How I Generated $1M+ Crypto Investing (Even In A Red Market)

Right now, investing in crypto is no longer optional. The US Government has literally created their own US Strategic Bitcoin reserve to start to cash flow assets to hold Bitcoin to offset the inflation of fiat currency, US dollars, Australian dollars, Canadian dollars. Because of the amount of debt that is going into the ecosystem, crypto is inherently volatile. But there is ways you can make income on the way up and the way down, which I want to show you today on how to create your own income using crypto. Now this is uncorrelated to the market. I'm going to share with you exactly how you can do this utilizing low risk strategies and also how you with high risk strategies depending on where you are in the market. Now this is something you really need to pay attention towards because the debt, inflation and the devaluation of currencies is going at such a rapid rate that you need to be able to make sure that your position, your portfolio to hedge against this crazy, crazy debasement and with the ability to make income on the way down is so, so important. I personally have close to 25% of my portfolio right now in stable coins, earning a yield, earning income. So I can deploy that when the time's right. But I don't care if the prices are going up or down because I am making money on both sides of the market. So that is what I'm going to cover today. A step by step guide on how you can do this as well and how you can make your first $10,000 a month using crypto. First thing we need to start with is understanding what your goal is. If you're starting out with nothing and you're trying to earn an income using crypto, well then maybe you're going to have a lower risk strategy. Maybe you're going to just deploy a little bit of capital. If you have a large portfolio in crypto, maybe you're looking to offset this or hedge against your other assets. And let's say you're a high net worth investor who we work with primarily you are probably new to crypto, but you've got a large portfolio in the stock market, maybe property. You're just sick and tired of the returns you're getting in other asset classes and you want to move to the digital ecosystem. That understanding what your goal is is really important. For a lot of our clients, they're going to look to move in $100,000, let's say $200,000 into the market and they want to make sure they have a position of their portfolio that is more Defensive, especially while the market right now is more in a defensive environment. And you want to make sure that you can offset any of the volatility with generating income. Now you really need to understand that, you know, in crypto, 95, 98% of what you see online is either fake, a scam or a high probability that you got to lose your money. And we saw this in the with Luna Celsius FTX where they were offering and showcasing super, super crazy high return products and protocols that are essentially very short term because markets are not able to sustain such high return. I'm going to talk about all the risks today so you can avoid all those. But it's really important to understand that not everything in crypto is what it says on the tin. We've actually had clients that we were able to save from FTX because of what we saw behind the scenes. A lot of the on chain data that we can see is a lot of these protocols in the past have used money to generate high returns and but done it in a way that is very, very volatile and very, very risky. And one thing can go wrong in the back end and that protocol will essentially, you know, rug pull or break and you will lose your entire capital. So please be aware that these protocols I'm about to share with you do have risks and they are not insured like banks. If you lose your money, there is no way usually to get it back. Now at the low end risk. All right, if you were looking at the least risky way to generate an income using crypto, let's say you want to generate $10,000 a month. I would start with stablecoins. Stablecoins are essentially a digital representation of fiat currency, meaning the US dollar, the Australian dollar. You can buy stablecoins that represent fiat currency but digitally and tokenize. So USDT and USDC are the most common. These are US dollar stablecoins. They're in the hundreds of billions of value you can see here right now. Tether the market cap is 186 billion, USDC 72 billion. Either of these are fine. You know, there's been comments in the past about the structure and validity of these two stablecoins. For me they're both very safe and you can use either of them ideally right now, like to generate a yield on crypto. You know, on the safe level you're probably looking at around 6, 7, 8% per year that you can make APY stablecoins. I'm going to show you how you can do that in a second. So essentially if you're looking to make $10,000 a month. That's $120,000 a year. You're going to need $1.2 million in stablecoins to generate that. That's probably more than the bank is offering right now. It's a great way that you can generate, you know, additional income at a low risk way. And the reason you're able to earn that return is because essentially you will provide those stablecoins to a protocol, whether it be decentralized or centralized, which I'll