How to Make Passive Income With Cryptocurrency: Yield Farming Guide

Crick passive income. So again, they always say in every gold rush who actually makes a lot of money is the pickaxe salesman. So I'm always on the lookout for okay, you can obviously you can buy you can make money in the crypto bull market by buying mean coins and watching them go up or watching them go to zero, whatever the case might be, but there's other ways to make money and to profit off of the bull market kind of being here. So this is my friend Aaron. I'll have him introduce himself here in a second. He is a brother in the Lord. We went to a theory of Denver together and he is a he is very very good at helping people walk through technical crypto things. Okay. So this is something I'm not as good at. I am more high level and I like to just kind of give you an overview and then it's like, okay, now you go figure out the details of how to do it. Aaron is different. So he is good at walking people step by step and he is here to give us a little bit of education. We're going to talk a little bit about his YouTube channel and then a training course that he has put together to help people make passive income using crypto. Let's go ahead. You'll have to forgive me too. I have really bad allergies. You can't see it, but I have like snot running down my face. The stream yard touch up kind of fixes it so you can't see it. But if you see me just you see my camera go off. I'm probably blowing my nose in some gross way. So let's go ahead. Let's start Aaron with introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself. This is your first time on my channel. So talk a little bit about yourself your story. How did you get to where you are here today? Well, thank you so much James again. Thank you so much for having me on the channel. I'm just honored to be here. It was great to hang out with you meet you in person at East Denver got to know you there and that's actually what inspired the course that we'll talk about, you know, at the middle to end of this video, but a little background on me actually I work for my church and so I'm a dual income guy. I love different multiple income streams. I've been in the crypto space for just over three years bought my first aetherium in late 2020 and then got into the YouTube game about three two and a half three years ago, and I just love educating people in this space because I love this space. I want to learn as much as possible and share my learning in the process. So that's why I'm here. My YouTube channel is all about walking people through what I'm learning what I've got going on right now. The narrative that's hot in my space at least is is airdrops. So there's a lot of airdrop farming tutorials right now in that space and in so I'm putting out videos like that, but I'm also really interested in DeFi yield farming making that passive income and I've transitioned myself into a place where I'm taking an income from the gains that I'm making in yield farming as of this month. Honestly, I've been a video production and marketing guy in the past. I do that for my church, but I really wanted to focus on my church church is growing like crazy. We're going into a new building. We just bought an AMC theater of all places and we're going to be moving into that. So I really wanted to focus on that and do the crypto thing continue to do the crypto thing. So those are my the two sides of my brain got the the the ministry side and the the technical in the video and the lighting in the sound and all that I do the production side of things over there. So my marketing as well, but then I love crypto. It's it's keeps me interested in the space. I love education. So I'm continuing to build on my channel and again, thank you so much for having me. I look forward to meeting your audience. Absolutely. So you can see why me and Aaron got along. So well, his two passions are crypto and Jesus and it's like, oh, that sounds familiar. So we connected right off the bat. We're going to talk a little bit about yield farming here today. So again, what one thing I want everyone to do right now, don't leave this this window, but go ahead open a new tab go to this link and subscribe to Aaron's YouTube channel. Okay, it's completely free. You don't lose any doesn't cost you anything to do that. So I will encourage everyone to stop what you're doing. Don't leave this video, but open a new tab and go subscribe to Aaron and Aaron. I'm going to let you talk for a little bit. My nose is going crazy. So I'm actually going to go off camera for just a minute, but go ahead and do your thing and we are in a bull market. People are looking to make money and I know that yield farming is something that you are very passionate about. So can you maybe start us out by talking about what is yield farming? I think there's plenty of people in the audience who've never even heard of that. So can you walk us through a little bit? What is yield farming? Yeah, absolutely. So if you think about yield farming in terms of financial instruments or just you know, if you if you have a bank account, right, you're making a little bit of interest maybe on your savings account yield farming is similar in the fact that you're making interest on the crypto that you have in your account. This is more commonly done on the Ethereum side in the EVM or Ethereum compatible chains in DeFi, but you can do a little bit that in a little bit of that in the Bitcoin space now, but I've been a big ETH guy and that's why I have that EVM in my in my crypt in my tag there all things EVM used to be all things ETH, but it's really expanded into all the different facets of the Ethereum world. But the basics of yield farming is just making gains on the coins that you already have the simplest way to do that. In fact, you don't even have to be on chain to do this. You can stake inside of some of the centralized exchange platforms