As a freelance animator and hobbyist crypto dabbler, I've noticed some uncanny similarities between the animation and crypto worlds. For one, both require surrendering to delayed gratification, an outlook that presumes all our work now will compound into greater rewards down the road, which - both savvy investors and creatives know - means learning to stomach the absolute s#*% show of an emotional roller coaster from delusional confidence to sheer panic along the way.

Creating an animated video from scratch or creating a portfolio of passive income streams is no small task. Over the past 9 months, I experienced the power of delayed gratification in both the crypto and animation worlds. For my animation portfolio, I had the opportunity to write, direct, and animate a short video. And for my crypto portfolio, I was able to compound multiple passive income streams, many from free apps, into a healthy position for the current bull market.

In this post, I'll show some of the creative process behind my latest animation project and share how I made passive income from various crypto sources.

The client provided about ten minutes of raw footage filmed at SXSW Film Festival asking celebrity filmmakers, actors, and directors like Ben Affleck, Patton Oswalt, and Glenn Howerton, whether they would chose "Team Human or Team Robot in a hypothetical all-out war for humanity."

The assignment was simple: use that footage and create a 3-5 minute animation.

Just as an investment strategy allows for planning and preparation before seeing any profit, writing a screenplay helps to map out the characters, settings, tone and ultimately saves time during production.

The main thing I kept in mind throughout the writing process was the truism that comedy is all about subverting expectations. Poop nuggets. See? You weren't expecting that.

I liked the idea of contrasting the interviewees' grim, graphic responses with bright, bubbly colors and animation, which I also thought could help create attention-grabbing assets once animated.

With the script approved, I dove headfirst into the animation process, and... horrendously underestimated the time and effort it would take.

As the saying goes, the Pi rule for creative types proved to be true: however much time you think a project will take, multiply it by 3.14, and that's likely a more accurate estimate.

If you could throw the video a like and even better, leave a comment, I would very very much appreciate it. And the future robot overlords will thank you for the data.

During the nine months of creating the video, I found ways to earn passive income through various crypto apps. Here are a few of the easiest ones for new crypto users to get into.

Over the hundreds of walks strategically utilized to de-stress after frying my brain in front of an animation tablet all day, building up some stacks from Move-to-Earn apps like Sweatcoin and sMiles was a nice added bonus in addition to seeing sunlight.

Both apps essentially pay you for enabling your location data and the more you move, the more you earn. sMiles pays out BTC. Sweatcoin pays out its native SWEAT token and I've picked up some small amounts of other crypto like NEAR and LNR from using the Sweat wallet app also. For both apps, the step counters reset at midnight of whichever timezone you're in, so as long as you check the app before it resets each night, you'll collect $BTC and $SWEAT simply by doing what you already do.

For day-to-day web surfing, Brave Browser is my current go-to browser. It pays out BAT tokens (Basic Attention Token) simply for allowing ads to appear while browsing. Payouts occur monthly and while the payout options are currently limited to centralized wallets like Uphold, the project is starting to test decentralized withdrawals on Solana with plans to expand to other chains.

Paired with Brave, I use Presearch for my search engine. It has its rare annoying bug or two requiring me to switch back to Google for a second, but it's still a really early project as far as the potential broader market. With a market cap of less than $8M, Presearch's pennies of earnings a day now could pay off down the road if you can envision a crypto-centric world.

A newer free crypto app I've been using is NATIX, a project that wants to chip away at Google's robot minion mapping car business by paying users to provide real-time road data. You simply activate your phone's camera feature and then treat it like a dashcam which provides a source of income while driving. This one is is one of the early ones that hasn't even launched their crypto token yet, so early users could be greatly rewarded. (New users are currently invite-only so use my code at bottom of page if you want in!)

One of my favorite set-it-and-leave-it free crypto apps is Honeygain, available for computers and mobile devices, which pays to utilize your unused internet bandwidth. It's been a steady earner over the years, around $120/year. Once installed on a computer, Honeygain will earn anytime it's connected to WiFi, and on mobile devices, the app must be open so it's great to leave open during periods when you're not on your phone or at night while sleeping. Earnings are limited to one IP address per device, so the more IP addresses and devices you install on (up to 10), the more lucrative your earnings. There are a few payout options including BTC but I prefer to enable the 10% bonus that comes from receiving Jumptask (JUMP) tokens and then I can seamlessly withdrawal earnings into a crypto wallet like MetaMask and exchange it into any other token I would rather invest in. Personally, I like to swap it back into more "stable" crypto assets, but ones that still promise upside like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, Cardano and Optimism.

Another set-it-and-leave-it free crypto browser extension that similarly pays for bandwidth is a project called Grass, which is so new that it hasn't even launched its own token as of this article. It's totally speculative and at the moment, it's earnings aren't technically exchangeable for money, but it's a legit project with an active Discord so early users could be rewarded once the team continues to achieve the goals in their roadmap.

