Passive income doesn’t exist, except….

Passive income doesn’t exist.

Well not really anyway. Depends on your definition, which we could debate forever. But regardless, some are definitely more passive than others.

Many confuse passive income with ‘delayed income’

Write a book

Start a dropshipping store

Create a course on Udemy

Start a blog

Develop an app

These are often examples of what people call ‘passive income’, but they require hours of work to hopefully get paid later. Many also need maintenance or upkeep; answering questions, updates, etc., which will take you further time

Examples of truer passive income streams are any types of earnings on assets, e.g.:

Interest on savings

Yield farming (DeFi or trad. markets)

Dividends

Rent on investment property

This is how I see the passive income narrative. In crypto, there are options out there to set income streams that are as passive as it can get. Here are mine:

Trading bots

Participating in investment groups

DeFi automated solutions

Options trading — this one is semi-passive

BOTS

There are different types of bots: grid bot offered for free by crypto exchanges, for example. But these are very high maintenance (readjusting needed several times a day, hardly passive) and results are very underwhelming according to the feedback I’ve read.

The bots I’m talking about are different. They cost a monthly subscription. In return, there is a team of strategists and developers behind your bots, working hard to maintain and improve them.

Afterall, the more the bots make money, the more they will sell subscriptions, so it’s a win-win dynamic. I explain how they work here.

In a nutshell: you set up your bot and step away. Hard to be more passive than that.

INVESTMENT GROUPS

These are DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisations) where people pool their money together to have access to solutions or instruments that a normal average retailer would not. These are the ones I’m invested and as you as guessed it, they are buy-and-forget, meaning you can invest and either participate in voting and discussions OR simply wait for profits to be airdropped to you.

Minetopia: a group of investors buy mining rigs to mine Proof-of-Work tokens like Litecoin and Ethereum Classic. Just like having a share in a startup, to get a part of this DAO, you need to buy its NFT. Profits are airdropped twice a month and it has started already. Check out their discord here.

WolferFinance is also a group of investors, but here they focus on softnode validators like AVAX and DAG, as well as daytrading.

Decentralized Foundation (DeFo): this one is a ‘relic’ from the infamous fakenode season of Q1–Q2 of 2022. The twist here is that they are using the fakenode narrative to increase their treasury, and eventually (probably soon) they will pivot into a sustainable profit sharing DAO, using DeFi and other investments.

SpaceDex (formely Wand Investment): the team is building an entire DeFi ecosystem including a DEX and trading bots, which is quite ambitious, but I won’t stop them of course. My main interest here is the dynamic of their Scepter token, which increases in price regardless of how much it is sold or bought. Crazy? Read a great explanation here.

DEFI

I like automation. That’s why I use autocompounders like Beefy Finance and Alpaca Finance. As the name suggests, they reinvest (compound) automatically the yield you are earning.

As for earning yield using a delta neutral strategy, it’s usually hard work because you need to calibrate and readjust your position constantly. Not anymore! Robo Vault has vaults that automate Delta Neutral positions.

OPTIONS

Selling (writing) options can be low (but never 0) risk. With these, you do have to follow up your expiry dates, which can be weeks later, so hardly any work really. Let’s call it set-and-come-back-at-expiry-date.

My go-to platforms are Lyra Finance and Synquote.

Voilà!

These are my plays with the lowest maintenance. I admit that it’s very tempting to look them up daily.

Fortunately, I’m leaving on a 2-month trip in a week, so I will truly experience the set-and-forget vibe. Hopefully I’ll come back to nice surprises, not empty bags!