out there just to make a little bit of yield, you know right now, I think it's at like three and a half percent on Ethereum. You can get like 5% on coinbase on your USDC. If you just want to stake that and hold that a lot of people don't think of USDC as a cryptocurrency because it's backed by the dollar, but it actually is something that's on chain and you can make yield on it. So that's technically yield farming, but I like to get into more advanced strategies because there's plenty of opportunity on chain where there's a farm right now that I'm making like one and a half percent per day and I go into that in the course. I actually reveal what farm that is in my course, but I just love I love figuring out how to make gains on top of what I do what the coins that I have primarily. I hold a theorem. This is my crypto strategy whether we're in the bull or in the bear market. I hold a theorem. I lend it to some platforms that I feel comfortable lending them to I'll borrow stable coins basically shorting the dollar and I'll yield our other. I'll either keep them in USDC to yield farm with those if I'm yield farming stables, which is more common during the bear market than it is during the bull market, but then I'll take you know, I'll buy something that's not USDC and go farm with that Arbitrum is a big one right now. I've got some great farms in the Arbitrum space. If you're familiar with you know, the different ecosystems on top of the Ethereum chain, but if you're just a basics getting into the basics guys, I highly recommend the course it gets you started from square zero. Like if you have a little bit of theorem on Coinbase, that's all you need to get started with this course and I teach you how to make a metamask wallet. I teach you how to move your coins off of you know, something like Coinbase onto your metamask wallet and then get get started inside of yield farming protocols. Okay, great a few questions. I have about yield farming. So first off, how much work is it is yield farming? Would you say and again? There's some people like myself who it's like, oh, I don't want to do work. I don't want to have to put in work, you know, I like passive income. So how much work is this to get set up? How much work is it ongoing? How would you kind of answer that? I think it depends on how complex you want to get as I mentioned with Coinbase. If you want to just stake your coins and get a little bit of yield there. If you're not expecting to, you know, take an income on this and just want nice passive yield, you know, three and a half percent five percent on USDC. These things are super simple to start up. But if you want to get on chain and actually take an income from these types of like if you're actually looking at this as an income stream, I spent, you know, depending on the complexity and the volatility in the market, you know, couple hours a week tops is what I really spend on on this specific thing. So I think it's pretty passive in relation to other income streams that I have personally. And that's why I like it so much because I've got my church. I got my kids got my wife got got, you know, teams that I interact with at the church amazing team of five that I love to work with but they take up a lot of my time and I want to make sure that I have the time for them and clear that brain space, you know, so these yield farming strategies really make that possible. Okay, and then when you thinking about returns, so you mentioned like you can do something very safe and simple like staking USDC on Coinbase, but you only get a five percent yearly return on that. Then you mentioned you can go on chain and do some crazier stuff where you're making, you know, one and a half percent a day type thing. Can you maybe talk about the difference in risk between those and how do you think through, you know, how much do you put in the safe USDC on Coinbase? How much do you put in something that's making 1.5% a day yield farming? How do you kind of think through those risks? Yeah, I personally have a pretty high risk tolerance. So I'm I don't have any of my coins just sitting there and Coinbase. In fact, I'm I'm I'm not total degen, but I believe that you know, this on chain defy is the future of finance and you know, a lot of people don't probably think that way yet, but I really think we're early in this space and I'm excited to be a part of it. So I'm I'm you know, you might be calling me a full degen, but I've got all of my assets on chain and making as much gains as possible because I do take a portion of it as income. So yes, it is risky. Yes, you have to be aware of all the risks. I go through a lot of the risks in the course from impermanent loss, which is it's a little bit deeper of a concept. So I'm not going to go into that specifically on this this episode, but you have smart contract risk. There's definitely risk of being rugged, but I go into all the the depth of detail and what to look for in in reputable pools. You want to make sure that you're getting into DeFi applications that have high total value locked or lots of assets are in there where people are, you know, it's an indication of how people how much people trust those applications. So I'm I'm searching for at least a million in TVL or total value locked in these protocols to make sure that I feel comfortable at least putting my assets in those those DeFi protocols. All right, and Dane has a name for you Duke of Degen. So there's there you go. If you're if you're looking for a name, there you go. How much capital this is another common question I get but how much capital do you think is needed to kind of get started again? If you're going on to a theory on there's going to be a lot of gas fees. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to go yield farm on a Ethereum for 50 bucks. But what's kind of the capital range that you would recommend for people before they get started? Yeah, I think you know, you can get started with as little as a thousand dollars. I don't think I would spend any time, you know trading in yield farming below that just don't think it's worth it personally and you know in the States. I live in the Midwest just like James does and cost of living is super low. So I'm not, you know, I don't need multi, you know million dollar accounts to be farming and making an income off this again. It's it's side income at multiple income streams, but I'm making a decent amount with a sub a hundred K portfolio and in and I feel pretty good about it. I am able to supplement my income and you know working for a church. I have a great salary. I got to be honest, but I'm used to being out in the in the workspace and I I can I can farm with you know, I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 K actively yield farming at the moment and I did the calculation. So if I was to put all of that into yield farms and without even compounding it about I think it took was going to take about 28,000 to 38,000 somewhere in that range to create an income of about a hundred thousand dollars a year. And that was based on a I believe it was based on a just a sub 1% a day, which is pretty great. I mean we are in a bull market right now. So I do think the the opportunities are greater than they were just a couple, you know, six to eight months ago. So right now is the time to get into it and get your feet wet if you haven't tried it before. Okay, love that. I've got a couple questions from the audience Dane says does farming in the ETH chain suck up a lot of profit with gas fees. Yeah, so I recommend getting off of the ETH chain entirely ethereum is the asset that you pay gas on all of the different ethereum compatible chains. So if you if you are familiar with your ethereum, but don't realize that there's multiple like dozens of other chains to be farming on. In fact, the ethereum network just just released a new update that makes gas even cheaper on layer twos of ethereum. And so there's there's I'm talking pennies guys. I think most of my transactions are between 10 and 5 cents right now on arbitrum on I'm doing a lot on the mantle chain right now. The base chain is actually the most compatible with Coinbase so you can dump your coins right from Coinbase onto the base chain to do the same thing with a lot of layer twos like arbitrum Polygon and I know James you spend a lot of time on Polygon as well. So if you're familiar familiar with that process and I walk you through that process of the course you can skip the ethereum blockchain entirely and use the layer twos which are going to save you so much on gas. Okay, love that. We got another question here from Biggie bags, which that's a good name to Biggie bags. I like that. Can you tell us your top three favorite current yield pools? Thank you. Yeah, you can you can catch a couple of these in my channel. So go check out the channel guys all things EBM, but right now and these are these are pretty complex. So I will put that out there. I am farming on the mantle chain the arbitrum chain with with very specific. They're called three three dexes. So Ramsey's on arbitrum and Cleo or Cleopatra decks on the mantle chain and then I'm boosting those yields with a program called the any ad which gives you a boosted reward on top Of the rewards that you're already getting at Ramsey's and Cleopatra. So watch those videos guys. Check out how I'm doing it. If you're if you're familiar with on chain stuff, I highly recommend those. Those are giving me like 600% APRs right now on specifically like mantle the USDC and arm to USDC or arbitrum coins to USDC and then my favorite one honestly right now and I go through this and I give it away in the course and I'll give it away today. If I just won't give away the entire process how to get there but extra finance on the base chain gives you a Delta neutral strategy to make one and a half per day and that's the one I originally talked about and all you're doing is providing USDC to extra finance. They do some of the backgrounds configuration for you in order to leverage your assets to give you one and a half percent on on a pretty good token inside of the base chain called Aerodrome or arrow token, which is their major decks. So if you're familiar with decentralized exchanges or dexes the Aerodrome decks is the biggest one on base and you're getting some outsized yield on that farm right now because so many people are getting onto the base chain and using it and volatility is the name of the game getting a lot of traffic a lot of fees are generated even though the gas fees are really small that the transactions are just so many on the base chain right now that it's generating just outsize yield. Yep, absolutely. And that's sometimes people forget that that went during a bull market like a bull run that we're in currently. It's not only the price of the tokens that go up but the volume goes way way way up even when we're in a bit of a dip now, if you look at the volume here over the last month or so the last couple weeks, it's been it's been so much higher than I was during the bear market and the volume is where the fees come from when you know, everybody going in swapping this for that. There's a fee that's taken out of each one and that's given to the liquidity providers, which is what is the basis of yield farming. So yeah, even when we're in a little bit of a dip, you know down 12% or whatever from all-time high that volume has still been huge whether it's you know, meet the meme coins have been really swamping the chains here recently. Everybody has their mean coin phases and personally I would much rather make money on the swaps for people getting in and out of meme coins then guessing which mean coin is going to be the one that actually takes off. So that's kind of my take on it personally. Yeah, just to just to confirm that on the aerodrome