explain today. And then traders or investors can lend those stable coins and, and they will pay an interest and you take the clip of the interest. And this is the beautiful thing about crypto and the reason that I got into this eight or nine years ago, and we've helped thousands of clients get involved with crypto now in a decentralized way. Now, if you are a beginner, I would recommend you can go and watch one of my TEDx talks that I did on Ethereum essentially and blockchains and why, you know, digital assets are so important. This was, you know, two years ago now. And essentially, you know, the most powerful thing about decentralization is that you don't have banks and middle people to take all of that money away. So let's say, you know, you put the deposit your money in the bank right now, you know, you probably get 2, 3%. You may be longer if you lock that money up, but the bank takes all the profits. You know, someone will lend that money that you give the bank, they'll take the profits, they'll run off and you get shafted. And they also have rehypothecation where they essentially print more money to then lend out. And that is why the banks are the most powerful companies in the world. What they won't tell you is that with that interest, you're earning 2, 3, 4% in the bank. The real inflation rate, what's really happening behind closed doors is that you're probably losing 10, 15% per year in real inflation rate. So the interest you're getting back from the bank is barely even covering basic CPI inflation, which is pretty backwards number in my opinion. That's essentially the number the government uses to, quote, unquote, inflation. The other thing you've got to be careful of is CBDCs. And CBDCs is something that, you know, Trump has come out, has been very much against. But this is something that directly involves the government owning money and the government controlling where money goes. They have full transparency on every single dollar that we spend and essentially, you know, it is a different form of digital currency that is not visible by decentralization and not pure security and private protocols. But essentially the bank would own this. If you think about a world where there's no cash, there will be no private transactions that go on, and the government and banks will know everything, which is a very, very scary place. So that is ess, essentially why we love crypto Decentralized. But not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Ultimately, we keep control. So if we are using USDC and we're deploying that to earn income, then we will take majority of the profits that that protocol creates, rather than a middle person like a bank taking it. That's the powerful thing. Okay, so earning crypto yield on USD stablecoins. You know, to start with, you know, there's really three different ways you can do this to earn crypto yield on stable coins. You've got centralized platforms and you've got decentralized finance. Right. Staking is something where you're utilizing a native token like Ethereum or Solana to stake that token, and you will essential actually use your crypto to help the blockchain with their security or their protocol, and you'll earn rewards back in that token. Now, staking is something different, which we'll talk about soon. But you've basically got those two different styles to generate income. So if you're looking at a centralized platform, you could look at something like Coinbase Finance, Nexo, There's a bunch of different platforms. Kraken as an example, you can earn on your tokens or SDC on Kraken. It is different depending on which asset that you're looking to stake. But you could also do this through your ledger as well. You can earn rewards through your ledger if you've got your crypto on a ledger. I personally look at different platforms. You can look at something like Kamino, where you're basically looking at different protocols, different vaults that you can earn income on. So there's a range of different, you know, USD stablecoin yields here. You could also look at Defi llama. This is another way you can have a look and get basically up to the moment. You probably get up to. If we look at, oh yeah, the APY's gonna be crazy if we go right in the defi. But you've got probably for me, at the moment, I'm earning on syrup. Close to 7%, I believe. Yeah. You can also earn up to 8.6% on Maple Institutional Secured Lending. Now you do need to be careful if you're looking at other these protocols because there are a lot of scammy, sketchy protocol that you know you can lose a lot of money on. So many people went down that path of Celsius and Luna like I spoke about before, where you can get sucked into these super high APYs that are unsustainable. And I'll share a little bit about why they're unsustainable in a second. But you really need to make sure that you know, your portfolio is really built from the ground up. All right. And if I'm thinking about the ways you can earn, you know, income and using just your crypto portfolio in general, you want to be able to offset the different risks associated with the different protocols by balancing your portfolio. Right? Just like, you know, building a house with the right foundations, you want to have that. Right? So I, if you're looking at a pure income portfolio, I'd