As the world of games/entertainment/fun and money continue to merge, NFTs are possibly the most accessible way for the average person to participate in the crypto space, enjoy themselves, and make money.

However, make no mistake, the NFT traders who consistently make profits are doing it on a professional level. They have a lot of knowledge on how NFTs work and what drives their value, and most importantly, they have the right tools at their disposal.

I’ve spent more than $500,000 on NFT projects over the past year, and have spent countless hours analyzing projects and trying out various tools to try and gain an edge in the market.

In this article, I’ll focus on NFT trading and analytics tools and why you need to use them if you hope to make money as an NFT trader.

Luckily, since all data related to NFT transactions is publicly available on the blockchain, we can have a very accurate picture of market conditions, provided we are using the right tools and we know what to look for. In that sense, the NFT market is very transparent and doesn’t give anyone a significant advantage when compared to the rest of the players.

As for tools, you’ll find a good mix of free and premium tools. I would recommend you pay for the tools you need, they usually more than pay for themselves within a few days if you’re an active trader. Even if you aren’t active on a daily basis, they will help you avoid costly mistakes and help you do enough research so as to allow you to invest in a project from a very informed position.

Remember that before you dive into the specialized tools I mentioned in this post, you should really be following conversations on Twitter, Discord, and YouTube, where most NFT platforms and enthusiasts spend their time. Oftentimes spending time on these platforms is what enables you to reach conviction about a project. Then you can follow that up with the tools to find the right tokens at the right time.

Read more about how to evaluate an NFT project, I share all the key indicators I use in that post.

Token Trackers

Token trackers are the most direct window into a blockchain and all the token transactions that are happening in real-time, as well as all historical transactions that have ever been done. As the blockchain is open, you can look up any transaction or address and view all the details about it. Token trackers also give us the ability to read smart contracts, which is important if you want to audit a contract before interacting with it, or if you simply want to take a look under the hood and check a few important parameters about a project.

Etherscan

Etherscan is perhaps the most technical tool in this list. It’s a block explorer at its essence, allowing you to view the details of any transaction that goes onto the Ethereum blockchain in real-time. It also offers a token tracker for any Ethereum based tokens, and it provides access to all ERC-721 token (the non-fungible token standard) contracts.

The latter is useful, for example, if you want to mint NFTs directly from a project’s contract. I’ve sometimes gone down this route and many advanced NFT traders prefer to mint this way as they can verify that the contract is the right one, and fees might also differ slightly.

I highly suggest you learn how to read a smart contract if you’re going to be getting serious about NFTs. I discuss smart contracts and other technical details of NFTs in my podcast episode with Jalil from PunkScape.

One frequent use case for Etherscan for me is to check the gas fees paid by myself or other NFT buyers. The amount of these fees can really make a dent in the potential profitability of any flips, and you should really learn how to control gas fees parameters in MetaMask if you are not already familiar with those settings.

I also like to use Etherscan to look up a token’s metadata. For my NFTs, I like to ensure that the image associated with the NFT is either stored on-chain (rarely the case, except for a few notable exceptions such as Crypto punks, Nouns, and Chain Runners. I also like to check if there is any mention of the license within the contract itself. Although most NFT investors don’t care about the license of the NFT they are buying, I give a lot of importance to it, and seeing it hard-coded into the contract gives me a lot of assurance about knowing exactly what I’m buying into. I haven’t yet seen this in any project I’ve looked at, but I hope it will become more common in the future.

Most if not all of the tools I will be referencing in this article can be thought of as a more user-friendly interface built on top of Etherscan, and many of them use the APIs provided by Etherscan to feed their tools with the latest data.

Etherscan

Analysis Tools

By analysis tools, I mean tools that allow me to get a nice overview on the overall state of the market, or to look into the numbers behind a particular collection. These are essential tools for every collector and NFT trader and you should use them daily. In my ideal setup, I’d have a few monitors constantly displaying some of my favorite dashboards.

Dune Analytics

This is possibly the most well-known tool when it comes to free NFT analytics. It’s a free tool that makes complex queries more accessible to the non-technical person and handles all the background tasks of actually fetching the data. So all you need to do is play around with that data and build a dashboard that suits your needs. You can also customize other people’s dashboards.

For example, you can take the Interactive NFT Floor Tracker dashboard and set up all your favorite projects so you can then easily track their floor prices.

Having said that, it’s not exactly beginner-friendly, you will need some querying skills when building a dashboard of your own. On the other hand, most projects already have user-built dashboards, so you can just find a ready-made dashboard and use it in most cases.

Dune Analytics

Nansen

I consider Nansen to be the industry-standard analytics tool in the Ethereum space, but it’s squarely aimed at professional investors and traders. The pricing reflects that, and you need some skills to use it as well, since it’s a generic tool that is not tailored specifically for NFTs.

This works like a regular web2 web app, so you’ll need to subscribe to one of the three available tiers and pay monthly or yearly in USD or crypto. The standard tier costs $149/month, VIP is set at $1,490 and Alpha is subject to a waitlist and costs $3,000/month. For most people, Standard is sufficient, but then you hit some limits really quickly, for example, you can only have 3 custom smart alerts. For NFT traders, this really is a big limitation as they typically like to follow many more wallets and contracts to see what the big guys are doing before the market realizes it.

Apart from these gripes, this really is a super polished analytics tool, and you’ll find good research pieces and a blog on their website as well. As you’d expect, they also have a Discord server, although it’s pretty quiet, especially for NFTs, so I wouldn’t say it adds much value.

Nansen

ICY Tools

This is possibly the closest analytics tool to Nansen. It’s more specific to NFTs and significantly cheaper.

You can either buy a weekly pass or buy an ICY Founders Club NFT that gives you lifetime access, plus you can trade it on OpenSea. Login is in typical web3 fashion, so you’ll need to connect your wallet in order to get access to the premium features.

As a free user, you can get a taste of what the tool can do, but it really comes to life once you’re on a subscription or hold the Founders Club NFT.

The ICY Founders club consists of a collection of 1,700 generative membership cards that the 1,649 early access buyers lifetime access to icy.tools with a transferrable NFT. The remaining 51 will be used for promotions and giveaways in the coming months and years.

The ICY Tools Discord server is a valuable resource for people using ICY Tools, and even more so if you hold a Founders Club token. Only those holding the token will be able to gain access to the Founders Club channels. Access is granted automatically once you connect to the server using the wallet that contains your membership card. The server uses Collab.land for verification, so there are no security concerns when connecting.

The community is fantastic and is a perfect learning resource for anyone who wants to take NFT investing seriously and use tools to their maximum advantage. Keep in mind that the NFT space moves extremely fast, and one of the best ways to ensure you become successful as an investor is to get information fast, or to have superior data at hand compared to the rest of the market. The ICY Tools app coupled with the Discord community gives you both of those elements.

Moreover, as I mentioned, ICY Founders Club tokens are tradeable on OpenSea, and I expect them to rise in value as the NFT space grows and more features are added to ICY Tools. I really like the artwork, even though that is not the main feature of this NFT of course, so that’s another bonus. You can use them as your background banner on Twitter or other socials, for example, and they come with a number of traits and rarity levels, which you can rank and compare on Trait Sniper.

