Bitcoin Forum

Is Blockfi a secure platform to earn interest on cryptocurrency?

If "secure" in a way that the company/business is totally legitimate, then yes.

If "secure" as in they won't lose the bitcoin you hand over, then no one knows. Exchanges and platforms in general get hacked all the time. If you wish to go through, take this risk into consideration and definitely do not deposit 100% of your holdings.

dont auto-trust a service asking for large investment making promises of returns, but then hides behind proxies
https://who.is/whois/blockfi.com
blockfi.com's contact page just says 'headquarters, Jersey City, New Jersey'

if you cant find an address to 'serve' a lawsuit against. you wont find it easy if they ever scam, liquidate, enter bankruptcy, freeze funds illegally, or 'get hacked'

always do your research before handing value to strangers. the KYC(know your customer) they ask for, should also be KYC(know your company)

Thank You for the reply. Which option would you suggest to stake coins with minimum risk.

Define "minimum".  There are always risks to custodial platforms.  Once your bitcoin is signed over to someone else, it isn't yours anymore.  Bitcoin is not debt-based, so it does not naturally generate interest.  If a custodian service cannot clearly explain the business model which allows them to offer interest, you should naturally be very skeptical.

Alternatively, if you wish to discuss staking Proof-of-Stake coins, please refer to the Altcoin Discussion (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0) board.

It all depends on the coins you wish to stake!
As the poster above asks, the minimum is arbitrary to the user, and staking a sum should be substantial enough if it is genuinely worth the effort because I don't understand why you would want to stake $300 with a 5% APY. I believe that amount might turn into thousands of dollars in crypto, but doing it for bitcoin right now, it's not worth it. Instead, keep your coins in your wallet, and if you have more than $1000, acquire a hardware wallet for your security's sake.

EDIT
This post should be in Altcoin discussion

Allegedly they do have systems in place to secure deposits, but still they safety of your funds is not guaranteed and don't forget that you are also exposed to counter-party risk. If they go bankrupt or their lending business model produces loses you might lose a partial amount or even all your holdings.

I suggest you do your own diligence, practice good risk management and diversification.

Unfortunately, there is always risk involved in staking coins. At first glance, staking looks like a great passive income idea, but it's too much of a risk in my opinion. The questions you ask say you have very little experience in the world of cryptocurrencies. Before you invest, I suggest you read a lot about staking first. Also take into account that by investing in staking you freeze your funds, which in the situation of a bear market will probably be a big loss for you.

Just hold assets in a non-custodial wallet that you think will appreciate in value in the long-term. While dividend yields are great, they're not totally necessary especially if you actually want to minimize risk.

If you actually want the sort of "passive income" type of yield, probably just buy good companies that provide dividends.

Thank You everyone for the reply. One last question: What do you think about staking Cake coin in the syrup pool on Pancakeswap. Can it be considered low risk?

Not really. The risks are:

1. Pancakeswap being exploited
2. Impermanent loss from the LP
3. Binance Smart Chain going bust

Again, I'm not saying that you should or should not do it. It will just completely depend if you're willing to take the risk. Everything concerning cryptocurrencies has a good amount of risk in the first place; the safest being just holding bitcoin using a hardware wallet.

You’re also forgetting the part of being hacked, because I can remember that the exchange was once hacked around 2020 (last year), although no funds were lost in that case. According to blockfi.com the hackerSIM-Swapped one of their employees phone, and that was what led to their platform being hacked.

So please tell me, what’s the possibility of such thing not repeating itself again? Unless they are going to be very careful this time, making sure that they avoid anything that would lead to such events happening again. Although I do know that this kind of events hardly occurs, because we hardly see news of big exchanges being hacked.

You might wanna take a look at the Celsius. I have a couple of friends that deposited pretty decent amount of crypto there (mostly stablecoins) and are getting around 9% interest on it.

Just bare in mind that even though Celsius is legit, it is safe until it isn't so I wouldn't risk any bigger part of the portfolio there, and certainly not everything.

Not just Binance chain but Binance itself. The Pancakeswap like its creator Binance is centralized and that creates a single point of failure. When the government shuts down Binance for a lot of different reasons, all their products including the exchange, token swap platforms, centralized tokens (BNB), etc. all will go bust.

The risk of getting hacked is a normal risk that every centralized services out there faces. So, if you're asking whether there is the possibility that blockfi.com can get hacked and people would lose their bitcoins or the funds that they have invested in the platform? then it is quite possible.

Although the platform can as well do their best in preventing such events from occurring, by making sure that they are up to date with their security features and closing every loopholes that hackers can penetrate through. Then you can also play your part by being sure that you are not investing 100% in such platform, you have to be aware of the risks that are involved and play accordingly. And yes, you can make profit from it.

PancakeSwap is a non-custodial exchange or a "DEX" as they call it, hence there is no user "account" that can be sim-swapped as with custodial exchanges such as BlockFi; very similar to how the likes of the famous UniSwap/SushiSwap works.

But then again, the potential exploits or "hacks" in this case still exists, just a totally different attack vector as what you're thinking.