focus primarily on building USDC income generating protocols. First get that 6, 7% APY sort of locked down and then you can start to look at other things like staking and using liquidity pools. So if we look at staking, so staking is essentially when you're looking at utilizing blockchains as a proof of stake mechanism blockchain like Ethereum Solana, where you can utilize those tokens to secure the network and you get rewarded for staking those tokens on the network. All right, so you are the validator, you will stake your tokens, you'll take your Solana, you'll give it to the decentralized network and you get to participate in your tokens securing that network and you get paid rewards. All right, sounds great. The thing about this is it is different based on different tokens. And the most important thing when thinking about staking your tokens is understanding token economics. All right? And token economics is something that a lot of people don't understand and most importantly the token unlocks. All right? And when you're thinking about altcoins and cryptocurrencies and staking your coins, they're very different to the share market shares. They are essentially representations of businesses that generate value based on the performance of the company. And you may have share buybacks and you may have range of different things that happen, you know, with the business, but essentially it is very much tied to the performance the business with tokens and altcoins and cryptocurrencies, it doesn't necessarily tie back to the value of the cryptocurrency. What actually Happens is token unlocks occur where you get a lot of restricted tokens that were bought a long time ago through VCs and people getting access to early tokens. This is actually, by the way, the best time to buy before these unlocks happen. It's something that we work with our clients on. That's something that I'd have to keep off the free channels. That's what our clients pay us for. But the token unlocks occur when you've got, you know, early partnerships, you know, airdrops, you know, VCs that invest early and then become unlocked after two or three years. Now, why you need to care about this is because when unlocks come into the market, it directly impacts the value of the token because of the market dynamics, and it directly or indirectly can lead to increased sell pressure at lower prices. Now, one of the things that you can do to look at, you know, as these unlocks happen, is essentially you are staking your cryptocurrencies to offset the rate of inflation. Now, this happens quite regularly. If you look at Avalanche Uniswap, you can see here, you know, this is a resource we did a little while ago. So this won't be up to date. The visual on this is you can see that there's a lot of major tokens that still have a huge amount of coins that need to be unlocked. One of the things you can do is obviously time the market, right? You know, get in before, you know, things unlock or, you know, spread the risk. But one of the other things you can do is to stake your cryptocurrencies to offset that rate of inflation. Now, to do that, you can do it on major platforms, and the rate of rewards will be different based on the token, based on the inflation rate, and based on the different reasons that the token is created. But essentially the big difference is the inflation rate. The higher the inflation rate of supply that comes into each token, the higher the rewards are. Same with normal inflation, right? If you think about fiat currency, you think about the amount of money that's printed that creates inflation, and you can basically lose the purchasing power of those dollars based on inflation. The same thing happens with cryptocurrencies. A lot of people don't understand that. Very important to understand that. And then we can look at, you know, staking our cryptocurrencies to offset that rate of inflation. All right? So you can do this through liquid staking. You can do this through different protocols that are basically incentivized through you deploying your capital to earn rewards. And you can also do this natively on centralized exchanges like Kraken, Coinbase, or you can do it on Ledger as well. All right, the last one is Defi and looking at basically sending in your money into these platforms like AAVE or Kamino for others to borrow. Again, you can do this just like I shared on Syrup. And that is exactly how you can earn rewards that way. The other thing I want to talk about is, you know, being a liquidity provider now this is where you can earn a lot more returns using liquidity. And this is where a lot of people talk about online. You may see where people are saying you can earn 10%, you know, a month or 20% a month. This is very, very risky. This is very, very advanced. If you don't have the battle scars in crypto or decentralized finance, I would not recommend going and doing this sort of liquidity provisioning personally, even for me, you know, it does require a lot of attention and a lot of time and you need to be really up to date on the liquidity pools and how these systems work because lose a lot of money if you don't get it right, but you can earn some additional income. And this would be a part of the portfolio strategy where you could implement a percentage of this as part