=Get paid in XEM
Since XEM and NEM are still so young, the value is still relatively low and you might be able to get XEM at a good price. If, for example, you had been paid US$90 in XEM in April 2017, you would have been given 3,000 XEM. In September, those 3,000 XEM would amount to US$900 if sold. Getting paid in XEM could be a good step, not only for the future of the network but also to build your wallet’s value. If the value of the coin increases, so will the value of whatever amount of XEM you hold. Remember, though, that there’s no guarantee that the coin will gain value.

=Get Vested
As more users join the NEM network and start using XEM, another way to make some extra, free money is to begin harvesting. As explained above, harvesting allows you to earn small amounts of XEM for helping to maintain the system’s security and accountability. But to do this, you will need to have a minimum of 10,000 XEM vested. At the current value of the coin (September 2017), that’s US$3,000, so it’s no easy feat if you’re looking to simply purchase the coins from an exchange.

As the time of writing this in September 2017, NEM and its XEM coin are still very much in the early phases of the platform. While NEM has been adopted by Mijin, XEM is only currently being used to pay other members of NEM and to pay transaction fees on the NEM platform.

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Ripple Labs explained why it used the escrow arrangement. The company claims that it has been "a responsible steward of XRP supply for almost five years and has clearly demonstrated a tremendous track record of investing in and supporting the XRP ecosystem." Yet it admitted that concerns about a potential flood of the cryptocurrency onto the market could harm current investors in Ripple.

Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system that also supports fiat currency, cryptocurrency, and commodity exchanges and remittances. The native cryptocurrency of the platform are Ripples, abbreviated as XRP.

Ripple was made by the Ripple company, but can function without it due to its shared ledger. Used by companies such as UniCredit, UBS and Santander, Ripple has been increasingly adopted by banks and payment networks as settlement infrastructure technology because of the payment’s speed within the network, stability of the technology, and the ability to its coin as a bridge currency.

There were 100 billion XRP created at Ripple's inception, which is the currency’s cap according to the protocol's rules. Of the 100 billion created, 20 billion XRP were retained by the creators and the remaining 80% of the total were given to Ripple Labs for sale.

is a Cryptonote algorithm based cryptocurrency, it relies on Ring Signatures in order to provide a certain degree of privacy when making a transaction. Monero is a Proof of Work cryptocurrency that can be miner with computational power from a CPU or GPU. There are currently no ASICs for Monero, which means that anyone with a computer can mine it.

The first thing you need to think about is if you are going to mine solo or on a pool. Mining on a pool usually comes with a fee but also has it's advantages. Users that don't have enough computational power may have to wait long periods of time before getting a reward, in a pool users pull their efforts together in order to reduce variance and have a steady flow of income. Users that have enough hardware or simply want to mine solo can also benefit from solo pools which function in the same way as normal solo mining, but don't require users to run a full node or store the entire blockchain. We are going to use MoneroHash for this guide, but you can use any pool you like.

Monero (XMR) is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on privacy and decentralization that runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and FreeBSD. Monero uses a public ledger to record transactions while new units are created through a process called mining. Monero aims to improve on existing cryptocurrency design by obscuring sender, recipient and amount of every transaction made as well as making the mining process more egalitarian.[1]

The focus on privacy has attracted illicit use by people interested in evading law enforcement.[2][3] The egalitarian mining process made it viable to distribute the mining effort opening new funding avenues for both legitimate online publishers and malicious hackers who covertly embed mining code into websites and apps.

Dash is designed to have a total supply of 18 million coins.

At present, the circulating supply of Dash is 7.4 million, and it will reach 18 million in the year 2300 (when none of us will be alive).

Dash has a variable block reward which decreases at a 7.1 % rate each year. The average block mining time is 2.5 minutes on the Dash blockchain, which makes it four times faster than Bitcoin.