Lending your crypto out has become a massive industry that has seen huge inflows recently! Both cefi and defi are booming, but what about good old staking?
Staking can be costly and annoying. Most wallets for proof-of-stake coins (POS) require you to keep them open and online at all times to earn rewards. Some require you to understand a bit of technical know-how as well to get started. A way to get around this is by joining a staking pool with a staking provider. Simply transfer your coins over to them and earn your rewards!
If you check on Staking Rewards, a website that tells you where you can stake your coins, you'll usually get a huge list of staking providers that you've probably never heard of. Are they realiable? Are they trustworthy? How is their security? These are probably all the questions you ask yourself when you're trying to figure out which one to pick.
I was able to earn some Celo recently with COINBASE Earn. In the videos they explained that you can stake Celo, but didn't explain where. Through Staking Rewards I found out about a staking provider called Coinlist, which is one of the few providers that offers Celo staking. I did some further digging and concluded that they were trustworthy enough, what helped was that they had an app as well, and so far it has been working fine. Every month I get my staking payment, but now I just have about $12 worth of Celo on one platform, and as it turns out Coinlist only provides staking for Celo and Algorand at the moment, so I had to figure something out for my other cryptos.
Now, I don't want to have to go through KYC 10 times and create tons of accounts, come up with passwords, install apps, and so forth. So I went back to Staking Rewards to find a provider with more coins available, and discovered MyCointainer.
MyCointainer is an Estonia based staking provider, that is licensed and regulated (they have obtained licenses from the Estonian government). They offer more coins available for staking than anywhere else as far as I have seen, and have both a website and an app. Sounds Good, but before I transfer all of my coins to MyCointainer, I want to do an in-depth review of the platform.
So let's get started!
A little History
MyCointainer was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia (an EU member), and provides staking and masternode services. The majority of their development team comes from other blockchain programs, and their management team has worked in the past with start-ups, as well as multi billion $ companies. The platform has over time introduced new features, such as airdrops, a blog, and a community page, and as of August they have 37000 registered users and have $2.4 million in assets under management.
What Assets Are Available?
MyCointainer has a huge list of different cryptos that you can stake with them. As of writing they have 80+ assets available!
A lot of different altcoins can be staked on MyCointainer, from smaller coins like ReddCoin and Syscoin all the way up to major names like Cardano and Dash! Bellow is a little snapshot of what they offer, and you can find the full list of all assets here.
In the time that I have used them they have consistently kept updating this list. Remember how I couldn't find a place for Celo initially? Well, not that long ago it became available here on MyCointainer. I expect the list to keep on growing in the future.
But How Does it Work?
Sign up is quick and easy! KYC is not required to get started. You will need it later though to withdraw your profits, and also if you want to buy coins through the platform. Of course this isn't anything unexpected for a service like this, but it's nice to just be able to get started without having to whip out all your id's first.
After you've created your account hit the deposit button in the top right corner, and then follow the steps to deposit your coins.
After you've transfered your assets, wait until they have arrived, and then go to your dashboard to check their progress.
If you want to see more details, you can click on transactions to get all the info on exactly how much you've earned and how much the fees were.
The reward fee % for every currency is different, but they are some of the lowest that I have seen! There are no minimums for deposits, but they do have minimums for withdrawals, and charge a small fee for withdrawing as well. Although the amounts necessary aren't high and MyCointainer is definitely not the only one to do this, I do think it's an unnecessary restriction. Just remember to check this before depositing your coins!
All your interest is immediately compounded on MyCointainer! Other platforms might pay you every week or even every month, so if you don't have a large amount of crypto, it's hard to start earning passive income by staking with them.
Depending on the cryptocurrencies you have staked you might be paid every day or even multiple times per day! This is one of the best features of MyCointainer.
Security
There is no such thing as perfect security If you divide all your crypto by staking it with multiple smaller providers, they might go bankrupt, quit, or scam you out of your coins. If you centralize it by transfering it all to one single provider, then they might get hacked. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is always a little risk when you transfer your crypto to a 3rd party.
So what does MyCointainer do for its security?
They also say that they double-check all transactions, and whenever possible assets are stored in cold wallets. In case of emergency they have prepared a SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users).
And what about those licenses?
It's great when a company says that they are licensed and regulated, but what exactly does that mean? MyCointainer is regulated by the Estonian FIU (Financial Intelligence Unit) and has been issued 2 licenses:
- A license for exchanging fiat and cryptocurrencies
- A license for holding and managing cryptocurrency wallets
To protect your account with added security, you can enable Google Autenticator. Google Authenticator is an app that enables two factor authorization for apps that support it. I would definitely suggest you do this, if you transfer a large amount of crypto to any website! I do the same for my accounts.
Ease of Use
For the most part everything is nicely designed, easy to use, and intuitive. It takes only basic knowledge of crypto to get started. They have a very extensive FAQ that has answers to almost every question. There is also an exchange where you can swap currencies, and a blog where the company updates people regularly.
You can check their airdrop page from time to time to see what airdrops are available at the moment.
And there is also a community page where they ask their users to provide feedback on things like what coin they should add to the platform or what new feature users would like to see added.
Their app on the other hand is very basic. It's more used to check on your coins while you're on the go, than for actually managing your account. For example you first have to generate your wallet adress for every coin in your account on the website, before it becomes active in the app. You can't withdraw your coins through the app, but you are able to add coins to your account. The exchange and airdrop pages are included in the app though. I really hope they keep updating the app until it has all the features of the website, for now it's nice to have, but not very useful.
The one thing I don't like about MyCointainer is their rewards program. They have a 3 tier rewards program that you have to pay for. Each tier comes with different benefits, for example not having to pay fees on staking and currency exchanges. But some of the others features are more vague, like being a part of giveaways, and receiving free coins every month. They don't tell you the value of these features.
Platforms like Nexo and Celsius give users the option to earn in their own native token to give additional benefits to their users. With the NEXO token you can earn dividends from the company's profits and earn 2% extra on all your coins. With Celsius's CEL token you can drastically increase your interest rate. And of course both tokens are tradeable as well and have increased a lot since they've been launched.
I do think MyCointainer is aware that their rewards program doesn't compete well with others, since they are working on launching their own crypto token, but this won't be ready until 2022.
In Conclusion
MyCointainer simplifies the process of staking and masternodes, and takes all the hassle out of it. It's a good platform for people who are starting for the first time with crypto, but also for experienced users.
Although the company is still quite young, they've made a lot of progress by building one of the largest and most successful staking platforms! But there is still some work to be done on their app, and especially their rewards program to attract more users.
The sheer amount of cryptos available here is very impressive, and makes it much easier to manage your crypto. If you look at their jobs page, they are looking for a lot of people to add to their team, so it looks like they are expanding rapidly, and I look forward to what comes next!
If you'd like to try out MyCointainer please consider using my link.
Thank you for reading and what do you think of MyContainer?
