How to earn Bitcoin everyday with Fold
Fold is service that allows you to buy gift cards and gives you cash back on each purchase but pays you out in Bitcoin. You can buy gift cards at top brands such as Amazon, Uber, Starbucks, and many more. You can download Fold here and get 20,000 sats once you sign up. A satoshi, sats for short, is the smallest unit of a Bitcoin. There are 100 million sats in a Bitcoin just as there are 100 pennies in a dollar.
The first think you should do, is spin the wheel. Fold has gamified giving away Bitcoin in a pro-consumer way. Tap the wheel in the upper left hand corner, spin the wheel, and collect your prize. You can spin once a day to earn free sats or a boost on your next purchase which is why you should spin the wheel before using Fold. If you spin the wheel 7 days in a row, you’ll get a bonus 1,000 sats.
If you won some sats, congratulations. If you won a boost, let’s use it. Go into your settings and add your debit or credit card. Now find a company that you might use soon. No need to spend money on something you don’t need if you earn a boost but companies such as Amazon or Starbucks are always safe bets as something you’ll use eventually should you want to capitalize on those boosts. Select an amount of the gift card you’d like to buy and check out. You just earned some free sats on a gift card which is like having a constant 4% off sale at top brands.
You may have noticed when you set up your debit or credit card that you were earning less sats back than if you used something called Lightning. Lightning is a scaling solution for Bitcoin but if you would like to earn even more sats back on all of your purchases, I’ve got you covered.
Download Strike which is a fiat to lightning onramp. Normally when you use lightning, you have to set up a bitcoin wallet, then a lightning wallet, then wait 20 to 30 minutes to open a channel, etc. which is all complicated and nerdy Bitcoiner stuff. Strike does all of that for you in the background so you can use it like any modern payment app that allows you to send money to your friends.
Once you download Strike, link your bank account. This is a safe service by a company called Plaid which is a subsidiary of Visa. Once your bank account is linked, tap the top of the app, enter an amount of dollars you would like to transfer from your bank account to Strike. If you are planning on buying a $25 gift card to Doordash, then send over $26. I recommend having at least $1 extra in Strike at any given time because sometimes you’ll be able to buy a $25 gift card for $24.99 and other times it’ll cost $25.01 depending upon the Lightning Network route. Again, don’t worry about the technical stuff. In my experience it has all evened out but I have definitely been short a penny which is annoying.
Now, in Fold go to buy a gift card (spin the wheel if you haven’t done so today in case you earn a boost). On the gift card screen, switch the payment option to lightning and you’ll see a QR code that will expire in 20 minutes. Copy the payment code, switch back to Strike, paste the payment code, verify the payment, and once you see it go through, go back to Fold. That’s it. Strike took care of the complicated parts of setting up a Bitcoin and Lightning wallet and you earned twice as much Bitcoin back on your gift card purchase.
You might ask yourself when more gift cards will be added so you can earn Bitcoin back on your favorite brands. The team at Fold will keep adding more brands but you might want to look into getting the Fold Card. This is a debit card that you can transfer cash into like you just did with Strike so you can earn Bitcoin back wherever Visa is accepted. Want to earn Bitcoin on your Netflix or Spotify subscription or even your rent or mortgage payment? Now you can. Since this is a debit card, you don’t need to do a credit check or any of the pain points with signing up for a credit card. The Fold Card also has some additional benefits so you can earn even more Bitcoin back.
The Fold Card benefits include:
$50 Bitcoin sign up bonus
Higher sats back rates than the standard app
10% savings yield on your balance (Remember when checking and savings accounts paid out a yield above 1% on your account balances?
A spin on every purchase you make
It also features a premium wheel which includes
2% back on your previous purchase
10% back on revolving categories
2x savings match
2x deposit match
100x referrals match which means you’ll get 100 sats for every friend you invited to Fold
2% boost on your next gift card purchase
1,000 sats instantly
1 full Bitcoin
That’s right. Every purchase you make throughout the day, you earn a spin on wheel. Wake up, spin the wheel and earn sats back or a boost. Coffee in the morning at Starbucks. Sats back. Pick up a prescription at the pharmacy. Sats back. Trip to the grocery store. Sats back. Your Disney+ subscription was charged in the background. Sats back. Each of those opportunities gives you the chance to earn 1 full Bitcoin. If you want to sign up for Fold or the Fold Card, download the app here.
At a minimum, you should absolutely use the app itself. One of the side benefits of using Fold or Fold with Strike is that it effectively acts like a VPN for your bank account. A VPN if you are not familiar is a service that hides your web traffic from your internet service provider so you have a bit more privacy. With these two services, your credit card company and your bank no longer knows what you’re spending your money on. All they see is Fold, Inc. or Strike Technologies and have no idea if that $25 is being spent at Macy’s or on video games from Nintendo, Xbox, and Playstation. Fold has been one of those rare apps I downloaded to play around with and now use every day religiously and it has only gotten better.
Once you reach the comfort level to hold your own keys, I would recommend downloading a wallet, buying a hardware wallet, and moving your funds to your own custody. More on that can be found here.