One other benefit of the Founders Club NFT is that you get a say in what features get developed next. By holding the NFT, you become a stakeholder in the success of the project, therefore aligning you with the incentives of the developers. It makes sense for the holders and developers to work together to ensure everyone’s needs are covered.

The Discord community server has many channels where you can glean alpha on new projects, be alerted of new mints and upcoming drops, get access to whitelists or ask questions and discuss relevant topics. Honestly, access to all these channels are enough to justify the club token’s cost, even though the main product is the app. It’s just a no-brainer for me to get the lifetime membership.

Again, you can also pay by the month but I’d really recommend the lifetime membership if you can get hold of one.

ICY Tools | Twitter | Discord

Spr3adsh33t’s Insights

BAYC holder and bot developer Spr3adsh33t is behind this unique project, that relies on Discord bots to provide the analytics that NFT collectors and traders seek. Discord bots can be quite powerful and for those NFT traders that spend most of their days roaming around Discord, it’s super comfortable to have access to analytics right within Discord.  The best way to understand how the Spr3adsh33t’s Insights Discord server and bots work is to check out the Quickstart Guide.

Spr3adsh33t is also a generative artist, and he created the PERLINs collection, which you can mint for 0.05 ETH or buy on OpenSea.

The premium membership to the Discord server costs $20 per month or $200 per year. If you hold a PERLIN NFT you will get a free month. Upgrading to premium gives more information, utility, and insights than Basic Bots. Some bots are also only available to Premium Members – including the Interactive Bots.

The bots can also be rented out to alpha Discord servers, so reach out to Spr3adsh33t if that’s something you’re interested in.

Spr3adsh33t’s Insights

NonFungible

I like keeping an eye on the Market History area of this site, as it gives me a very good overall picture of the NFT space during the past week. I can quickly see what the top sales were, and more importantly, whether market volume is trending upwards or downwards, as well as which projects are doing really well.

NonFungible

NFT Stats

NFT Stats includes a lot of free and easy-to-read data about NFT collections, including sales charts and a rarity explorer. I like to keep an eye on the pages of the biggest projects I’m invested in, as it easily shows me some important data like the overall price and volume chart as well as the top-selling items in the last 30 days. Here’s the Doodles project page, as an example.

NFT Stats

Moby

Moby offers real-time NFT minting insights, wallet watch lists, instant notifications and price trends.

I see it as somewhat of a competitor to ICY Tools, but to me Moby is not yet as useful as its main competitor.

Moby

NFT Charts

This is one of the newest analytics tools in the NFT space and is extremely polished. I love having a look at the charts and information available about every project here. I use this for monitoring the projects that I am most committed too. Typically these are projects where I have a significant portion of money invested and I need to be sure of where things are going, either to take evasive action or to double down by potentially buying more tokens. Incredibly, this is a free tool.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few projects included in this platform. A similar site is Flips.Finance, and that one includes many more projects.

NFT Charts

Discovery Tools

It is a known fact that the biggest profits accrue to those who go in early in projects, especially if they manage to do mint their tokens and not buy on the secondary market. This requires you to know exactly which are the best upcoming projects well in advance, giving you the time to study the artwork/utility, get involved in their community, and possibly get on the whitelist. This is the area where I feel there is the most noise and is dangerous territory for new entrants, as they typically don’t know how to evaluate projects. Given that they don’t even have the volume and floor price reference that builds up when a project is already trading on the secondary market, the discovery stage can be really hard to figure out.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while there are a number of tools to help us out, this remains one of the most human-intensive parts of the job, and while I own and use the tools below, I’d really like to see them improve as I still spend too much time on this work.

Cryptoscores

Cryptoscores is my favorite project discovery tool. Before discovering Cryptoscores, I never used such tools as they were too noisy for me, and I am very well-connected in the NFT space, meaning that it is very rare that I miss any upcoming good NFT drops. However, now that I have Cryptoscores, I check it daily. The upcoming projects list gives me an idea of where the space is going, and which types of projects are launching. But more importantly, it’s not just a firehouse of upcoming projects. The team behind Cryptoscores have a background in data mining and statistics, which enabled them to produce a tool that is great for NFT quantitative analysis.

You can see some of these innovations in the upcoming mints section. Whereas other calendar websites just blast you with an infinite list of unsorted projects, Cryptoscores applies some algorithms on each project to find out which are most likely to sell out and gives them a rating. You can then use these scores to figure out which ones you want to spend time researching and trying to get whitelist for.

Cryptoscores

NFSea Tools

NFSea is an NFT deal finder; a hybrid of (and a simpler version of) Nansen, Trait Sniper and NFT Calendar. It’s a site you can use to find new projects, analyze revealed and unrevealed projects and it also shows indicators of higher or lower probability to become profitable.

Comparing to its counterparts it comes at a cheaper price while doing a few more things that others don’t. Free users can stay updated with trending, minting, upcoming drops while paid users can see charts, graphs, and second by second updates. NFSea takes real-time information directly from the blockchain and does the number crunching for you to generate actionable statistics. 

I personally like using the Mints tab that shows me which projects have been minting, and most importantly, the % of total tokens that have been minted. This gives me an idea of how successful the project launch has been, and is information that I can then use to decide whether I should also mint or not.

NFSea Tools

NFT Go

I’d say that NFT Go is another take on discovery. This website adds several layers of context to the usual analytics that you’d expect to find, for example, whale tracking, drop curation, and a very nice dashboard that gives a user-friendly snapshot of what’s happening in the space. I also like its portfolio/address analysis page. Another very cool page is the profit leaderboard.

The very top of the homepage gives you a 30-second update on what’s happening in the past 24 hours, so it’s a good thing to check at the start of your day.

NFT Go

NFT Evening

This is a site that showcases upcoming NFT-related events and NFT drops. It also provides news and big announcements, as well as the possibility to subscribe to a very decent newsletter.

NFT Calendar is another similar website that is just a real-time list of upcoming projects. The problem with these kinds of websites is that they are not curated and thus a new person to NFTs wouldn’t be able to distinguish the good from the bad in most cases.

Even worse, they are usually filled with promoted projects who pay for the top spots. Low quality or scammy projects are the ones primarily incentivized to use such sites to promote their drops as they rely on pre-release hype to make their money.

I prefer NFT Evening over NFT Calendar due to the fact that it at least offers some beginners guides about NFTs for newcomers and filtering facilities. For example, you can filter just upcoming conferences, or upcoming metaverse NFTs.

NFT Evening

Automation Tools

Trading NFTs can be very time-consuming, and it can also be a very time-sensitive job. By having things automated, you can go to sleep, knowing that you’ve already set up a bot that will do your bidding while you take a rest, spotting and snapping up good deals according to the parameters you had previously set.

NFT Pirates

NFT Pirates is an OpenSea bidding bot. Unfortunately, this is a Windows-only tool, so if you use a Mac you’re out of luck unless you’re familiar with setting up a Virtual Machine to use this tool.

