I’m always looking for ways to earn money outside of my day job, without too much additional effort. One thought involved Amazon FBA, and although I did start researching it, success really requires a lot of time that I’m honestly not willing to invest. Searching for the next greatest import from some foreign country to dropship to an Amazon warehouse isn’t very interesting to me, even if there’s a chance of being profitable. And let’s face it, with all of the YouTube videos convincing me that financial independence via FBA is a pipe dream, I have decided to search for other options.
This brings me to cryptocurrency, the holy grail of investments (just kidding). I was introduced to crypto in January 2018, and it has been an emotional roller coaster for me ever since. I actually ran tens of masternodes back then for a couple of cryptocurrencies (Ultima and Infinex), thinking that they were going to provide me with some really great passive income. Well, I was wrong, because both of those were scam projects and I lost my entire investment.
And this is also a good time for me to say that I’m not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. Purchasing tokens and taking on the burden of managing cloud computing resources shouldn’t be done if you need this money to live. No one knows what’s going to happen with the crypto market, so this is a warning.
With that statement out of the way, I’ll mention that nowadays, there are more options available, some offering crazy APYs of 10k-80k%, which are surely too good to be true. There are other projects that don’t offer very good gains, but they show promise. Stake and HODL your earnings in the hopes of the token increasing in value years down the road! One of the nodes I am currently testing is for a project called Presearch.
I’m not going to get into the specifics about Presearch, since you’re better off visiting their website and reading up there. It should suffice to say that they are a new type of search that keeps your data out of the eyes of the big companies, and you also get paid in PRE tokens when you search. Free tokens, why not? PRE is currently valued at about $0.25.
Setting up the Node Software
You can earn passive income by running a Presearch node. This entails running their node software on a computer. This could be your personal computer, or a VPS instance purchased from the likes of vultr, Azure, etc. The purpose of this article isn’t to explain how to set up the node on a VPS, as that has already been documented on the Presearch website. Their instructions are very clear. I’m more interested in the cheapest option available, and today I heard you can easily setup their node on the Flux blockchain. This approach requires a bit of crypto juggling, so I thought I’d document my experience with this. Hopefully, it will help you out as well.
First of all, it costs 0.5 FLUX (about $0.85) per month to run a PRE node, vs. about $3.50 per month for a service like vultr. This is great because currently the PRE staking rewards aren’t that high. I think on average a node staking 2000 PRE will get around 1 PRE per day, which is about $7 per month. I’ll take $6 gains over $3.50 gains any time!
Purchasing FLUX
So, how do you get FLUX? The typical approach is to enter the token symbol into CoinGecko and then scroll down to Flux Markets. There, you will see the exchanges that support FLUX. Note that the trading pairs are almost all USDT. I’m using KuCoin since I already have an account there, and Binance isn’t allowed in the US anyway.
Therefore, you also need to get USDT if you don’t already have it. My default app is crypto.com. If you don’t have a crypto.com account, I highly recommend them and would really appreciate it if you used my referral code 4d7vw494m0. We both get $25 free when you sign up and make your first deposit! Quick segue — crypto.com is really helping crypto become mainstream. They offer a fabulous Visa debit card that I’ve been using for all of my purchases. The cash back percentage is higher than any other credit card I own. In addition, they offer excellent interest rates on stablecoin staking. At my tier, I get 12% APY on stablecoins plus an additional 2% in their CRO token. It has really worked out well given the massive growth that crypto.com is currently seeing.
Ok, back to purchasing the USDT required to purchase the FLUX. I did purchase 50 USDT on crypto.com, but was shocked to see that there was a 25 USDT transfer fee to move it to KuCoin! So I’d lose 50% of my total investment. That’s insane. I’m not going to do that.
Enter Nexo. I love Nexo for a few reasons:
1. Diversification — don’t leave all of your crypto in one place. I have mine spread across various services and hardware wallets.
2. Interest rates — they are pretty good on stablecoins at my tier (10% APY for Platinum level, which means I hold enough NEXO tokens relative to my overall portfolio value)
3. Free transfers — I believe they give you three free transfers per month. This is perfect for times like this when I only want to transfer a few bucks and don’t want transfer fees eating up all of my funds.
So if you don’t have a Nexo account, you might want to get one. Again, if you could please use my referral code z5meymfucs, I would really appreciate it!
Okay, now we should have USDT available and can transfer it to the exchange. On the Nexo side, click the Wallet icon in the lower toolbar, followed by clicking the Tether icon in the list of cryptos. Now click Withdraw and enter the amount you want to send.
Typically, exchanges have a page where you perform deposits. Try to find that page and then select USDT. You should be able to find a deposit address. KuCoin happens to have an icon that will display a QR code when you hover over it. This code is your deposit address. At the Nexo app’s Withdraw page, you can click the icon that looks like a QR code and it will bring up your camera. Point it at the QR code in your exchange’s web page and voila, you’re done. I look for steps like these to avoid costly mistakes whenever possible. If you don’t have that option, another thing you can do is copy and paste the destination address into an application that works on desktop and mobile. I sometimes use Slack and send myself a personal message with the wallet address in it, and then copy and paste it from the mobile Slack app into my sending wallet app.
Once you click Withdraw, wait a few minutes and the funds will appear in your exchange. Now you can follow the typical steps to purchase FLUX. In my case, I look for the FLUX/USDT market and then do a market order for 100% of my available USDT.
Side note — after purchasing your FLUX, don’t mess with any of your security settings! I did this and suffered through a 24 hour cooldown period.
Purchasing PRE
In order to earn PRE passively, you have to stake some. The new requirements for PRE nodes is a minimum stake of 2000 PRE. But how do you get it? Again, look at CoinGecko to find the available markets.
I actually only recently opened a KuCoin account, so I had acquired my PRE tokens using Uniswap. I’m not going to go through the Uniswap steps here, as there are tons of tutorials out there already. If you’d like me to write an article, just let me know. However, I will say that two options you can use are Metamask or Coinbase Wallet. There are others as well. I’d just like to say that I set up address whitelisting in Coinbase Pro, only to find that it also affects Coinbase Wallet. I was therefore unable to transfer my PRE to the node wallet immediately. I actually ended up disabling whitelisting completely because it was the only sure-fire way to allow the wallet to transfer my tokens to the node’s wallet address. This requires a 48 hour cooldown period, and I didn’t want to make a mistake by whitelisting an invalid address, so removing the security completely was best for me at the time.
Update 12/22/2021: Although this goes against the primary point of my article (using Flux Nodes), tonight I decided to add more nodes using Rack Nerd. I can’t vouch for their reliability scores (yet), but they have very good pricing. $22.99 per year! I will most likely cancel my only vultr VPS node next month, since it costs three times as much. If you sign up for Rack Nerd with my referral link, I would appreciate it! In fact, if you sign up before the end of 2021, you will get 50% off! Check out their Black Friday deal that is still in effect. You can get an entire year of a VPS (good enough for PRE) for only $10.88!
Setting up the Flux Node App
Now armed with at least 2000 PRE and enough FLUX for many months of service, I was ready to follow the instructions provided by the following tweet to set up my PRE node:
Now it is just a matter of following each step in the tweet. And it looks like the cost is actually 1 FLUX, not 0.5.
0. Create a Zelcore account — this entails installation of their dedicated soft wallet and transferring FLUX to it from your exchange. I tend to access soft wallets via a VM that I only run when I need to access coins, just for a little additional security.
1–9. Just follow the steps in the tweet — they are very straightforward. However, when you try to deploy the node, you might get errors. Just be patient — try again later, or log out and in again, and then re-deploy.
The interesting thing about Flux apps (at least in the PRE node case) is that you’ll end up with 2–3 nodes in your Presearch nodes list after deployment. Perhaps that’s why the pricing was updated to 1 FLUX, but I don’t know for sure. In the Flux discord, the explanation was that the message is sometimes processed simultaneously, so multiple Flux nodes install the app.
Staking PRE in Your Node
You have to stake at least 2000 PRE in each of your nodes to get rewards. Go to your https://nodes.presearch.org/dashboard and scroll to the bottom of the page where it shows Current Nodes. Click the Edit icon under Node Description to take you to the node settings page.
At the Update Search Node Details page, simply enter the number of PRE you’d like to stake in this node under PRE Stake Amount and then click Update.
And that’s it! Your node will take up to a day before it processes searches, due to the relatively low volume of requests, but you should start seeing your rewards values start to tick upwards over time.
Summary
I’ve only been running my Flux-based PRE nodes for less than a day, but their reliability scores are slowing increasing, just as my other node on vultr had. I’m pretty excited to only have to pay 1 FLUX per month per 2 node instances. It’s way cheaper than vultr, although I’d honestly say that setting up under vultr is a little more straightforward.
Are there any other crypto-related projects that you think are valuable, yet confusing enough that it’s hard to get started? Please let me know and I might write instructions!
Update 12/21/2021 — Once of my Flux-based nodes disconnected today and hasn’t reconnected yet. Therefore, I wanted to let you know that while Flux is a cheaper option, you might want to use a more established VPS provider until they work out kinks in FluxOS. You can also apparently create 2 “always free” VPS instances on Oracle Cloud, but I do not know if violates any terms of usage, so I cannot recommend this option at this time.
Update 12/23/2021 — my Flux-base node still has a reliability score in the low 60s, due to bad latency.
