How Gen X Uncle Ventured Into Crypto With Passive Income

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post contains an affiliate link that will help me earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Thanks to Seedly, I was made aware of the existence of Hodlnaut, this Singapore start-up that offers lucractive interest rates on cryptocurrencies. But I didn't think that it would apply to me. Cryptocurrencies conjured a rollercoaster to me, where adrenaline-charged youth relished riding the ups and downs in search of high returns. I honestly didn't think that I would have the stomach for it.

As such, my involvement with cryptocurrencies only included using the Brave browser whenever I served the Internet. For the uninitiated, the Brave brower is similar to Chrome, except that it blocks ads. However, should you decide to view ads, you will get rewarded with BAT tokens. The reason why I wanted to enable ads is that I wanted to accumulate (or "farm" in crypto slang) BAT tokens and then convert them to a cryptocurrency.

I have been using the Brave browser intermittently for about seven months but didn't think I would go through the hassle of converting them to a crypto yet. Until a staff from HodInaut emailed me to ask if I would be interested to become their affiliate partner. This piqued my curiosity, so I decided to deep dive into the crypto world.

What does HodInaut mean?

The first thing I asked myself was why Hodlnaut? I am not even sure of how I can pronounce this start-up's name. Upon checking out the comprehensive list of FAQs on its website, I realised that 'Hodlnaut' is a combination of 'Hodl' (slang for holding on to your crypto instead of selling it) and 'Astronaut' (which symbolises the founders' ambition to shoot for the moon and take their company worldwide).

What attractive interest rates does HodInaut provide?

I don't know about you, but understanding how the name came about helped me to feel more connected to Hodlnaut. The next thing that caught my attention was its lucrative interest rates (6.2% APY on BTC, 6.7% APY on ETH, 10.5% APY on USDT, USDC, and DAI). If you are a layperson like me, you will probably be familiar with only Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). So why do BTC and ETH yield lower interest rates than the other 3? I posed the question to the staff, who kindly clarified that BTC and ETH are considered as extremely volatile assets whereas USDT, USDC and DAI are known as stablecoins with collaterals backing it and are pegged to a national currency.

How are users' interests protected?

I checked out the FAQs and realised that HodInaut could offer such high interest rates because they lend out these digital assets to established financial institutions. But knowing this might not assauge your anxiety about whether your crypto deposits would be safe. Something that helped reassure me was that HodInaut underwent a Financial Attestation in January 2021 with Crowe Singapore (one of the Top 8 audit firms in the world) (https://www.hodlnaut.com/press/second-independent-verification-234m-crypto-assets-crowe-singapore) to gain external verification and make their AUM completely transparent. Another point that reassured me was how it obtained certification by the Singapore Fintech Association, which is recognised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (https://twitter.com/hodlnautdotcom/status/1255807916688330753?lang=en). Very respectable and legit.

Having these burning questions answered, I was ready to get into the game. So I decided to finally do something about those BAT tokens. These are the steps how I got my BAT tokens converted to ETH in my HodInaut account:

1) Set up an Uphold account (which is a cryptowallet)

2) Withdrew 16.50 BAT tokens from Brave to Uphold account

3) Now that my BAT tokens were in my Uphold account, I converted these tokens to ETH. This was the exact amount of ETH I got: 0.004576270915105103 ETH

4) Set up a HodInaut account

5) Sent this 0.004576270915105103 ETH to the Ethereum network

6) Now that my minute ETH asset was in the Ethereum network, I made a transfer to my HodInaut account.

Ta-da! Yes, I know this sum of ETH is so negligible that it cannot be counted even as kopi money. But the feeling of creating some money out of nothing is truly priceless. This is compounded with the feeling of having enrolled successfully in a new venture. I must thank the Hodlnaut team because the verification of my account took 1 business day. The staff (now my Onboarding manager) answered my pesky questions so promptly that I was determined to figure out how to make all these transfers work!

For those of you who have deeper pockets than me, you may want to sign up an account with Hodlanut using my referral link (https://app.hodlnaut.com/signup?r=joAItg9DS) . You will get a US$20 signup bonus if you make an initial deposit equivalent of US$1000 on any of the 5 supported assets.