Savings is a service for anyone interested in earning extra money just by holding cryptocurrency. Now in a few taps, you can earn daily interest and rewards. It’s the safest and simplest way to earn passive income in crypto.

How does Savings work?

There are two ways to earn with ZenGo Savings:

  1. Lending: You are essentially loaning your crypto, either to a decentralized pool of liquidity (currently Compound) or if you’re lending Bitcoin, to Nexo, where others can borrow it in return for paying you interest. Compound is an algorithmic, autonomous interest rate protocol that enables people to provide and borrow Ethereum-based assets. Interest rates are calculated algorithmically by the protocol, based on supply and demand. Nexo is a licensed and registered financial institution for crypto lending and calculates interest on a daily basis. Both methods add the interest to your balance automatically, providing you with compound interest in the same currency that you’re lending.

  2. Staking: Staking lets crypto holders earn extra income by contributing to the network security of a proof-of-stake (PoS) asset. By contributing (delegating) the voting rights associated with your asset to a validator node, you increase the chances of the validator to validate transaction blocks and in return earn rewards. They then share a portion of those rewards with their delegators. Currently, ZenGo offers staking with Tezos (XTZ), but in the future, we plan to add more staking assets. For more information on this topic, see the article on Tezos staking.

How do I start making money with ZenGo Savings?

You can start earning in just a few taps by following these simple steps:

  1. Pick which asset you want to earn. You’ll find the available interest rates (APRs) on the “Savings” screen in the app to help you decide.

  2. Tap on the asset. If you don’t own any, we’ve made it easy to buy or receive.

  3. Tap the Deposit button and choose how much you’d like to allocate to Savings.

  4. Tap “Confirm”.

That’s it! You’ve just started saving. Now just sit back and watch your portfolio grow.

How do I deposit and withdraw?

There are two types of screens that you might encounter when depositing and withdrawing:

Deposit and withdrawal screen: Most assets have a Deposit and Withdraw button that you can tap to increase or decrease your allocation to Savings. These are the assets used for lending in Nexo & Compound. For these assets, you can choose a portion of your funds to allocate by tapping Deposit and then choosing a sum to allocate to Savings.

Activation screen: Staking assets, namely Tezos for now, have an “Activate” button instead of a deposit button because you can’t choose a portion of your assets to stake — it’s all or nothing. You simply need to activate your savings once per asset and your wallet remains activated forever. There’s no downside to this since the funds never leave your ZenGo wallet and are always accessible and liquid. If you send them out of your ZenGo wallet, you’ll simply stop earning the rewards on that amount.

Where can I see my savings deposit and rewards?

To see your rewards just go to the Savings tab in ZenGo. All the active deposits and rewards are presented there.

Note that the savings balance for lending does not appear in your wallet balance because the funds are located in Nexo and Compound (which you can also see in your activity history).

Staking funds, however, will appear in your wallet balance.

How do I get paid interest and rewards?

For lending in Compound, your interest accrues in real-time — every few seconds — and you receive it as soon as you withdraw from Savings into your wallet. In addition, Compound rewards you in COMP tokens which are paid when you make your withdrawal. More details can be found on the Compound website.

For lending in Nexo, your interest accrues once per day and gets added to your lending balance automatically in BTC, so you can earn compound interest.

For staking, there's an initial waiting period of approximately 33 days before receiving your first reward payment. After that, you should receive a reward payment from the validator approximately every 3 days which gets deposited directly into your wallet.

You can see all of your activities and earning history on the Activity and Savings screens in the app.

Are my funds liquid while in Savings?

Your funds are always accessible from your ZenGo wallet while in Savings. All transactions are on-chain and only you have the ability to move your crypto. That said, there are slight differences between lending and staking in this regard.

Funds that you’ve provided in Compound are essentially stored in a smart contract, so before being able to use them for a different purpose (i.e. sending them somewhere else), you need to withdraw them from the smart contract back to your ZenGo wallet. Similarly, funds that you’ve lent to Nexo are stored with Nexo so you first need to withdraw them to your ZenGo wallet before sending them elsewhere.

On the other hand, funds that are delegated to staking are never sent out of your wallet. You only delegate your voting rights for the asset, not the asset itself. So you don’t need to do any special withdrawal action to be able to send them out of your ZenGo wallet.

Are there any fees associated with Savings?

The only fees you need to pay are network fees (not paid to ZenGo but to the blockchain networks) to complete your deposit and withdraw transactions or to activate staking.

For Eth deposits (Compound), the fees are deducted from your wallet savings

For BTC saving

For Nexo lending, you get one free withdrawal per calendar month which means that the network fees are waived.

Which assets are supported in ZenGo Savings?

For earning interest through lending, we currently support Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), Dai (DAI), USD Coin (USDC), 0x (ZRX), and Basic Attention Token (BAT).

For staking, we currently support Tezos (XTZ).

For BTC savings, the following countries are not yet supported.

Who holds my assets?

For lending, your Ethereum-based assets are held in a Compound smart contract and your Bitcoin is held with Nexo. For staking, your assets are held in your ZenGo wallet.

Where is ZenGo Savings available?

Everywhere the ZenGo wallet is available!

Is there a minimum or maximum deposit amount?

Yes, for Ethereum-based assets there is a minimum deposit of 250 USD because network fees have been relatively high for some time.

For Bitcoin the minimum deposit is 0.002 BTC.

For Tezos the minimum deposit is 1 XTZ.

Is there a minimum or maximum Withdrawal amount?

For Bitcoin, the minimum daily withdrawal is 0.0011 BTC, and the maximal daily withdrawal amount is $20,000

There is no minimal withdrawal for Ethereum-based assets.

Is there a fixed loan term?

No, there’s no fixed amount of time that you must keep your crypto in Savings. You can deposit and withdraw anytime.

Are there risks involved?

Lending: Since lending involves sending your crypto to a 3rd party (smart contract or company), there are certain counterparty risks involved. We recommend doing your own research into the various aspects of counterparty risk before making any financial decisions.

Staking: Since you don't need to part with your assets in order to delegate them, your funds always remain in the safety of your ZenGo wallet. This means that validators do not have access to your funds, and you earn the rewards with no counterparty risk.

If you have any further questions, contact us anytime at or through our live support inside the app.

Did this answer your question?