So there is a few ways to make money with crypto beyond the normal buying and selling. You have mining, air drops, games, gambling, a $5 wrench, LP, making your own crypto, and so many other ways.

One of the most popular ways is staking. But the thing is, we have several different types of staking.

On wallet locked staking for x time

It's pretty obvious what this is. You lock your crypto for a given time or maybe there is a unlocking time. So for example, I can lock my crypto now, but if I decided to unlock it at any time in the future. Some crypto requires you to wait x amount of time once requested. Or maybe you did a normal locking, and in this you are locking for x time. Normally the longer the higher APY.

A big thing to note with this method is some places have a burn if you don't interact after a given time. For example, Pancake swap if you lock your Cake token. After the x time, you have until about 7 days before a burn starts, and then you have 90 days before all your rewards are burnt.

This is important to note since if you die, then your next of kin needs to know this.

Note some coins like ALGO want you to do backflips to stake your coins. Obviously do your research before jumping in.

Not locked for x time staking on your wallet

This is again staking using your wallet and this is basically where you can go in and out of it as much as you want. Note as mention if there is an option for locking, then you often will make less APY if you don't lock it for x time.

Note most you need to lock your crypto to a smart contract. But you can unlock it at any point.

Soft staking on your wallet

This is more than less by holding the given crypto you get more. Algo use to do this. VET does this now, but note you get another token for holding VET. This hopefully prevents any inflation problems with VET itself

^{(please ignore how people like me lost 90% of our value with VET})

Liquid staking

Liquid staking like stETH basically lets you stake a given coin without locking it into some contract. Something like stETH is interesting since you need to be rich to stake ETH the normal way, and in short you are giving the value of your ETH to Lido, Rocket pool, or many others. And this lets anyone stake without being rich. Plus since it isn't locked in a smart contract, you can use your liquid stake tokens if you want. Like you can match it into a liquidity pool, transfer, etc. You just get the rewards when you unstake the token or in a time period (I think Lido pays daily). Things like Coinbase's version pays when you sell the token. (Coinbase basically made a stable coin attached to ETH that increases in value over ETH over time. This making it where your rewards are the extra value)

CEX

So this is simply staking with a centralized exchange. I don't think Kraken does this anymore, but others like Coinbase has this. You need to note that this doesn't always help out the blockchain, and sometimes the pay is lower than staking on your own wallet. And then if anything happens to your account, then your funds could be locked.

It's almost always better to not use this method.