of your broader strategy. Actually, just on that before I continue, we actually have a portfolio program that we work with clients, particularly more high net worth, you know, investors. If you're new to crypto, if you've got a large amount of money in property stocks and you know, you're concerned about the rate of inflation, you're concerned about how difficult it is to manage a lot of property and manage a large portfolio and you don't have the right allocation or hedging in your portfolio. With crypto we have a program here at Collective Shift, we are one of the largest and leading crypto research firms where we work with clients one on one to help build a portfolio. You work with Experts within a 30 day period, build up your portfolio strategy, have a 12 month plan, we do an investor profile with your own client success manager. And we basically build your portfolio based on where you are in the market, where in total portfolio. And we build goals and have one on one sessions and sort of our program to help support you and build out what you need, get you in the right programs, get you set up with the right platforms and you have one on one coaching and support all year round to get that, you know, support. So if you're interested in that, if you do have over $100,000 in crypto or you're looking to deploy more than $100,000. There's a free link for some training in the link below, you can go check out, we'll walk through, you know, step by step, how it works and how. We've currently got over a thousand clients we work with. And yeah, it's been, been, been awesome to work with a lot of clients that come from YouTube. So thanks guys for checking it out. Most people, you know, think about building out this income and building out this crypto portfolio and they just, you know, they don't have, you know, really the balance and risk protocols created and hedge. They don't have capital across different platforms. They kind of go all in on one area. And we saw this back with FTX a number of years ago. Luckily we were able to save our clients a lot of money from warning ahead of time before ftx. But you really need to be able to allocate capital accordingly to the right platforms. And I personally, this would be blurred out folks who won't be able to see this, but this is basically, we have a collectorship portfolio. This is an audited portfolio that I've been leading here with the team for the last six years. And we've outperformed the market every single year. We're returning about 55, 57% year on year. And right now we have about 25% of our capital in stablecoins and you know, earning, earning a yield through syrup. And the other percentage of the portfolio is built around assets like Bitcoin theorem, some other assets that, you know, our members will see. But no single platform should have all the risk and all the capital allocated, especially if you have, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars allocated to crypto. I would definitely try and allocate that and split that, you know, across different platforms because if one goes down, you're not insured, you're not going to get that money back. You need to have that risk adjusted. Now a lot of people think about investing in crypto without doing the math and the numbers behind, you know, what you're actually trying to achieve. It's something we work with our clients on to make sure they're, you know, achieving the goals they want to achieve. The big thing that I think about, you know, in crypto is creating the math on, let's say it's cash flow that you want to create, let's say it's $10,000 a month, how much money you're going to need to actually create that income now anything above risk free rate of 4%, you are taking additional risk. So the higher the returns that the protocol is offering, the higher the risk you're going to take. If you're looking at a 10% return on your capital, you know you're looking at 1.2 million. That's more of an aggressive approach. If you're looking at, you know, something a bit more realistic, let's say 6.5%, a blended yield, you're probably going to need about 1.85 million. Now really the way I think about it is, you know, generating income allows me to protect my portfolio. On the downside, waiting for the right time to reinvest. And that is something that I think about. But there are some more high risk plays that you can look at, like providing assets to a liquidity pool. Again, I wouldn't recommend this if you're not experienced, but you know, as you can see here, if we go across to Uniswap as an example, you can look at the different pools here. You know, some of the APRs are 20, 30, 40%. Liquidity pools are different based on traders being able to access that liquidity. So here is a presentation I did with our clients just recently on a team did on how liquidity provisioning works. Left hand side you've got the liquidity provider, the lp, they'll provide liquidity to a pool to essentially earn tokens back based on that liquidity pool. So you are essentially creating your own exchange or your own bank. All right? And a liquidity pool is when you've got two assets together that are trading against each other and you are providing assets to the liquidity pool so a trader can come in and take those assets and trade with. Now the biggest risk