Having put your Bitcoin on a trading exchange like Bitfinex we can set it to lend out the Bitcoin for interest. Rates of interest vary widely between exchanges and coins, and over time. However, they can be surprisingly generous – for example you can currently lend Bitcoin on Bitfinex at an annual rate of up to 40%.

Cryptocurrency lending, however, is typically over short durations – for example a non-compound annual rate of 36.5% really means a rate of 0.1% per day for a certain number of days. In fact crypto loans are typically quoted as being for a minimum of 2 days and in my experience nearly always last exactly 2 days.

That could make things very inconvenient if every 2 days you had to start another loan manually. However, there are bots that you can do this for you – I always use CoinLend and I highly recommend it. Not only does it work really well – it’s an online bot with nothing to install – but it’s completely free!

Start by going to CoinLend.org and creating a new account by selecting Setup Bot. Enter your email address and a password and selecting Register. Then login.

You will be taken to the Bots screen where you can set up bots for three different exchanges: Poloniex, Bitfinex and Quoine. Bitfinex seems to consistently give the best interest rates so that’s the one we’ll use.

Go to your Bitfinex account and login. Then select the Manage Account (a head-and-shoulders icon) in the top right of the screen, then API. An Application Program Interface (API) is a software call that allows a third party program – our bot – to communicate with the Bitfinex exchange directly without us needing to be involved.

Click on Create New Key. Make sure the following permissions are ticked and no others:

• Read: Account History, Margin Funding and Wallets.
• Write: Margin Funding.

Make doubly sure that Write permission is off for Withdraw so that this API cannot be used (by Coinlend or some other party) to withdraw your funds. Enter a name at Label Your API Key such as Coinlend lending key. Select Generate API Key. Check your email and confirm creation of the new key.

Your new API Key, and a secret key to access it, will now be shown in Bitfinex – copy both of these somewhere safe to record them.

Copy both keys into the Bitfinex Bot section of the Coinlend Bots tab and click Save. If you’ve done this correctly you will get a confirmation message, it will display Bitfinex credentials valid, and the button will go green and say On.

Coinlend will generally start working very quickly, almost immediately. To see your loans underway just switch to the Loans tab and wait a minute or two – here it’s showing our first loan has gone out, and it’s at 16.62% (the display defaults to annual, compounded interest):

You can also confirm your loan status by going to Bitfinex and selecting Funding -> Bitcoin. Your active loans will be shown under the PROVIDED pane – click the drop-down icon to open. The interest rate shown in Bitfinex is the daily one – so here it’s 0.04214 per day.

If you want the interest rate shown in Coinlend to be the same then you can change this on the Settings tab – the options are Daily, Yearly, Compounded.

Tip: If you think you might want quick access to your Bitcoin then in Coinlend in the Bots/Bitfinex Bot tab under the On/Off button select Settings -> BTC – Extended and switch on the option for Always lend at the minimum duration of 2 days, and then Save Settings. This setting doesn’t always ‘stick’ so check it by going back into Settings and repeat if necessary – once it has set successfully the Extended button will show orange.

And that’s it done – the Coinlend bot will keep lending out your Bitcoin until you set the Bitfinex bot to Off on the Bots tab. Your Bitcoin stake will grow, and all for free.