While there are many traders using such software (I receive tons of automated offers below floor for my NFTs daily), it was surprisingly difficult for me to find a decent one for sale, in fact, this is the only one I found so far that delivers on its promises.

So how does this work?

There are two pieces of software you can buy from NFT Pirates – a Bid bot and a Sniper Bot.

With the Bid Bot the idea is fairly simple. The goal is to get a discount on the floor price. So you use the bot to make multiple automated bids on many tokens of a project, all below floor. If a holder gets shaky feet, your offer might be enough to tip him over into selling to you at a great price. This is known as paper handing in the NFT space.

Pricing for the Bid bot range from 0.75 to 2.5 ETH, with the higher tiers including 1 on 1 Support and Mentoring, which is incredible for those who are just starting out.

The Sniper Bot, on the other hand, is used to immediately purchase any listing below a certain price. There are many holders that question the ethics of using such a bot, but it is totally legal and not against OpenSea terms. The reason why these bots are so disliked, is that their users regularly get incredible deals when people fat-finger their OpenSea listings. For example, you will find many stories of BAYC holders forgetting a digit when typing in a price, for example putting in 7 instead of 77 ETH. A sniper bot, set to buy anything below the BAYC floor (say 50 ETH) would immediately buy that 7 ETH listing without giving the holder the chance to realize his mistake and cancel the erroneous listing.

Pricing for the Sniper bot range from 1 to 1.95 ETH, with the higher tiers including 1 on 1 Support and Mentoring, which is incredible for those who are just starting out.

NFT Pirates

Rarity Tools

Rarity Tools

This is the most famous rarity tracker. It is so well-known that new projects actually pay to get listed there, as it serves to give exposure to a project. As an interface, it’s not my favorite, but since many projects collaborate directly with the platform to release their rankings, it is often the most accurate tool to get the rarities checked.

Unlike Trait Sniper, Rarity Tools is not useful for new projects when you want to snipe mispriced items, as new collections typically appear several weeks after launch. Rarity Sniffer, Golom, and Moby are similar sites.

Rarity Tools

Sniping Tools

Sniping is perhaps the most exciting aspect of being an NFT trader. I’ve always loved finding good deals, and tools like the ones below make it very easy to dial in the parameters to find the best deals on the market. Professional NFT snipers use these tools mainly when a project reveals, as they want to be among the first to find rare items, buy them up, and immediately put them back on sale at a healthy profit.

For long-term collectors like me, on the other hand, these tools are still handy. While all the data they show you is available on OpenSea itself, they repurpose that data to make it easier to find deals and understand what’s happening on a second-by-second basis.

Trait Sniper

Trait Sniper is an essential tool if you want to access rarity rankings right after a project’s reveal. While there are many such rarity trackers, this is one of the fastest in getting new collections online. The Discord channel is very active, so you can report bugs or request your favorite projects to be analyzed, and the founders will get back to you in no time.

The main use of this tool, as the name indicates, is to snipe mispriced NFTs. That is why it is so important to have the rarity ranks shown as fast as possible after reveal, before holders have the chance to realize that they hold rare items and adjust the sale price on OpenSea.

Their Discord server is a great way to learn your way around sniping. You will see other snipers sharing their profit-sharing screenshots on a daily basis so you can learn from the strategies they used. There is also a daily calendar, reveal alerts, and all the other features you’d expect from a community that is focused on putting you in the best position to snipe the best deals.

If you have a good amount of ETH and you’re interested in sniping, this tool, like many others on this list, will easily pay for itself within a few days providing you put in the work to study and and be there when projects launch. Sniping on project reveals, unfortunately, is not something that can be automated. There is a lot of human subjectivity when sniping, but that’s why I like it, as once you’re competing with automated bots, it’s hard for anyone to make profits. When you need to use your research skills, it’s more likely that you can get some type of edge over others and nail consistent profits.

Logging in to the app is done using your wallet, and subscriptions cost 0.2 ETH for 1 week and 0.65 ETH for 30 days. There is no lifetime option, unfortunately.

Lastly, Trait Sniper also has a downloadable Chrome extension available, which is immensely helpful to me while I browse OpenSea. It shows the current floor price and also the rank of an item. These details are overlaid onto the normal OpenSea display for convenience. You can also use the extension to calculate the value of your portfolio based on floor price.

Trait Sniper | Discord | Twitter

NFT Nerds

This is another essential tool for those who take trading NFTs as serious business. It was built by mathematicians and coders who aspire to create the best tool in the NFT space. Having provided substantial feedback to the team, I can verify that they are very enthusiastic and keen to incorporate new features requested by their users.

Unlike Trait Sniper, which frequently requires the user to ask the team to refresh a collection to get the latest data, NFTNerds charts are always a reflection of live conditions; syncing happens automatically under the hood.

Not all projects can be found on this site, but you can request which next ones will be included by joining the Discord server of NFTNerds. The server is a great way to meet other NFT enthusiasts and learn from their trading experience. The profit-sharing channel, in particular, can be very inspiring and shows what you can do once you have a strategy in place and work hard.

There is also an Academy category within Discord which has several subchannels that focus on teaching you how the tool and the NFT space in general work.

I use this tool to get a real-time view of what’s happening within a project. By looking at the dashboard of a project I can quickly get a feel for where things are going, and it’s not the first time I snipe an item priced below the OpenSea floor as soon as it gets listed. OpenSea sometimes takes longer to show new listings, while NFT Nerds shows them faster. So the floor you’re seeing on OpenSea might actually be lower than what’s shown, and NFT Nerds allows you to see the real floor.

You can purchase directly from NFT Nerds, which takes roughly 4 seconds from spotting a listing to approving the transaction.

Rarity rankings are also built into the app, and usually use the official rankings. This means one less tab to check, and the ability to make faster trades.

NFT Nerds can also be used to discover trending collections, which is a great way to make sure you don’t miss out on any new collections, especially if you’re an active NFT day trader. You can also monitor the current gas prices directly within the app, and use custom gas fees for your purchases if you want.

To start using the premium version of NFT Nerds, you need to purchase a pass and then use your wallet to login and unlock the premium features. Genesis Passes can be found on OpenSea.

This is a tool that still has many more features to come, but is already extremely useful. Judging by the speed at which Genesis Passes get sold every time a new batch is released, I’m not the only one to love NFT Nerds.

If you can get hold of a Genesis pass I would highly suggest you buy one.

NFT Nerds | Discord | Twitter

SuperSea

The free SuperSea Chrome extension adds a number of features to make it more convenient, fun, and profitable to browse the OpenSea marketplace:

• Floor Prices – floor prices for your tokens and portfolio value calculation.
• Skip OpenSea Cache – fetch asset images directly from source (OS takes long to update on reveal).
• Listing Notifications – get notified the precise moment an asset within your given price range is listed.
• Scam Protection – extremely useful when buying bundles, as scams are so common.
• Mass-refresh and Mass-reveal – mass-Queue items for OpenSea metadata refresh and automatically load all images from source while OpenSea is updating their cache.

With the premium version, you will get access to more features like Rarity Ranks and Quick Buy and enhanced Listing Notifications.

