From staking to AI trading: promising ways to make money from crypto in 2025

In periods of heightened volatility, people prefer steadier ways to earn and turn to passive-income tools.

This article reviews several of them: staking, restaking, farming and copy trading.

Staking

One of the most popular ways to earn extra income, available to users of CEX such as Binance and decentralised-finance (DeFi) protocols such as Lido.

What is staking and how can you profit from it?

Stakers hold the native assets of PoS blockchains — Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Toncoin (TON), Tezos (XTZ) and others. Networks pay rewards for verifying and confirming transactions. Users lock coins to do so, either by running nodes or by delegating funds to validators.

Payout rates and lock-up periods vary by blockchain. Current figures are available on the analytics site Staking Rewards.

Staking is popular because it provides regular rewards. However, this passive-income method often requires substantial initial capital, especially for those who wish to do it themselves.

At the time of publication, solo-staking Ethereum requires 32 ETH. In early October the project’s co-founder, Vitalik, acknowledged the need to cut the minimum deposit to 16 or 24 ETH, but gave no timeline.

Liquid-staking protocols such as Lido partly address this, letting users lock any amount of ETH in a smart contract and receive stETH tokens that can be traded across other DeFi markets.

What is liquid staking?

Most centralised exchanges also offer staking. In that case you do not control your funds; you entrust them to the trading platform.

Restaking

A relatively new way to earn passive income, implemented by the EigenLayer protocol. It uses ETH already staked to provide crypto-economic security to other protocols in exchange for their rewards.

What is restaking and how can you profit from it?

The idea is akin to merged mining, where several cryptocurrencies are mined at once without reducing aggregate hash rate.

Farming

This typically involves earning a DeFi protocol’s governance tokens in return for providing liquidity.

What is yield farming (income farming)?

Farmers can face smart-contract vulnerabilities, fraud, token price slumps driven by inflated APR, and the project’s economic unsustainability.

For example, in May 2022 the algorithmic stablecoin UST, issued on the Terra blockchain, and its native coin LUNA collapsed in value after a series of events.

Terra’s death spiral: how and why LUNA and UST crashed

To mitigate risks, conduct DYOR on protocols or lock assets on reputable CEXs. For instance, Binance and OKX regularly distribute new-project tokens via launchpools to users who lock stablecoins, bitcoin, or exchange tokens BNB and OKB.

Copy trading

If you would rather avoid delving into restaking details and assessing the odds of a new DeFi protocol being hacked, you can use copy trading — a strategy in which you replicate the trades of a lead trader.

Follow the lead: what is copy trading and how can you profit from it

Bear in mind the human factor: even seasoned traders can incur losses at various points in the market cycle.

Copy trading also costs money. Typically, users pay the platform a small share of the profits generated by copying lead traders’ deals.

AI trading

Artificial intelligence can reduce the human factor in copy trading. For example, the AlgosOne service uses proprietary deep-learning algorithms and generative AI models to improve trading accuracy and risk management.

The platform has obtained an EU licence to provide financial services, including cryptocurrency trading. At the time of writing, its TrustPilot rating stands at 4.6 out of 5 based on 850 reviews.

AlgosOne charges fees on profitable trades and offers 10 trading tiers based on deposited amounts. The minimum deposit is $300 and the maximum is $1m. Fees decline from 20% at tier one to 12% at tier ten.

“These are rather low fees compared with AlgosOne’s returns. Our clients do not even notice them as the portfolio balance grows. At the same time, they do not need to know anything about trading, investing or cryptocurrencies. AI does everything itself. Users start to make a profit within 15 minutes after depositing at least $300,” project representatives commented.

The platform supports three types of trade:

1. Automatically approved trades. AlgosOne selects the asset, position size and trade direction based on current market trends. The AI approves and executes the trade.
2. One-click trade approval. The service defines the trade parameters and executes if the user clicks “Approve” in the notification.
3. Free trading with credits. Trading credits are bonuses earned for activities such as daily app logins, approving signals, completing training and referring others. Such trades will be executed automatically.

Withdrawals are available in fiat (USD, GBP, EUR), bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH) and Tether (USDT). Note that AlgosOne locks user deposits within investment plans for 12–24 months. Early termination incurs a penalty and forfeits current profits.

AlgosOne returns part of the amount from unsuccessful trades to users from a reserve fund. The fund also covers losses in the event of a hack or unforeseen losses.

According to the project’s website, the platform will soon issue an AlgosOne token with a limited supply of 1bn AIAO. The team has also announced a retrodrop for early users.

“Register now, before the retrodrop is announced! The criteria for receiving tokens will be published after the announcement. To receive free tokens, you must already be using AlgosOne’s broad functionality,” the project website says.

Conclusions

We have outlined the most popular ways to earn passively in crypto without heavy outlays. Running validators and mining once belonged in this category, but by 2024 they had become full-fledged jobs, requiring sizeable hardware investment and constant profitability monitoring.

A wide array of passive-earning services is available. Almost every major CEX has an Earn tab with fixed/flexible crypto deposits and other financial products.

AI-driven trading tools such as AlgosOne are gaining ground. Newcomers can test the service — the first 14 days come with no deposit lock and no withdrawal limits.