decks. There's a lot of mean coins that are being traded through that decks and just having exposure to that arrow token is why we're getting that outsized a return on that USDC to arrow pair. Yep. Absolutely question about the training course itself. Maybe you can go through a little bit what all that people will learn and then Dane would like to know how long does it take to get through your training course? Yeah, the training course is actually pretty short. I wanted to make it super simple and super basic guys. So $49 gets you a 10 courses. All of them are in video format. Each of them have the script. I did them with the full script on a prompter guys so you can read along with if you want to take notes, it's right there in front of you can copy paste or even copy the the script right out of the platform and put it into your notes program make your own notes to to follow along. It's a lot of crypto specific jargon in there. So I try to break that down as simply as possible, but the length of it. I think the total length is somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour as far as watching every video back to back. I think there's a lot of process time that you might want to take in between and just to understand what's going on. I don't go into super detail on every single piece of the of what I'm doing. I'm mostly telling you about it and letting you figure out on your own, but I do get into some of the details of that extra finance specific yield on the last video. So look forward to that a lot of it's me talking to the camera going through concepts, but it some of it is just me on my computer showing you exactly what I'm doing and how I'm doing it just like I do on my YouTube channel. And I think that answers your question. Did I get everything there? Yeah. No, I think that's great. That gives a lot of a lot of clarity. Does your training go through how to earn with airdrops as well? The training does not go through airdrops at all. In fact, I wanted to keep that super separate because I think my channel does a really good job of that and that's what I'm honestly very, you know, it's the narrative right now. So it's fun to share that on my channel. I'm growing my channel with that narrative and I wanted to make this super simple. I don't think airdrops even really computes for the first, you know your first time on chain. Like I think I heard about airdrops maybe six months after my first time on chain and I didn't really know, you know, what an airdrop was so I didn't want to confuse people too much. This is a super basic course guys super basic. I will be hopefully coming out with a master class in the next month that I would like to create for more advanced users and then maybe I'll bring even something in the in between at some point. All right, very good. Few more questions. Dane after one hour. Can you actually be earning with farming? I 100% think you can. It depends on you know, how what your knowledge is as far as you know, are you a crypto user at all? Are you a defy user at all? I think some some people might move a little bit slower wanting to do more of their own research to make sure they feel comfortable moving their assets on chain and then moving their assets within the different, you know L2's or going straight into base and getting right into something like extra finance. It could be that simple guys. It could be you know, you you maybe you have some Ethereum in coinbase that you've been holding on to maybe you want to move that on chain and start start getting into those yield farms. It's possible within you know within an hour honestly to get on and really get started, but I do think a lot of people because this is a basics course. It's going to be helpful for those basic users to really wrap their head around things and get to chew on defy concepts and really give them a full depth of the risks involved and what impermanent losses and all these things before they get started. So I think it depends on the user more than it does the course itself. I think it's it's laid out such that you could get started really quickly or you could really chew on those concepts for a while. Okay, and then girls crypto experience which welcome to the channel girls, but deep I move so quickly is the course updated with defy changes or updates. The the course will not be updated. I do think this will be relatively evergreen. Maybe I'll change that 10th course, especially as it is it is more specific to that that specific strategy on on extra finance. But that 10th course actually goes into a couple other defy yield aggregators as well. So it really teaches you how to find things yourself. So I go into defy Llama, which is a on-chain aggregator of just information right and teach you how to find those yield farms yourself so that I'm not the one that has to update you every time. So it's really giving you some training in order to find the best yields that you can possibly find in in in the now, right? So maybe I'll update that those courses that are a little more specific to a strategy. However, I give you the tools in order to find those on your own and I hope that you do. Okay, and then talk about your YouTube channel. Do you cover in your channel how to get into airdrops for noobs? I I haven't gone to a friend asking for a friend nice, you know, I would say the the course will probably help you get your assets on chain and then you can probably jump into my channel. If you want to get more into the airdrop stuff a lot of the airdrops probably aren't too crazy advanced. I think a lot of them are more involved with maybe doing some quests on something like Zili or Galaxy. I don't spend a lot of time in those platforms, but I do mention them. I talk a lot about like recently I had a an AVO airdrop, which is a perpetuals decks on and that's you can either do it on aetherium optimism or arbitrum and I traded a lot on the arbitrum