It takes time to get to know a subject, particularly one as multifaceted as digital currencies. I remember messing around with it a bit after Robinhood started to offer Bitcoin and Ethereum, so fairly recently really. I tried day-trading them, but absent margin and other tools, it was kind of slow-paced. Experimenting with that, though, led to my inquiring further and starting to get a better grasp on it.
It's a predilection I have: research and reading. A lot of people are like, "Term paper? Nooo!" Not I. It turns out crypto is pretty interesting as well. Hence, I'm experimenting with using AI to publish reports periodically on a wide range of blockchains. Lots of folks do that, but here you'll just have to decide for yourself. Do you prefer one writing style over another? Do you value a historical approach to understanding the future better?
Crypto might have been new to me, but stocks and day trading were not. Nowadays, I'm more in tune with steady cash flows, which is one thing I like about crypto with its staking. Lately, I've taken a liking to one pair of ETFs that combine dividends and staking.
REX-Osprey offers Ethereum and Solana exchange-traded funds, and they distribute the staking rewards as a monthly dividend. Now think about that a moment. How exactly does that work? It pays in US dollars, but the payout can vary by the price of the underlying currency. Initially, I noted the dividend and wondered what the payout percentage was, but I really bought it as a wager on Solana and Ethereum. Then the dividends started to roll in.
Let's say the dividend for Solana is 7%. If the price of Sol is $100, you'd be getting $7 over a year. In practice, though, it varies from month to month. However, continuing the example, say the price then rises to $300? The dividend also goes up 200% to $21. The same is true of the Ethereum ETF, but Ether is more conservative about its reward rate at about 3%. The two are competitors, or at least often compared. Ether, though, is at $3,500 as I write this, but it's not impossible it could go a lot higher. With crypto, I tend to keep at least a ten-year perspective, which, given its volatility, is a reasonably long-term view.
It's entirely possible that these ETFs don't pan out somehow, but the more people pull Sol or Eth out of circulation to stake them, the more the price will tend to appreciate. That's what I'd like to see on the dividend. The higher the better.
In reality, digital dollars have been a thing for a very long time; what we are seeing now is structural change in the system. It's originating away from the central bank. Away from nearly any central bank, although a growing number of countries have been looking at making cryptocurrency a reserve currency. Indeed, Donald Trump has spoken of it as well. Overall, I judge the macro trend to be very bullish. That's one of the reasons the staking dividends caught my interest.