Poloniex Lending: The First Time My Bitcoin Went to Work

In 2015 and 2016, holding Bitcoin was a quiet hobby. You bought, you stored, you waited. Then I found Poloniex lending, and my coins got their first job. Poloniex lending was a peer-to-peer loan market inside the Poloniex exchange. Holders lent their coins to margin traders and collected daily interest. For me, it was the first real farming opportunity in crypto, years before DeFi existed. Crypto before DeFi There was no Uniswap back then. No staking dashboards, no liquidity pools, no points programs. Your options were simple: hold or trade. Trading wasn’t for me yet.