You can buy lifetime access on OpenSea (or mint it for 0.5 ETH while they last), or a monthly subscription for 0.1 ETH.

SuperSea

Ninjalerts

Ninjalerts is a smartphone app that can track all sorts of parameters. It is most commonly used to track the wallets of whales, influencers, and media personalities in order to know before everyone else what they’re doing.

With that information in hand, you can, for example, understand which project is going to experience a hype cycle and take a stake before the prices claim. As always, the data can only take you so far, you also need to put in a dose of your interpretation skills in order to profit consistently.

The nice thing is that it’s a mobile app, which in my view makes it very convenient to get alerts through push notifications.

Right now you can only buy a lifetime license from OpenSea, but they will also have a monthly subscription option in the future.

Ninjalerts

Portfolio Valuation Tools

It’s very easy to lose track of how much you spent on NFTs, and whether you are in the green or in the red at a particular point in time. That’s why it is essential to keep on top of your portfolio.

The two main tools you need for this purpose are a valuation tool, and another tool that gives you a history of all your transactions, including gas spent. There will always be some work involved when compiling data for paying your taxes or even calculating accurate profit figures, but having good tools will turn this task from impossible to manageable.

NFT Bank

This is a good tool to get an overall valuation of your portfolio, as well as to find any discounted NFTs. It only supports a select number of projects, usually the bigger ones, but the team has great plans for this tool, and its one of the only ones I know that are focused on portfolios and valuations.

It’s a nice tool to keep track of your purchases and sales too, and the corresponding profits or losses made, so it can help you prepare your taxes.

NFT Bank

WGMI

WGMI is one of the top tools for managing your listings on marketplaces. You can easily monitor floor price changes, as well as look into all your listings and check whether someone else has undercut your price, based on the most valuable traits of your tokens.

This tool has been created by BAYC member @NFTommo and is also a perfect tool for calculating the value of your portfolio. You can use the project’s floor price, the best trait price, or an average of the two when calculating each individual token’s value. Due to its customizability, it’s the tool I use most for calculating my portfolio’s value. It also provides a handy CSV export facility.

Once you get the hang of using this tool, it can become one of the most important dashboards to keep open at all times, as it gives you a great overview of everything that’s happening in the market and also in the projects you’ve invested in.

Lifetime passes are available on OpenSea, or you can pay for access on a monthly or yearly basis.

WGMI

DappRadar

DappRadar is one of those DeFi tools that can be used to manage your overall portfolio. I use it to check what airdrops I can claim and also to keep an eye on my NFT portfolio. DappRadar can estimate the total value of your NFT portfolio and also give you more information about each individual project you invested in, for example the total amount spent, current holdings and P&L. Right now the financial view is generated using floor price but a more accurate value estimator based on trait floor will be added soon.

You can also swap tokens directly from DappRadar instead of going to a separate DEX.

DappRadar

Zerion

Zerion is similar to DappRadar in that it can manage your overall portfolio and connect you to DeFi. If you dabble in both NFTs and DeFi then I would highly recommend you use one of these tools. I’m not a DeFi power user, but I do have a few farming strategies going on, chief of which the $LOOKS token. Apps like Zerion and DappRadar automatically fetch the data related to such farmed strategies and display them in your overall portfolio.

Of course, you can also view your NFTs, although this is not the best feature of Zerion at the moment. What is a very cool feature, on the other hand, is the ability to show off your NFT collection directly from your iPhone home screen.

Users can now create custom widgets showcasing their favorite NFTs from the Zerion iPhone, iPad and macOS apps. This ‘NFT gallery’ widget works just like our portfolio monitoring and gas price widgets and lets you set your NFTs to rotate so your collection is always on display!

Crucially, only NFTs owners can display NFTs. When you connect your wallet to Zerion containing your NFTs, we verify your ownership to ensure that if (and only if) you own it, you can display it.

Zerion

Zapper

Zapper is one more alternative to Zerion and DappRadar. You can basically pick one of the three according to which one you like best.

I think the best feature of Zapper as it relates to NFTs is the History tab, as it gives you a very clear picture of all the transactions you’ve done. I especially like the fact that the gas fee is shown separately in a very clear way.

If you’re using MetaMask with multiple addresses, Zapper picks them up automatically, so you don’t have to worry about that, and of course, it shows you your balances on multiple chains.

As an overall dashboard, this is my favorite of the three I mentioned.

Zapper

Peer-to-Peer NFT Trading Tools

You will want to use a P2P trading tool when you reach a deal with someone else to swap NFTs or to make a private deal in exchange for ETH (or another cryptocurrency).

Typically, you would have reached the deal by meeting someone in real life, say at a conference, or online via project Discord channels, or even by directly reaching out to someone who has NFTs that you’re interested in listed on a marketplace. Some NFT collectors include their details (Twitter, Discord username etc.) in their marketplace profile, making it easy to reach out to them and broker a private deal.

If you’re just selling or gifting NFTs to friends where trusting the other party is absolutely not an issue, you can just do a manual transfer via MetaMask or OpenSea as it will be cheaper. When you use the tools in this section, you will be interacting with a smart contract, whose aim is to take out the trust element from the transaction, but since there is a more complex transaction involved you will need to pay a higher gas fee than for a simple transfer.

SudoSwap

Sudoswap was created by well-known developer 0xmons in April of 2021. I use SudoSwap whenever I reach a private deal for an NFT transfer with a user off OpenSea. Typically this happens over Twitter DMs or in Discord channels. Once we agree on a price, the seller sets up a swap, shares the trade code and the buyer completes the trade. There are no fees for using this service.

You can trade multiple items at once and the assets never leave your wallet until the swap is accepted by both parties. You only pay gas for approves and the swap itself, so it’s quite gas-efficient, and definitely cheaper than transacting within OpenSea.

Sudoswap uses the open-source 0x protocol to create and settle swaps between any combination of ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens.

This is the cheapest way to make a private swap in terms of gas fees, when compared to the other tools available. The platform doesn’t even charge any fee for swaps, you only pay for gas. However, the interface might not be the easiest to use, as it’s got a very retro feel and needs a slight learning curve. I’m very comfortable using it however, and found it pretty straightforward to figure out, so it’s my default choice.

SudoSwap

NFT Trader

NFTTrader was the first P2P NFT trading platform as it was launched in January of 2021 by a team of four founders. The team created their own custom asset-swap smart contracts that allows users to swap any combination of ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens, as well as ETH.

The NFT Trader website is pretty cluttered in my opinion, as they promote their own NFTs. These NFTs are pretty worthless, so don’t waste your time on them, unless you make many swaps, as holders of the Trade Squad NFT pay no trading fees. Even then, though, SudoSwap gas fees would be cheaper.

NFT Trader

Swap.Kiwi

Swap.kiwi is the youngest platform of the bunch as it was created in June of 2021 by ape punk niftynaut.

It’s backed by a registered company that developed its own smart contracts to execute swaps between any combination of ERC721 and ETH, and I think it’s easily the most user-friendly swap tool out there. Apart from having a very slick interface, it also provides tutorials for people who are newer to Web3 and NFTs.