chain. In fact, they're still doing basically a yield farm of their token right now. So if you're trading on that platform, if you like trading you can certainly farm those tokens within that now. I also in the in this course do mention a specific strategy that is trading Delta neutral on perpetual decks is rage trade is what I use for the course and they're actually doing an airdrop farm right now. So they haven't launched their token yet. They aggregate a bunch of different perpetual decks is or trading platforms and any any volume that you trade on those platforms is going to give you the opportunity for an airdrop and I teach you how to do it Delta neutral in my course, which means you're not exposed to the price fluctuations of the underlying tokens that you're trading. Can you can you explain Delta neutral a little bit more? I mean, I know we could do a whole video on Delta neutral, but I think it's a it's something a lot of people might not be familiar with and you might talk about it in your course, but can you kind of just give us a little bit more overview of what Delta neutral means? Absolutely. So Delta neutral means that you're not exposed to the price fluctuations or the volatility of the asset that you're trading. So I'm going to break it down super simple. Say you have Ethereum and Ethereum has gone up recently to as high as like $4,500 and all the way back down to I think it actually went under $3,000 in the last just span of seven days. So if I was going to be trading Ethereum on a on a perpetual exchange or a trading platform in order to be Delta neutral, I would open up a long position on one side and long long Ethereum and then open up directly at the same time a short position. Now some some perpetual sexes don't let you do that specifically. So I go into how rage trade actually lets you do that on different platforms in order to open up those positions to be exactly Delta neutral and then you get to farm the funding rates, which is a whole nother side of yield farming that I get into in the course. Okay, very good. Maybe last question here, but is this course for beginners? Are there more advanced courses? So maybe tell us a little bit about what's in store for the future for for yourself. Yeah, so follow the channel if you're a little bit more advanced on the YouTube side. I talk a lot about airdrops, but I do get into yield farming there, but I do hope guys. I I've been inspired by James to put out a lot of these courses shout out to you James for being an inspiration, especially while we're at Eat Denver. This guy was putting together course in our Airbnb like a day that we had a little bit of downtime and I got so inspired and and threw this course together and was able to publish. I mean the paint is still drying in this course guys, but I do hope to in the next month put out a more advanced version. Perhaps it talks a little bit more about airdrops. It'll probably get into more more passive income opportunities inside of crypto. Not just for beginners in yield farming. Okay, well love it. Yeah. No, I really appreciate this. I really appreciate to again. One of the goals for me is to help everyday people get into crypto. And so we need some of these like beginner courses to help people you do a great job of walking people through. Hey, here's how you set up a wallet and things like that. So my goal is just to help you as much as I can get as many eyes on things as possible. So calls to action as we wrap up your first off free completely free. There's no reason to do this unless you're a bad person. I'm just kidding. You don't have to do this but go subscribe to all things EVM to Aaron's YouTube channel. You guys don't know how encouraging it is for us as content creators just to have subscribers like people who I it's only one click, but it's still it just I don't know. It really encourages us. Hey, we're doing stuff. That's useful. That's helping people. So go do that. Go do that for Aaron go subscribe. And then if you're interested in yield farming, which again, this is not degen. There are degen aspects that you can for sure implement again 1.5% a day. That's that's a little degen. I would say but this is actual revenue. There's no Ponzi nomics going on in yield farming. You're providing a service which is you are providing the liquidity for people to be able to swap between different coins and you are being rewarded for that. So it's really is like a little business that you're running and it's so you're a business so you can tell people you're a business owner if you do some yield farming, so definitely go subscribe to all things EVM course 49 bucks, which again, if you have $1,000 to put into yield farming, you will make $49 in very little time on this course will pay for itself. If you have money that's just sitting on the sideline, then this might be a really great way to put it to work for you even a little bit. So we will wrap up their audience. You guys are amazing. I apologize that my nose is has a mind of its own here today. Hopefully it wasn't too distracting. Please hit like on your way out. Go subscribe to Aaron Aaron always a pleasure to have you on brother. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of you on here. Appreciate you. I need to get over to Des Moines to say hi to you. Sometimes I've been trying to get to church with Aaron and just has not worked out but we will one of these days. I will be there when you least least expect me. So but thank you for building something. Thanks for coming on presenting it to the audience. Appreciate it. Hey, thank you so much for having me on. Thank you for being an inspiration for this course James God bless you and God bless all the people that you have touched through your channel. Thank you so much for having me on really appreciate it. Amen, brother. Amen. Appreciate all you guys. God bless you all and we will talk to you later. Have a great day.