with liquidity pools is that these are hugely volatile protocols. It is not sustainable to be earning that percentage return for a long time. In fact, these liquidity pools that have these like large amounts of return could change overnight. Literally this was 42% like three minutes ago. And they're very light on in terms of TBL and volume. Now what essentially happens here is you are trading this liquidity pool of Ethereum versus USDT. So you will provide that same amount, 50 of both those assets to the liquidity pool and then the trader will trade and utilize the same out of that liquidity pool. The problem is, is when you go to withdraw that money, if the asset like Ethereum has gone up in price, you essentially lose out on that money you would have made with Ethereum because you are essentially getting back that same amount when you go to withdraw. So liquidity pools are great when the assets are not, not volatile and essentially you are putting the money in and you take the money out and the traders are using that, but traders will use that as a liquidity pool and give that money back. If you then say, you know, you withdraw that money 12 months after, even a month after, and Ethereum as an example in that pool went up, you do not get that amount of money back. You lose out on the growth of Ethereum. So as an example, we call it impermanent because it can hypothetically be recouped if asset prices return the previous values, but the loss becomes permanent once you withdraw the liquidity and cannot be recouped without making additional trades or investments. So you are essentially betting by going into this liquidity pool that Ethereum won't go up in price, because if it does, you lose out on that and you are essentially selling without getting the growth of that asset, if that makes sense. So that is why these APRs can promise a lot, but they very quickly change. And if Ethereum goes up in price, then you are losing out. And that is why it's very risky when using liquidity pools. And I would only recommend doing this if you're a bit more advanced or you join our programs and we can teach you and build out some strategies for this. So this is where people really lose money. They don't have the right systems or structures, they don't have the right wallets. They have stuff going on everywhere. And I've literally spoken to very successful people. You know, had someone just recently had successful two businesses and lost a lot of money because the platform he was using had scammers, you know, be able to log in and take his capital. Lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've seen others that have, you know, been in rug pool environments where you sort of get promised the world with these tokens, get full rug pull. Not saying this liquidity pool, but like, you know, random altcoins and you know, you lose a lot of that because you don't have the right security setup. So I'd really recommend having, you know, your assets on the right wallets, you know, using something like ledger, you know, ensuring you have two factor authentication on and you know, stay organized, you know, being able to track your crypto using, you know, something like our platform. If you're going to track it, have a spreadsheet, use a tax calculator, make sure you have the right platforms where you can track this, because otherwise things go absolutely Chaotic and you know, to really build and sustain that wealth and create that generational wealth and be able to preserve that, you know, your kids and whatnot. With the future of digital assets, you want to make sure it's secure, all right? And that's, you know, security is number one paramount. We have a checklist here we go through with all of our clients. But you know, really it's about making sure you have the right wallet set up. Two factor authentication. Don't store your information online. Be careful of phishing alerts. That's where a lot of people get it wrong. And if you're using defi and digital wallets like Metamask Mask and things like that, you know, you need to be very careful. The next thing I want to talk about when you're doing, you know, generating income and just crypto in general is tax is really important, guys. So like when thinking about generating income or just like, you know, using stable coins, defi, whatever else, treat all yield as income. Depending on what tax jurisdiction you're in, it can be classified as income. All right. And you want to make sure you have the right structure set up from the start. So personally, you know, I use a company entity because I can use pre tax dollars to invest or generate that income and pay the tax later. You do get hamstrung a little bit if you're a personal investor because you're essentially getting your income from your job or your career. You pay the tax before you the money. And now you're using post tax dollars. I like to use pre tax dollars as much as I can. And then the other thing I like to do is like with my assets, like essentially I don't want to sell my assets if I don't have to. And that's where lending really comes in. And I, you know, I think about, you know, my strategy and my goal over time, you know, with my assets is ultimately accumulate as much bitcoin as I can lend against my bitcoin to generate cash flow, pay back the