How I Earned $885 in Crypto Profits in Just 8 Days

Nearly $885 in profit in eight days. Can’t complain. So I won’t. 

In fact, I’ll crow a bit because my new crypto-earning strategy—NFT lending—is working out pretty darn well here in the midst of a sour market for crypto. 

And that’s probably the best place to start—the sour market.  

I’ll come back to NFT lending and that $855 in a moment because there’s a bigger story unfolding.  

You’d have to have been asleep for the entirety of 2022 so far to miss the fact that bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptos—as well as NFTs—are down significantly.  

Lots of people raced into the space as bitcoin and other cryptos hit record highs. Now that bitcoin has retreated—and has taken down just about every other crypto and NFT with it—many investors are jaundiced and have basically written off crypto as a scam or, at the very least, a stupid investment. 

Neither is true, of course. Crypto is the future of everything. Prices will rebound. 

And based on what I am seeing among my followers on Twitter and elsewhere, and based on crypto’s positive reaction to the Federal Reserve’s rate hike and post-hike press conference last week, I have a suspicion that we are close to the bottom. 

It’s always dangerous calling the bottom.  

The Fed could do something wildly unexpected, or the economy could report a huge inflationary surge, either of which would see investors flee crypto and stocks one again…and we’d go lower than the recent lows. 

I don’t see that happening at this moment, so I’m going to say we’ve seen the bottom in crypto prices. Not saying crypto shoots the moon next week, but I expect for the rest of the year, we’ll see crypto float higher. 

Which brings me back to that $885 profit and NFT lending… 

Just as a refresher, NFT lending marries the age-old business of running a pawnshop with the uber-modern age of blockchain technology. The premise is simple: NFT owners get the opportunity to raise temporary cash by borrowing against their non-fungible tokens, the one-of-a-kind crypto assets representing everything from digital art to digital ownership of a company.   

On the other side of that equation, people with spare crypto get the chance to serve as a lender. The borrower gains quick access to cash by putting up their NFT as collateral, and the lender gains access to nice rates of return on their idle cryptocurrency.  

I am on a mission: To use this opportunity to generate a large pile of crypto while prices are cheap.  

As prices rebound, the crypto I am earning from lending, or selling defaulted NFTs that land in my crypto-wallet, is going to rise markedly in value. Ultimately, I plan to use my crypto profits to buy a nice apartment in Europe. 

In most cases, the loans I’m making have been repaid early. 

Some, however, have defaulted. The borrower has simply walked away from the loan, leaving me holding the NFT on which I granted the loan. 

Frankly, I typically want this to happen. 

I’m strategically lending against a highly specific selection of NFTs, and I’m doing so because I know default is a real possibility and I want to end up owning what I consider high-quality NFT projects that I know I can turn around and sell at a profit. 

So far, I’ve experienced four defaults across 16 loans. One of those is still for sale, while the three others have sold on the secondary market for annualized returns of 410%, 98%, and 627%. 

That last number is my latest sale. It occurred on Sunday.  

Three days earlier, an NFT tied to a project called DeGods defaulted on a five-day loan of 230.5 Solana with an expected interest payment of 4.5 SOL. (Solana, or SOL, is the cryptocurrency these loans are priced in.) 

DeGods is one of the most respected projects on the Solana blockchain, so I knew I’d likely have no trouble selling it, if it defaulted. 

And, well, I didn’t have any trouble.  

It sold for 250.56 SOL after fees, meaning I walked away with 20.06 SOL. With SOL sitting at about $44 per token at that moment, my dollar profits were almost $885.  

I don’t, however, typically think in dollar terms when it comes to the SOL in my wallet. I’m more often thinking in Solana terms because my goal is to accumulate 1,000 SOL. Some of that will come from trading NFTs, but the bulk of it will likely result from the interest I’m earning and the profits I’m picking up from selling defaulted NFTs. 

To that end, my DeGods loan generated a SOL-on-SOL profit of 8.7% in just eight days, or 627% on an annualized basis.  

I immediately put those proceeds back into another DeGods loan: 211 SOL for 21 days with an expected return of 9 SOL. 

If that one defaults too…well, the proceeds from the sale could be substantial, given that the lowest-price DeGods is listed at 285 Solana, as I write this. 

Assuming all of my seven outstanding loans pay off as expected—meaning no early repayments and no defaults—my SOL balance will be just over 672…  

Well on my way toward that apartment somewhere.