Swap.Kiwi

Miscellaneous Tools

Genie

Genie allows you to batch list and batch buy NFTs. This saves you time and gas fees. It’s one of my most frequently used apps as my investment strategy regularly sees me go for 3-10 items at one go when buying. Since NFTs are spread across several marketplaces (OpenSea, LooksRare, Rarible etc), and will be even more so in the future if my thinking is correct, having the ability to use a tool that scans all the marketplaces is great.

With certain projects, you can also perform bulk swaps. Let’s say I want to get into the Doodles project and want to buy 3 NFTs from that collection, but I don’t want to use or don’t have the necessary ETH to do so. However, I do have several other NFTs that I wouldn’t mind getting rid of. So what I can do with Genie is to pool my ETH plus the NFTs I want to sell, and on the other side select the Doodles I want to acquire. If the tool can find the right match for the amount I have (ETH + NFT valuation), I can go ahead and perform the swap in one transaction.

My biggest use for this tool, however, is to batch list items. I usually list my NFTs for a few days at max, and things can get really tedious when you own many tokens and want to relist them every few days. Genie allows me to make short work of that task.

Genie

Fees.wtf

Here’s another cool and sobering tool that builds upon the Etherscan (and CoinGecko) APIs to show you how much gas fees you’ve spent since you’ve been trading NFTs.

All you need to do is connect your wallet and the fees are calculated in a second. You can also claim the WTF token based on the amount of fees you paid in the past. That token can then be staked, and you can also claim an NFT that can be then used to access forthcoming premium features on this site.

Fees.wtf

Paperhands

This is a tool that makes it easy to calculate your worst and best trades as well as celebrate your long-term holdings. You have three options to select once you connect your wallet:

• worst trade (paper hands)
• best hold (diamond hands)
• biggest profit take

This is an interesting way of viewing your trading activity. The worst trade is not necessarily the one where you made a realized loss. For many collectors, it turns out to be an NFT that they sold too early.

For me, it is a mutant ape that I sold after just 2.5 days as I was trying to play the flipping game. I made a nice profit in just two days, but I missed out on a huge run in the next month or so, meaning I would have been much better off just holding off to that token.

On the other hand, by far my best play in the NFT game is my entering the Doodles project with total conviction early on and holding on to my purchases even as the floor price rose.

This tool, in combination with the previously mentioned fees.wtf, makes it obvious to me that I’m much better off being a collector than a flipper. When you factor in the risk, time, fees, and missed opportunities versus holding, it just doesn’t work out that well for me.

It might be a different case for you, and I definitely enjoyed the experience and the adrenaline rush of flipping, but long-term holding is better suited to my skills and character.

Paperhands.gg

Honorable Mentions

• Sunspot – alerts you in real-time when NFTs are listed and sold on OpenSea, depending on the parameters you set.

Wrapping Up

Do you use any other tools that are not listed in this article? Let me know, I’d love to check them out and possibly add them to this list.

Towards the end of 2021, I went down the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) rabbit hole and absolutely loved it. I haven’t stopped since and have been investing most of my time into this segment of crypto.

I’ve been working on this article as a way of doing my own research on projects and also sharing what I’m doing with others who might want to do something similar. I am not trying to convince anyone that NFTs are the best investment; if you enjoy learning about NFTs and like some of the projects I mention, you can do your own research and decide for yourself.

NFT technology can be used for many use cases, so for the purposes of this article, I am really talking about its digital art component.

These kinds of NFTs can be found on sites such as OpenSea, SuperRare, Rarible and Foundation.

Both Coinbase (read my review) and Kraken (read my review) will also be launching their own NFT marketplaces, making it even easier to buy and trade NFTs in 2022.

Read more: What are NFTs? – My guide to investing in NFTs

NFTs are a wonderful world where you can really end up spending all your waking hours immersed in learning, discussing with others on Discord, and admiring the artwork in your portfolio. On the other hand, just keeping up with the channels of a few projects (for example, the ones that you buy into) can be a challenge.

I haven’t been captivated by anything in such a way since I first came across Bitcoin itself several years ago.

The NFT space comes with its own lingo (gm, gn, wagmi, ngmi etc) and the main hangout spot (apart from Twitter) is Discord.

Of course, it can be pretty challenging explaining why you’re spending so much money on JPEGs to your family and friends, as shown in this semi-joke tweet:

So let’s go ahead and take a look at my favorite NFT projects.

Doodles

This is a collection of 10,000 Doodle NFTs which were snapped up within minutes at minting. As of writing there is around 650 ETH in the so-called Doodlebank that sustains the project going forward.

Team

Well-known, although not super famous, artist Scott Martin (aka burnt toast) is the designer of this collection. He previously released some amazing NFT artwork on Foundation that embodies the same style of the doodles.

The second co-founder is Evan Keast, who previously worked at Dapper Labs (the team behind Cryptokitties and NBA Topshot) as well as at Kabam Games.

Roadmap

The Doodlebank contains the roadmap as well as serving as a place for community members to propose things. We can then vote via Snapshot. From what I’ve seen so far, this is a really streamlined process that will be one of the pillars for this project’s growth. It is an alternative to a full-blown DAO, which was originally the idea. Unfortunately, DAOs are still very hard to implement in a fully legal manner, especially with a worldwide collector base like Doodles has.

Notable Holders

@Pranksy, @OhhShiny, @beaniemaxi, 9x9x9eth, @mattkalish, @farokh, @Thecryptomist, @hi_sighduck, @tommyk_eth

Check the largest holders on Dune or Golom.

Why I Invested

This was the first project that I looked at pre-mint and instantly fell in love with. I thought it had a great chance of becoming a blue-chip project and loved the positive vibes that the artwork throws off.

Unfortunately, after I woke up at 3 AM to get in on the mint, I fumbled things and did not allocate enough gas for my minting transaction to go through (being a newbie at gas wars). I ended up losing a good amount of ETH as mining fees for the failed transaction.

On the flip side, I then used a couple of rarity tools to get my hands on a few Doodles that I really dug and that looked like members of my family. In the worst-case scenario, we got ourselves some expensive PFPs, so there’s less downside like that than if I just minted and got random doodles.

Perhaps that outcome is even better than having just minted them outright.

Back to some more definite reasons why I bought several pieces from this project:

• there was a very solid organic build-up to launch, so the Doodles launched with a big community already in place on Discord.
• sensible, feet-on-the-ground roadmap
• solid plan to handle proposals going forward (here’s an example of a proposal to hire an animator)
• fair distribution. The first 5000 pieces were reserved for a whitelist, but the rest were distributed fairly during a public mint. As of writing, there are 4600 owners, which is quite good. The BAYC project, by comparison, has 5700 holders.
• fun and positive vibe. I generally like happy and playful NFT artworks, and this project is the perfect embodiment of that idea.
• nice traits mix. There is a lot of variety due to various face, hair, body, background traits and special effects like rainbows or animals in the rarer examples.