Another personal favorite and one of the simplest set-it-and-leave-it crypto apps is Nodle, a newer mobile app that pays users to enable their bluetooth and location sharing. The company is marketing itself as an AI crypto app, since the data being collected is valuable for training generative AI, so the app is a great way for new crypto users to gain exposure into the burgeoning Artificial Intelligence crypto sector. Payouts earn the NODL token, which is built on the Polkadot chain, and the app is especially great if you have an older spare smartphone just collecting dust in a drawer somewhere, as you can instead turn the device into a passive income machine.

If you're interested in earning another crypto token before it has even launched, UpRock is a desktop application (and mobile app, currently limited to Android devices) that pays users in its native $UPT tokens for sharing your unused internet bandwidth, very similar to Honeygain. And like Nodle, UpRock is positioning itself as an AI crypto company, so earning tokens now while it's still in the beta phase could prove to be lucrative once on the open market.

Another crypto-earning recommendation is Cryptotab, which is a browser built on top of Google Chrome that mines Monero but actually pays out in BTC. I'd recommend Brave over Cryptotab as a day-to-day browser, but all I have to do is leave Cryptotab minimized and it quietly earns in the background. It's pennies to a few bucks of BTC a day but if you're a long-term Bitcoin holder, the earnings can still be significant just from an browser that you can minimize and leave.

Besides earning Presearch (PRE) tokens from using the search engine, another one of my favorite passive income streams is through running a few of their nodes. Over the nine months of animating, I listened to every one of Presearch's weekly updates and following their roadmap, the team has been hitting huge milestones as far as making the project a valuable, self-sustainable business/token, so this is a more speculative play but it's easy to see the upside at $10M market cap when it's also developing its AI features and launching a ChatGPT feature soon.

This crypto app isn't as passive like the set-it-and-leave-it apps, but it's worth mentioning: Silencio is a newer project that pays users for recording sound out in the world, offering more rewards paid for undiscovered areas. It appears to be a legit project with a real world use-case that wants to improve problems like noise pollution and hearing loss. On the app, all I do is enable the microphone for a half-hour each day while I'm taking a walk (and earning from Sweatcoin and sMiles), earn a few dozen tokens with every second I record, and it's an easy way to build up a stack for a potential price jump once the tokens are launched.

This will eventually be a play-and-earn web3 game (some PC users may be eligible to begin early testing) but I see this one as a longer term investment: Cornucopias (COPI). The team and the game's fans are extremely active in social media channels plus new developments are constantly dropping in their weekly updates on their Youtube channel, Copi Cafe.

Cornucopias is currently sitting at around $64M market cap. While the Web3 gaming industry continues to become more saturated with competition, if Cornucopias can execute their roadmap as I've seen them continue to do over the last year, it's seems plausible to see the COPI token at market caps closer to Decentraland or Sandbox, which shot to over $6.4B at its peak in the 2021 bull market (a 100x from COPI's current market cap) . Depending on how speculative you want to get, there's a world where mass adoption of the game could mean a token value that starts to head closer to market caps of companies like World of Warcraft's Blizzard Games, which is valued at around $74B today (over a 1125x from COPI's current market cap). But regardless, they've built a beautiful game with AAA graphics, and while on the riskier side, a small allocation to COPI could prove to be a great investment opportunity at $.07/COPI.

I also include Cornucopias on this passive income list because they're currently offering a sale of their file node NFTs, which will begin operating no later than July 2024. With only 20,000 nodes for sale and buyers capped at 10 nodes/player account, earlier buyers are incentivized by cheaper node prices, which are currently $330 on Cardano and $285 on Base, and will eventually be $1,025. In addition to the nodes' daily earnings, which will payout in COPI tokens, the co-founders have mentioned in interviews how they'll be rewarding early NFT holders with airdrops down the road.

The day-to-day earnings amount to a few bucks a day. Nothing life-changing, but using Honeygain's earnings of $120/year as an example, it would take $3000 sitting in a 4% high-yield savings account to earn that same amount over a year. And most people don't have high-yield savings accounts. So earning a few hundred bucks every year from apps paying for stuff you already do is pretty neat. And depending on how you invest that additional capital, it could actually be life-changing.

Anywho, there's some animation and some passive income apps, as promised. If you watched the video and liked/left a comment or used any of these referral links, thanks for supporting my ability to keep creating stuff I like!

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If you're into TV writing or storytelling and are looking for online classes to improve, two places I recommend are Upright Citizens Brigade (alma mater of writers like Amy Poehler, Donald Glover, and Adam Mckay) and WritingPad. If you're interested, feel free to message me and I can shoot you a referral link that gets us both some free cash to invest back into our writing. [For UCB, just type my name (Patrick Clayton) at the checkout if it's your first time signing up for an online class. And for WritingPad, shoot me a message and I can give you a promo code to one of their classes.]

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