically, the Mantle team appears to have bet on Catizen as their main driving force in Telegram mini game adoption. They also claim 20+ Telegram games from the Mantle ecosystem will launch in the next few quarters.

Finally, conferences like the YGG Play Summit are an excellent indicator of what’s coming next. Among all the upcoming launches, there are two ecosystems that appear to hold the most promise: Avalanche and XAI.

In fact, a large portion of the games preparing to launch next year are building on Avalanche subnets, Off The Grid being the first major example. As for XAI, the ecosystem has been slow to launch. However, the primary reason for this appears to be regulatory due diligence. The team claimed they’re still working on settling everything down on the regulatory side in order to prepare for token launches and web3 game onboarding to the chain. That said, we spotted two major titles building on XAI at the conference. The first was Riftstorm, a roguelite similar to Hades. The second was Lost Glitches, a trading card game similar to Parallel. While both games aren’t live ‘on the blockchain’ just yet, they appeared to be extremely content with building on top of XAI.

Overall, the sentiment for web3 gaming appeared high. This is despite everyone seemingly being aware that the industry still has a long way to go to achieve legitimacy outside of web3-native gamers. But, to quote the words of a wise man, “Web3 Gaming is Inevitable."

🔥 Hot Deal Of The Week 🔥

Alt season could be upon us. That means now could be the time to start positioning your portfolio.

As such, you are going to want to make sure you are set up with a top notch exchange. Recently we noticed a few of our crypto scientists in the CoinBureau lab were trading on Toobit and that got us thinking that we should probably secure you guys an exclusive deal over there.

We’ve been able to get you a crazy welcome bonus up to $100K and a fee discount up to 50%! This is one of the craziest deals we’ve ever been able to secure for the Coin Bureau family.

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🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

* Dogecoin Update: History, ties to Elon Musk and potential for 2025!
* Gold Rally: What’s behind gold's recent price surge?
* AI Crypto Research: How to streamline with AI?
* Devcon Summary: Highlights and updates!
* BTC Price Prediction: How high will Bitcoin go?
 
🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* Toobit Review 2025: Complete Exchange Overview
* Centralized And Decentralized Crypto Exchanges Compared
* The Role Of Hashrate In Mining Performance
* Best Cloud-Based Crypto Mining Platforms Reviewed & Compared
* Understanding The Role Of Oracles In Decentralized Finance

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

As we prepare to cross the Rubicon (i.e., Bitcoin above $100k), let us take a moment to appreciate the journey we have been on. However, $100k is not the end of the journey, it’s just another milestone.

"Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star." - W. Clement Stone

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.