Overall, I was lucky to come across this project in time and put in my purchases in the first day. Prices will fluctuate but I’m very happy with my buys and expect that the price will go up significantly within 3-6 months after launch. This is the period it took for the Cool Cats (a similar project in some ways) to take off. External factors, most importantly the overall crypto market and gas prices will definitely affect the prices of this another projects, so I’m wary of that too.

Things to Watch Out For

The license is quite restrictive when compared to, for example, BAYC. Any commercial use is pretty much impossible. Your only right is that of displaying the NFT that you buy and use it as a profile pic on platforms like Twitter and Discord. Copyright is retained by Doodles LLC, the company behind the Doodles. While the license is restrictive, we have already seen derivative projects as well as holders modifying their PFPs and there was no move from the Doodles team to go after such uses. The actual enforcement and attitude seem to diverge from the terms themselves. For this reason, I’ve been asking the team to reconsider the license as I think a more open one would be very beneficial for the long-term prospects of the Doodles.

Read more: The Best NFT Trading and Analytics Tools

For example, removing the background or mirroring a doodle, for example for the scope of creating a banner with multiple doodles, would technically be infringing on the terms. Animations would be the same. However these have so far been allowed, and possibly even encouraged. The bottom line is that the license is at odds with what the founders actually allow so far.

An NFT project’s floor price is very important, and Doodles’ floor price might suffer a bit more than others. In my opinion, Doodles have some not-so-attractive trait combinations that will keep the floor down, since they will just be used by flippers trying to make a quick buck on a premium project, rather than buyers who buy because they love the particular artwork of that NFT. The nicer ones will keep rising, as they look amazing, but at first glance the project might look like it has a relatively low value due to a lower floor, which will in turn drive liquidity elsewhere, making the expensive and nicer pieces harder to sell. This is totally my conjecture, so I hope I’m wrong on this and it doesn’t affect the project very negatively long term.

While earlier on in the lifetime of the project I had concerns about unattractive traits and how they would affect floor price, this hasn’t proven to be a major negative influence. If anything, these are the doodles that keep things liquid, as people are typically not diamond-handing them but use them to get in and out of exposure to Doodles.

Following the Doodles launch, holders have enjoyed the Space Doodles experience, which in my view is a showcase of the capabilities of the Doodles team. It is also meant to be part of the longer-term vision of Doodles, so I’m excited to how that plays out.

The second big thing was the Dooplicator launch. There is sparse information about what the utility of Dooplicators will be, but there are rumors that it will bring Doodles to the masses and also help holders profit off their Doodles. This would address my concern about the current license being too limiting.

I remain very bullish about Doodles art and the team.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Moonbirds (and PROOF Collective)

Moonbirds are my favorite collection and I’m extremely bullish in the long run. But before we talk about Moonbirds, we need to back up and talk about the PROOF collective. This community of around 1,000 people is the brainchild of Web2 darling Kevin Rose (founder of Digg.com for those of you who remember it).

As Kevin went down the NFT rabbit hole and started to collect digital art, he started a podcast focused exclusively on NFTs and subsequently created a Discord group whose members were the artists he was interviewing on the podcast. As listenership exploded, he decided to drop an NFT pass that would be the foundation of everything else he did in the NFT space and guarantee access to the Discord server.

The Dutch auction did very well with the passes selling out quickly after launch with an average price of around 2 ETH, but the impressive thing is how the price ballooned over the subsequent months, going well over 100 ETH during the launch of Moonbirds. PROOF is an amazing community that I really treasure being a part of. All the people I’ve met in real life have been nothing short of amazing, and the online interactions I’ve had with other PROOF members always brought me a ton of value.

Having a PROOF pass guarantees access to the PROOF conference that is held on a yearly basis (first one in 2023) as well as 3 Grails drops every year. There are other projects buing built, the first of which is Moonbirds, and the second one is a metaverse play codenamed Highrise. Whenever there is a drop PROOF holders get free or nearly free minting privileges. In the case of Moonbirds, every PROOF pass holder could mint two Moonbirds for free.

Getting back to Moonbirds – the main initial aim of this collection is to expand the private Discord membership beyond the initial 1,000 PROOF pass holders. But holding a Moonbird gives you much more than access to the Discord. The starr feature at the moment is nesting, which is a spin on the staking concept, whereby you obtain benefits if you “nest” your birds and take them out of circulation. Nested birds cannot be put up for sale, so the incentive to nest ensures that there will be very limited supply of Moonbirds on the secondary market, thus enhancing the scarcity element and keeping the floor price at a healthy level. The longer you nest the bird, the more likely you are to reach higher tiers that unlock rewards. For example, holders who nest their hoodie birds will get a hoodie IRL after reaching a specific tier.

Similar to holding a PROOF pass, Moonbird holders get access to private events such as the PROOF+Moonbirds event at NFT NYC, discounted tickets for the PROOF conference, and the promise of future drops like Moonbirds derivatives and the metaverse play Highrise which I mentiond earlier.

The main criticism of this project is that it was very hyped and it is only successful because of Kevin Rose.

I don’t find these criticisms to be valid, given that almost nobody beyond the PROOF members knew about and was excited about Moonbirds up till 3 weeks before the launch. The fact that in just a short period of time the team managed to pump out a number of excellent appearances on podcasts plus get press coverage to reach that level of awareness and excitement is actually an incredibly bullish point in my view. That means that they can repeat this effect for future drops.

As for the reliance on Kevin Rose’s persona, while I love Kevin and his way of doing things, most of the people I speak to outside of the web and crypto space have no idea who he is. This is in contrast to, for example, Gary Vee, who is a much more household name. The way the VeeFriends project is structured, in comparison to PROOF and Moonbirds, is extremely focused on Gary Vee’s personality, so in that case I would understand if someone had concerns on the over-reliance of the project’s success on one single person. I think Kevin brings a ton of value to Moonbirds and PROOF, but in my opinion that value is found in his connections in the web and VC space, his experience in building successful companies and startups as well as his maturity and way of doing things. He has shown that he is an all-rounder that is happy to step outside of the limelight and build a solid team that can take a project forward without him being the main focus.

Website | Twitter | OS

CyberBrokers

I invested in this project heavily after having several months of experience being pretty much immersed full-time into NFTs, so I’m hoping that my experience is helping me to make better decisions at this point. I’m really bullish on CyberBrokers for many reasons. The artist, Josie Bellini, is an OG artist in the crypto space, and the project took around 2 years to get launched. That’s not because the team was slacking; it’s because there was a ton of work involved in making this happen. All art is on-chain, which was a first for this kind of art-intensive project. There have been other collections that have been put fully on-chain, but arguably nothing comes close to this level of art.

I love seeing what members of the community come up with, just a few days after launch we were already seeing beautiful 3D renders among other interesting creations.

The traits are also very very interesting and there’s plenty of scope for game-building and storytelling around them. Oh, and did I mention the fantastic clothing? The team have a metaverse fashion brand in the pipeline, and the clothing of the characters in CyberBrokers is truly amazing.

There are several big collectors who bought heavily into CyberBrokers and I feel very comfortable putting in serious money into this one giving the possibilities that lie ahead and the quality of the art and team.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Cool Cats

Out of the big projects, this is the project that I think has the most similar vibe to the Doodles, but they appeal to a wider age group. I love cats and I like the family-friendly artwork used in this project. Cool Cats have a really great community that I have been enjoying participating in via Discord.

