Nodes
Blockchain Nodes offer a great way to earn a return that runs in parallel to your active trading and investing strategy. In essence, they are a crypto-native passive investment vehicle.
Similar to dividend income in equities and bonds, or rental property income in real estate, nodes are an income producing asset that are not directly tied to day to day market fluctuations of the underlying asset, yet may still produce a high APY (yield) as compared to the aforementioned more traditional investment assets.
Nodes are one option among many in crypto land to earn a passive yield - others include liquidity provisioning (to DEX, or lending protocols and platforms such as Aave or Frax). Nodes, and particularly Beam Nodes, have the potential of netting the operator/staker a variable but high APY (5%, 10%+ or more) each month simply for participating as either an owner and/or staker capacity of the underlying node, or via delegating owned nodes or even just staking the Beam token itself to existing node validators.
Each Node program in the digital assets realm will vary in their requirements, such as potential for yield, hold periods, and type of rewards - be it partner tokens, stables, native token or otherwise, so as a participant it is critical to do your own research before engaging.
Risks
Although the rewards may be enticing, it is important to realize that even with Nodes from reputable chains there will always come some degree of inherent risk, as with any investment. The blockchain may fail, funding may become insolvent, or the program and its requirements may change altogether. These are risks that the operator assumes.
In my personal case, I am a validator and node operator for the Beam L1 - as such, I am comfortable with the risks outlined above, taking into account I am invested only with a prospect I am intimately familiar with (Beam) when gauged vs the potential for rewards, and I like the anchor it provides my portfolio. Of course, I am just sharing my thought process here, and not making any particular recommendation. Please do your own research, as this is not financial advice!
If you are interested in participating in Beam nodes to help secure its L1 blockchain and earn passive rewards for doing so, I have included a starting point below to get you started. If you are instead interested in other node programs with other projects/chains, you can quickly get up to speed via their official channels. Defi Llama (defillama.com) offers a great research starting point for many projects, including yields, metrics and other protocol info which you can then use to drill down further.
How-To Beam Nodes
Beam is a sovereign L1 (blockchain) built by @BeamFDN.
You may earn rewards by securing the Beam network as a validator or staking your BEAM and/or Node Tokens as a delegator.
The Beam Staking Dashboard is an easy to use interface to register validators, delegate/stake nodes or tokens to existing validators, and claim rewards.
To delegate to an official Gödel Beam node:
Click the ‘Stake’ button next to the relevant validator (there are 3 in total)
Enjoy rewards in the form of Beam or partner tokens each month
NOTE: There is a 21-day hold period for withdrawing Beam tokens or Node tokens after they have been staked. There is however no hold period when re-delegating.
If you instead wish to acquire Beam nodes and become a validator yourself, I have included a list of resources below to get your started.
For a list of good validators and other resources for the Beam L1, visit:
For more documentation related to Beam nodes, visit:
If you wish to acquire Beam nodes, you may do so at a discount:
Or via buying on the secondary market at the link below: