5 Ways to Get Free Ethereum — From Airdrops to Gaming

It is not necessary to purchase Ethereum in order to start collecting some. Staking, airdrops, referral programs, and some browser-based games are just some of the means by which you can acquire some ETH. However, none of this is going to make you wealthy; let’s get that out of the way right at the outset. However, each one of the mentioned methods below does indeed earn you something.

Where Does “Free” ETH Even Come From?

Nothing is truly free – it’s always coming out of someone else’s pocket. It’s either a network paying out staking rewards, a project spending marketing money to get new users (airdrops, referrals), or a platform paying you a few cents for your time (learn-to-earn, games).

1. Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games

Playing P2E games will reward you with crypto tokens, but the transparency differs dramatically here. The older P2E games such as Axie Infinity had you buy an NFT first to get any rewards, thus ruining the entire “free” premise. Nowadays, there are browser-based Ethereum coin mining games like RollerCoin, where you build up virtual mining rigs and cash out small amounts of real crypto – a decent, low-pressure way to poke around the space before spending real money. Don’t expect much, usually just cents to a few dollars a week unless you’re putting in real time or buying an upgrade.

2. Staking Rewards

This is arguably the most predictable return on investment on this list. Usually, you’d require 32 ETH to run your own validator, but the ability to participate in staking using services such as Lido, Rocket Pool, and even cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken gives you the freedom to stake any number of tokens.

The yields on staking are approximately 3-4% annually, in the form of ETH. With an investment of $1,000, you can expect about $30-$40 annually; boring returns with the additional risks of smart contracts and periodic locks on funds. While it is not truly “free” as you need some ETH to get started, the returns will be additional new ETH.

3. Airdrops

Airdrops occur whenever a project airdrops tokens to users that utilized their protocol prior to launch of the token itself. It’s been known to yield good returns, as anyone that utilized Arbitrum and Optimism was able to earn between hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of tokens.

The drawbacks include:

• You only receive tokens of the project, rather than ETH.
• The requirements for qualifying for an airdrop aren’t announced ahead of time.
• The majority of airdrops these days filter out “airdrop farming” through automated bots.

4. Referral Programs

Coinbase, Binance, Crypto.com — they all pay you for bringing in new users, usually $5–20 in crypto (sometimes ETH, sometimes a stablecoin or their own token) per person who signs up and actually trades or deposits. If you’ve got friends who are already curious about crypto, this is genuinely free money. If not, don’t expect much – the payouts have also gotten smaller since the 2021 bull run.

5. Learn-to-Earn

With Coinbase Earn and Binance Academy, you’ll be paid a bit of cryptocurrency for watching a short video and taking a test. You could potentially make $3 to $25 per course, and there is a limit on how much money one person could earn, so the campaigns tend to come and go. It’s a slow process – maybe earning you $10 to $20 – but there is virtually no risk since you aren’t spending any money.

Comparing the Best Ways to Earn ETH

None of this replaces simply purchasing some ETH, if that’s what you actually want. But take the ETH that you own, play around with something like RollerCoin, pick up an airdrop here and there, and it turns out to be a pretty good side hustle, with very little downside.