This is an established project that has a stable floor, so there aren’t many doubts about its worth.

The Cool Cats website is one of the best I’ve been exposed to. As a Cool Cat holder, you can view your collection on the site, as well as build banners.

Cool Cats grant a non-exclusive license, which I like. In this aspect, they are much better than the Doodles.

As the owner of a Cool Cat, you basically have the right to do anything you want with your Cool Cat image. Maybe you want to create a t-shirt, go ahead. Perhaps you want your cat on a mug, no problem. You might even want to pay an artist to create a new piece of work, featuring your cat, also ok. You can do all these things and more, as long as you are holding the Cool Cat NFT. You can not sublicense your license to third parties. You can transfer your license by selling your Cool Cat. The new holder will then be the license holder.

Cool Cats have attracted a number of high-profile buyers – including Steve Aoki, who purchased a Bob Ross TV head cat, and Mike Tyson. Leading NFT investor and “Cool Cats Maxi’ Farokh also owns a collection of 17 Cool Cats, including two TV Heads and his highly sought-after Afro Rainbow Unicorn cat. The president of TIME Magazine, Keith Grossman, has been a long-time supporter of Cool Cats.

Unfortunately, the game release that was scheduled for early 2022 didn’t quite go as planned, and Cool Cats suffered a lot of damage from that. Many people lost interest in the project and the floor price crashed over the following months. I remain bullish, however, as the team has proven to be honest and hard working, and they have no intention of abandoning the project anytime soon. The plans for the coming months and years seem solid to me, and the artwork remains extremely likeable and appeals to a wide spectrum of people. Check the roadmap for the latest information. There definitely seems to be a long-term plan to continue adding value to this project.

If you’re thinking of buying a Cool Cat, you should take a look at this Twitter thread that can help you find the right cat for you.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

3Landers

During a period of time where the NFT space was seemingly filled with cheap copies of successful copies, Doodles and Cool Cats in particular, this project caught my attention by providing some incredibly colorful and unique art as well as a fun and engaging story to go along with it.

The lead artist behind this project, Pom, is amazingly talented, and the rest of the team seems to be on the ball too, as the initial mint and subsequent airdrop went by without a hitch.

The excitement around this project and early floor price action reminded me a lot of the Doodles when I bought them in the early days after mint, so I’m hoping they follow a similar trajectory. The team is less experienced and it would not be fair to compare the two projects, but I do have high hopes for this one and have invested accordingly.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Coolman’s Universe

I hold a few fairly rare Coolmans that I’m happy to hold long-term. The artist, Danny Casale, is pretty famous, and he’s been creating animations since 2007 on YouTube, including a very viral one called “Snakes Have Legs”, which you can watch below.

I included it as I think it gives a very good feel of the kind of project that Coolmans is. Danny has a massive following so doing an NFT project was probably a no-brainer for him.

I like the art and the variety of traits, and it works well as a PFP, meaning many people will want to get one to use on Twitter or other social media profiles.

There have been rumors of collaborations with very big brands, and I think it’s just a question of time till that materialises. At the very least, one can imagination a cartoon series of some sort. Here’s a clip showing the story of Spesh, the main character, that can be a taste of things to come.

There are IRL events being organised, although right now it’s very focused on the US, as most projects are. I’m also pretty sure merch will be an integral part of this project, and what there is available right now is already looking good.

Again, this is the kind of project where I don’t need to hang around in Discord every day to check whether the founders/developers are still active and creating things and to judge whether I should continue holding it. Going forward I want to hold more of these kinds of projects where I just buy in and wait for the long term for things to grow organically.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Worldwide Webb

Worldwide Webb is an interoperable pixel art MMORPG metaverse game giving utility to popular NFT projects. The game uses NFTs for in-game NFT Avatars, pets, lands, NFT Items, and quests. Deployed with a build-first mentality by a group of crypto-native game developers, artists, coders, and marketers; rapidly pushing out new technologies and applications.

This game has a retro vibe which I like since I grew up playing games with these sorts of 2D graphics. There is a general consensus in the space that this is the number one 2D metaverse environment that all collections want to integrate with, so it makes sense to own some land here. At the time of writing, the apartments are in the hands of more than 60 NFT communities & numerous influential figures.

I like what the team has been putting out, including the amazing apartment builder, with which you can totally customize your own apartment including hanging up pictures of your own NFTs.

The one thing I really dislike is the name, but I’ll have to get used to it I guess. It’s a play on the founder’s surname Webb. He’s quite a character, so I think it makes sense to spend some time familiarising yourself with his ideas and work before you invest in this project. Beyond his outlandish fashion sense, I think he is brilliant and amazingly creative, so I have no problem backing this collection for the long term.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

PROOF Collective

PROOF Collective is a private, members-only collective of 1,000 dedicated NFT collectors and artists. It is a project by Kevin Rose (the founder of Digg), and that alone is a good reason to join, given Kevin’s trajectory in the web space starting from the early 2000s and moving on into Web3 these days. He has an enviable collection of OG NFTs and runs a podcast where he interviews top generative artists – he definitely knows his stuff.

I found the community to be very diverse, extremely helpful and very knowledgeable, especially about the generative art side of NFTs. I feel that generative art is an area that interests me a lot, but I am not yet able to value projects as well as I can in the PFP niche. This makes being in PROOF and being able to even talk to some great artists a big plus for me.

This is just a unique club in the NFT space, and the quality of everything they do is off the charts. To cite an example, have a look at the GRAILS drop and all the work that went into that.

Website | Twitter | OS

PunkScapes

PunkScapes are 8-bit NFT banners designed to be used on platforms like Twitter, Discord and OpenSea, and designed in a way to match CryptoPunks. It is the biggest banner project on OpenSea.

NFT-verified PFPs/avatars are coming to many platforms, and the same could apply to banners. Several punk owners have also bought PunkScapes. Some of these owners are very active in the PunkScapes Discord too, which is a bonus if you want to chat with these OGs. An example is @etheralto.

There is also a growing trend of PFP projects offering “transparent background” options so that you could easily put the background of your choice behind them.

The price has been somewhat suppressed since launch, although those who got in at mint can already sell at several multiples of what they paid. The overall price in USD however is still low. The project has been operating under the radar and took a long time to list on Rarity Tools, for example. The founder has decided to focus all his energy on building rather than any kind of promotion, so you won’t find constant notifications of useless giveaways, collaborations, and other low-value events in the Discord chats.

Also, rather than the typical whitelist that many projects use during launch, which favors a few at the expense of the public, PunkScapes used a fairer launch mechanic whereby you could buy a OneDayPunk token that would later give you early access to the PunkScapes mint.

An interesting feature of these tokens is that they have a date field in the metadata. People have been using this date as a marker to find tokens that are relevant to them, for example, their birthdays.

Founder Jalil is a real star, always ready to help and respond to people in the Discord group, as well as being constantly building new things for the project. A special aspect of this project is that Jalil has set up a #transparency channel where he proactively discloses any important movements, for example, revenue from secondary market sales, any purchases or sales he personally makes, etc.

