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If you play any kind of blockchain games on the WAX blockchain, you probably already know that you can stake your unused NFTs to passively earn the Aether cryptocurrency....if you didn't know that, here's your good news for the day. You can stake your unused NFTs from a variety of series including Alien Worlds, Upland, KOGS, Blockchain Heroes, and more to earn crypto. In theory, it's cool to be able to earn crypto, but many of you will want to dive a bit deeper and ask "How much can I earn?" and "Is it worth it?". In today's post, I'll show you an easy resource that can help determine how much Aether each of your NFTs will earn and walk you through a simple break even analysis to estimate the profitability of buying dedicated Aether mining rigs.
How Much Can I Earn?
In the past, it was difficult to estimate how much Aether a specific card would earn. Dedicated R-Planet NFTs had the Aether rewards included as part of the artwork, but if you were planning on staking an Alien Worlds or Upland card, you had no idea (or at least I didn't know) what your Aether rewards would be until you actually purchased and staked the card. Recently, NFT Hive has given users the ability to easily see how much Aether their NFTs will earn. When you search for an NFT on NFT Hive, it will automatically show you the up to date staking reward that the NFT will earn on R-Planet.
To be fair, Aether mining rewards are just one part of the decision to purchase an NFT, but this could serve as a great tiebreaker. Suppose that I'm trying to decide between two equally priced NFTs and I can't seem to make up my mind. In that case, knowing which one has a higher staking reward might make the difference. Or, to flip things around, let's suppose that I was planning on buying a super expensive NFT thinking that since it is rare it must have a high staking reward. Under the old system, I would have no idea about the staking reward till I purchased the NFT, but with the new system, I can see the reward before I buy to estimate whether it is worth it or not.
When Will I Break Even?
Before we start, I want to point out that there are two main strategies for R-Planet. The first, and simplest strategy is to simply stake your unused NFTs. If you have NFTs that you aren't using and you aren't doing anything with, then there really is no loss to simply stake them to R-Planet and accept whatever reward you get. Since you weren't doing anything with them anyway, it's basically "free" income regardless of the actual Aether rate that you earn. Under that scenario when you aren't actually investing anything into the game, any Aether that you make is profit.
Although I started playing R-Planet mainly by staking my unused cards, I later decided that I wanted to invest more into the game and try to increase my earnings by buying dedicated mining equipment. Since I was purchasing dedicated mining rigs that I wouldn't have otherwise purchased, it was necessary to do a profitability analysis to determine 1) how quickly I would earn back my initial investment and 2) what my per week profit would be after my investment.
At the time of writing, one of the cheapest dedicated R-Planet mining rigs is the Juicer Rig which costs 529 WAX or about $76 USD and generates a guaranteed 150 Aether per hour. Since the rewards are given in Aether but the price is in WAX, we must convert the cost to Aether.
The current ratio listed on Alcor DEX is about 1080 Aether per WAX, so we will need to earn 571,320 Aether to recover our initial purchase price. Given a rate of 150 Aether per hour, we will recover the initial cost in 3,808 hours or about 159 days. After that, our 150 Aether per hour equates to about 25,200 Aether per week or about 24 WAX. Given today's price of WAXP at $.15 USD, that means we can make about $3.60 indefinitely from this investment once we recover the initial cost.
Disclaimers
Although this proposition sounds appealing, I do want to point out that there are a lot of variables that can change at a moment's notice and drastically increase or decrease your profitability. Although we buy the mining rigs with WAX, we earn in Aether, and then we value our profits in USD. Because there are so many different currencies involved, changes in the value of any of them can have drastic impacts on staking profitability. For example, let's suppose that the value of Aether crashes vs WAX. In that case, it will take longer to pay off our investment. On the other hand, if the value of WAX increases vs the USD while the ratio between Aether and WAX remains constant, then our 150 Aether that we mine per hour will likely be worth considerably more than $3.60 per week. The opposite is also true, and a falling WAX value would decrease our rewards in USD valuation.
I also want to point out that dedicated mining rigs will likely have better Aether mining performance than NFTs from other series that you stake in R-Planet. For example, the AI Excavator that I showed on NFT Hive has a mining rate of around 490 Aether per hour but it also costs about $1,900. By contrast, a dedicated Fusion Rig that generates 800 Aether per hour can be purchased for about $440 USD which is more Aether per hour at a significantly lower cost.
Does this mean that you should NEVER purchase an AI Excavator? Not necessarily. The AI Excavator has a use beyond Aether staking and can be used for mining in Alien Worlds whereas the Fusion Rig can not. At the end of the day, the Aether rewards are something to consider, but it's important to decide whether staking for Aether will be a primary or secondary purpose. If your primary goal is to mine on Alien Worlds (or collect NFTs on KOGS, Upland, etc) then you will likely lean towards purchasing the in-game NFTS and considering the R-Planet rewards as an additional benefit. On the flip side, if your primary goal is simply mining Aether for passive income, then you are likely to find the dedicated R-Planet rigs a more cost effective way of doing this.
Bonus Tool
If all of this sounds too complicated and you just want an easy to use tool that you can use to easily estimate your R-Planet earnings in fiat, well, there's a free tool for that also. Simply head to https://rp.naw.io/ and connect your WAX wallet. It will give you an easy breakdown of how much you are earning per hour, day, week, month and years as well as showing you the values in WAXP, Aether, and USD. It's a fantastic tool, and its free!
Summary
As I have said before, I think the ability to stake NFTs and earn crypto is a fantastic idea, and think that R-Planet has huge potential. I feel that a new crypto game that gets its NFTs approved for staking on R-Planet has a huge advantage over a project that doesn't as it creates an in-built value for those NFTs. I wouldn't be surprised if R-Planet experiences significant growth as more projects try to get listed there. In all honesty, I have to say I was a bit let down by the recent "Rigs for All" sale that had a lot of technical glitches. Despite that, I'm trying to keep an open mind and if I put that behind me, I still do like the concept behind R-Planet and think that it has significant potential.
Although R-Planet is a game, it is also a bit of an investment proposition, and with any investment, it is good to have a clear plan of what your goals are. Do you want to use R-Planet as a way of earning a bit of change from unused NFTs or is earning Aether your primary objective? Making this decision is important because it will help you determine what NFTs to stake. Lastly, it's important to have a general idea of the break even time of any investment, but its also important to remember that there are a lot of moving parts when calculating the profitability analysis of R-Planet investments and it should be considered a very rough estimate instead of any kind of guarantee.
As always, thanks for reading, nothing is financial advice, and good luck.
References
https://www.publish0x.com/the-part-time-economist/how-to-stake-nfts-with-r-planet-xrymogn
https://nfthive.io/
https://wax.atomichub.io/
https://rplanet.io/
https://rp.naw.io/
