Staking NFTs – A Beating Heart Among Stillness or Clinically Dead?

Passive Income 2.0

Making money as you sleep is the ultimate goal for many of us. Like it or not, it’s something that we have come to accept in this space we call blockchain gaming.

Yes, for those of us in the business of building and development, some (like myself) insist that the focus is on gaming, and that’s a big reason why my gaming team at Cradles recently released the pre-alpha as a pure playable game without any sort of token model built in. But we also know that blockchain gamers want the benefits of blockchain-enabled models that make them part of the revenue generation – something they’ve never been able to do in the traditional gaming world easily.

Throughout the years, investors have been seeking ways to earn a steady income while being actively involved with other types of businesses. Using the money that one already has to make more money by being patient for a certain amount of time became a popular way to side hustle. Whether we call it investing, asset building, or asset sharing, it is a smart way to extend your wealth.

Digital innovations changed the way we live, interact and conduct business on a daily basis. Bending on new trends in the realm of digital technologies, we found a way to make the next best investment, whether actively or passively. There are so many things you could actively do with digital assets, NFTs in particular, yet NFT staking refers specifically to an NFT owner locking up their digital asset for a certain amount of time to earn passive income in the form of cryptocurrencies.

The tech behind NFT staking isn’t hard to comprehend. Namely, staking per se is a crucial trait of many divergent blockchains. And we can observe many gaming projects involved in staking cryptocurrencies and NFTs. The most basic manner to earn interest in crypto was to stake coins for a predetermined lock-up period in time. It was like earning interest in the sense of traditional banking.

Then, thanks in a large part to gaming Dapps, we got the opportunity to stake NFTs on compatible platforms. The genuine features of NFTs make them an ideal option for wait-and-HODL strategies even though it may take some time before such long-term investments come to their expected fruition. Such staking opens many possibilities for collectors to monetize their collections.

Hence, we have HODLers that lock up their NFTs in decentralized finance platforms and even gaming platforms to receive monetary rewards with the passage of time without the need to sell or give up ownership in any other manner. Not at all dissimilar to the concept of DeFi yield farming since both are investment strategies.

Profit Talks

Nevertheless, NFT staking is a concept still in its infancy. The NFT craze carried most people away with headlines about sellers who earned insane amounts of money for a piece of digital art. We won’t forget easily about the 12-year-old kid who earned $400,000 by creating and selling digital pics of whales while Beeple managed to acquire $69 million in an auction for his art, turning him into one of the most financially successful living artists.

At the same time incredible and borderline strange, the rate of success is proportionate to the degree of market demand and the ability to sell. Otherwise, you are just stuck with a pic.

Despite the attraction of NFT staking, there are some particular drawbacks such as liquidity problems due to the infancy of the ecosystem and the practice of buying NFTs for long-term investments. At the moment, the concept is not as notorious as cryptocurrency staking, yet the forecast is somehow sunny with the predictions of ETH2’s Merge with staking taking over mining.

Furthermore, most investors have been attracted to the NFT world because of the hype surrounding the concept while thinking of the solidity of its foundations and profitability calculations. NFT staking could be a good business venture following the right conditions and taking certain matters into account. As the story goes with every type of investment and earning passive income, one has to understand the system.

For instance, the Annual Percentage Yield (APY) refers to the rate reflecting the rewards that may be earned over a year, based on the rewards rate of the current year. A good degree of knowledge of staking platforms and return rates helps tremendously. Furthermore, understanding price volatility and price fluctuations, with the exception of the reserve price of NFT collections, is the step that makes the difference.

Let’s think of a puppy NFT locked up on a fictional platform called RisingStar and the puppy produces 5$ tokens per day, currently worth $5 on CoinMarketCap. The NFT is now earning $25 per day just from staking. Let’s assume that the puppy NFT costs you $15,000. The math goes like this: $25 per day for 365 days amounts to $9,125, and we get the APY number by dividing the cost of the NFT by $9,125. Hence, APY amounts to 61%. Not that bad, right?

Only, it doesn’t always work that way when the crypto earned from staking keeps going down in value in a crypto winter, stripping away at the APY…

NFT Staking and Gaming: A Whole New Level with Staking-into-NFTs

So NFT staking in its original concept may be in its death throes because it’s not sustainable and cannot only hope to produce profit in a short-lived bull market. The concept may encompass a number of problems due to the infancy of the system. As it goes with everything, beginnings are always hard, but we overcome obstacles with a little help from our friends.

For us, we can see how NFT staking goes hand-in-hand with blockchain-based games, if done in creative ways that are more sustainable, and more meaningful.

My team love to come up with new solutions to keep you entertained, focused, and satisfied with numerous options that don’t sacrifice gameplay, yet also seek to meet the earning needs of less-active players. We know many others that want to do the same, and I’ll be the first to say I hope one of us succeeds.

That’s a big part of why we made up a new tokenomics model, under which we are introducing a subscription-based game with 0% transaction fees. And for those less interested in actual gaming, but who still want to earn, we have the new Staking-into-NFT (SIN) mechanism that also involves gameplay, but passively!

In this system, passive players with game tokens can aid active players by staking crypto INTO the players’ NFTs, making them more powerful. Stake crypto into Player A’s sword and it deals more damage, for example. This player is then able to perform better and earn more from gameplay. In return for the “staking boost”, rewards earned by Player A are also shared proportionately to those who staked into his sword NFT.

It’s a win-win situation as both parties earn more in-game coins along with broader rewards in the game itself. Additionally, live streamers are going to be rewarded with large sums of tokens and the possibility to call on their audience to Staking-into-NFTs on their behalf, further expanding on potential growth opportunities within the game.

NFT staking may be dying, but long live Staking into NFTs!

*I am the founder of blockchain MMORPG Cradles, and this is my introduction. I plan to write about the industry, much more about insight, much less about my company.