interest and not sell my bitcoin. This is how the wealthy make wealth in every other asset class. Property, bonds, stocks, everything they, they build up assets, lend against it, never sell, and that's why they never pay tax. So having the right structure is really important. Having the right entity and then having the right advisor, whether it be a coach like us and then also having the right tax provider is really important. Something that we go through. And we did a tax session recently, we brought on it, we bring on tax experts and do tax partnerships with Our clients all the time, particularly around structure. And also when you're coming up to tax time, how you can look at things like tax loss harvesting, how you can reduce your tax bill, critical times throughout the year. And that's something that I'll cover off another video. Let me know in the comments. If you want me to do a dedicated tax video, I can do that as well. Then when it comes to volatility, you want to make sure you are, like, optimizing your portfolio based on, you know, things that are happening in the market. All right. And, you know, the market has been quite volatile over the last 12 months. You know, it hasn't been that exciting, I guess, for investors. And if you join, got into crypto and invested heavily, you know, middle of last year, you've been in, you know, a pretty difficult environment. Now rebalancing is very, very important. A lot of people think it's just like, you know, come in, set and forget. Now you can do that if you're just holding something like bitcoin, but you're missing out on a lot of returns, a lot of upside at the right time in the market. Me personally, I rebalance and I'm always updating and optimizing my portfolio based on where we are in the. And, you know, this is something that I updated our members. It was late last year when I sold down and reduced, you know, some of my altcoin positions because I wanted to stack stable coins to protect this downside. And that's essentially what's happened. SUI was one that, you know, we got in and sold just a little bit under from where we entered because the market obviously didn't go the way we wanted to last year, but sold out at $1.80. And now I think it's, you know, close to $1.40, 20 cents. Would have lost, you know, a considerable amount of money if I just held on to SUI and didn't make any changes. Really important you are across the market or you have a team like us that are looking across the market to help you make those decisions, because the market moves really quickly, rapidly, and if you don't adjust at the right time, you can be in a lot of strife. And I sold dependency based on my previous post or I think this was back in early November. Yeah, trim some old coins, sold SUI bought more bitcoin. This was about three months ago and protected my portfolio a lot from what was to come in the weeks and months following. Now I'm in stablecoins waiting to redeploy and I'm waiting for the right time to get back into the altcoins and you can see that based on my returns over the last five years, you know, you do have years where, you know, it is a tough year, but you've got to protect the downside. The market was actually, you know, a lot more red during these years where I was down 12% and down 16% in 2020 and 2023. The market was actually a lot, a lot worse than that. But I protected my portfolio because I rebalanced. Same on these years where I made over 3,000%, 96% and 90%, I was able to rebalance and then go heavier into altcoins and less stable coins and into the right sectors. That is really important. You do need to protect your portfolio more so in crypto than other markets. And I would highly, highly recommend, you know, having a coach, having mentors, having, you know, research, independent providers like us, collective shift to work alongside you so you don't have to do all the heavy lifting yourself because you are coming up against the institutions now. You're coming up against the big boys that have algorithms, that have quant funds, that have huge AI algorithms that are managing capital on their own. They have a huge edge. You need to have that edge. Otherwise you're going to continue to buy crappy old coins. You're going to be behind the market, you're going to be buying too late. You're going to be getting the wrong protocols, you're going to be getting the wrong stablecoins. Ultimately, everyone pays a tuition fee in crypto and I always say that because people do get scammed, unfortunately. I've been there. I've been in this space for eight or nine years. I lost money when I first started getting crypto that many years ago and I see it all the time now. So it's ensuring you're working with the right coaches. Listening to the right people is really important to navigate the market and rebalancing when the time's right and making sure you're using a systematic approach. So if you are ready and you want to work with that systematic approach and work one or with me and the team, click the link in the description below. We got a free training. We can learn a little bit more about what we do. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening along. If there's any other videos you want me to cover, please put them in the comments below. Otherwise, we'll see you on the next one.