You can listen to my interview with Jalil on Mastermind.fm – it’s a great way to deepen your NFT knowledge.

In fact, I would recommend getting a PunkScape just to be part of this amazing community. Out of all the Discord groups I’m in, PunkScapes is the one I get the most value out of. A lot of that value comes from Jalil and other prominent members being ready to help out with any kind of questions members pose. The fact that it’s not a hype-filled project ensures that there is very little price talk and many more conversations around building stuff and innovating.

Again, if you’re technically inclined or want to build stuff in this space, you need to be in this project and its Discord. There are hackathons (with corresponding rewards) and art competitions, and as I said lots of building going on in general. And if you love 8-bit artwork and want to grab one of the earliest banner projects in the NFT space, you should also get yourself a PunkScape.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Creature World

This is a project you would want to join for the artistic element above all else. Danny is a great artist and he’s built this incredible world around his creatures that has become very special for holders of this NFT.

The merch is fantastic, although it is of a particular style that won’t suit everyone. But at least I think everyone can appreciate it as a piece of art. The community is very friendly. The one pet peeve I have with this project is that there is no way to download a high-res version of the creatures you own. I find that absolutely ridiculous given that people are buying it as an art project and many like to print them out and hang them in their office or house. I’ve raised the point multiple times in the Creature Discord and got nowhere, but I hope this gets addressed at some point, because the high-res versions definitely exist.

Note that each part of the journey has its own website. Creature.guide is the main you want to look at if you’re new to this project. Price-wise they’ve been experiencing a downturn in early 2022, after having a nice run-up in 2021, but it should be a great long-term hold. In 2022 the team has really upped the game with new and unique experiences for Creature holders, that will continue to make them a favorite among NFT collectors.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Poolsuite

Poolsuite FM is a unique website that has been around for many years, and the idea was to launch an NFT and use the funds to build an amazing Web3 experience for holders.

Founder Marty Bell is an amazing creator (read this history of his work) and with a top team and relatively big budget, you can bet on him delivering big things with the Poolsuite brand.

When launching, many people bought without really knowing what the brand would deliver, and banking on Marty more than anything else. Below is a description that Poolsuite provided when launching the NFT. You’ll be forgiven if you don’t really understand what you’re investing in.

“As an honored supporter of our beloved corporation, it will be our priority to show you an exceptional time throughout your membership and to shower you with perks and gratitude commensurate with your status as a founding member. Please take a leap of faith with us as we collectively build the future of internet leisure.

By holding a Poolsuite brand NFT, you place your trust in us to deliver you an ongoing stream of experiences in the months and years ahead. From ambitious art projects and state-of-the-art financial instruments, to fractionally owning an antique manor house, possibly on the Portofino coast, where people who smell of Vacation®️ brand sunscreen might serve you chilled Lambrusco wine while you take in the salted breeze of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Your patronage will allow us to go where less adventurous organisations have as-yet failed to go.”

Benefits of being a member of Poolsuite (holding an NFT) include:

• Special members-only features on the website
• A physical exec card (connecting the digital world to IRL)
• IRL Events/parties
• Access to future drops
• Tokens that will drive the Poolsuite economy

It’s a project that plays a lot on the nostalgia element, and as someone who grew up with late 90s internet, I certainly vibe a lot with the Poolsuite brand and am rooting for it to go places. Even in its initial steps, the project is proving to be capable of delivering smooth features with serious attention to detail, without needing any extra hype. In fact, it’s the only project I’m invested in that doesn’t even have a Discord server.

Website | Twitter | OpenSea

Party Degenerates

Party Degenerates are a collection of 10,000 NFTs representing the rebellious spirit of those who choose to celebrate life, rather than merely living it. The people behind the project are entrepreneurs, developers, community leaders and one of the biggest and most influential NFT collectors in the space.

The artwork is very polarizing, and while it can grow on you and is very original, I don’t think this can be the main driving force behind the project’s success. There were several guest artists contributing to the Party Degenerates, and most of them have amazing artwork in their own projects. As I note below, however, the reveal had quite a surprise in store for many holders. To be fair, the project founders always told holders to “expect the unexpected”.

There also seems to be a lot of real-life utility coming in the form of special deals, perks and freebies at clubs around the world, but also in the metaverse. However, it is too early to say what exactly will drive value to this collection, as the roadmap has not been fledged out yet as I write this.

I went into this blindly, based on the reputation of the team and the people who were holding them after the mint was over. The reveal took a bit more than a week so nobody really know what they were buying.

Once they were revealed there were some very strong reactions by holders, and many were disappointed and sold at 2 or 3x the floor we saw during the week before the reveal. I took the plunge in true degen mode and bought a few more when that happened, but only time will tell if that was a rash decision or a good one.

I feel that the art itself is exceptionally unique and memorable, and that is a big plus in this niche that’s filled with copycat art.

Secondly, the aims of the project are also unique – bringing real-life utility in the form of access to exclusive events and experiences within the clubbing and electronic music scene. Given that the majority of NFT holders right now seem to be twenty-something white single dudes, the market for such an item is definitely there.

I’m personally more interested in the promised metaverse utility of the degens. I’m very interested in experimenting more with Decentraland and Sanxbox, so the degens might be my gateway to these worlds.

The license is great, giving full commercial rights on the NFTs. On the other hand, I’m not sure that the general public will be able to distinguish between one degen NFT and another.

It’s still early days and so far the degen story still has to be written, but the team is solid and I’m very confident in the project.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Illuminati

This is a DAO-based NFT with some of the most amazing artwork I’ve seen so far.

The mint price was 0.23 ETH but I bought all my Illuminati tokens on the secondary market, some of them pre-reveal and some others that I hand-picked and paid a higher price for when they were revealed.

50% of mint + secondary royalties will be funneled into the Illuminati Collective – a DAO for active Illuminati NFT holders.

There isn’t much information on what the DAO will do, except that the team has ideas and that holders can vote upon each idea and add their own as well, which is pretty standard fare for most DAOs and even simple NFT projects not backed by a DAO.

The team is led by Alex Taub who is an experienced entrepreneur with a reputation to uphold, so that’s a positive thing in my view. The artist is superb, you can see him at work on the Twitch streams.

Unfortunately, the floor price hasn’t held up that well so far, and is currently sitting just below mint price. I have been disappointed with the lack of things happening within the project. The team seems to have been hard at work trying to form the DAO, so perhaps when that is completed we will have a clearer direction on future prospects. It is normal for people to get impatient in this fast-moving space, and sell when updates are sparse, thus driving down the floor price.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Discord

Curious Addys Trading Club

Curious Addys Trading Club is the first educational NFT project with a 100% refund baked into the smart contract. That’s one of the two main innovative things that this project is doing.

The second is that they are building an educational platform for newcomers to crypto.

People who are deeply involved in crypto compare the current state of things to the internet in ’95, when only technical people were on the web building stuff and understanding what this new technology could do in the very near future.

What is working today in getting regular people involved in crypto is NFTs and games. People spend thousands of hours playing games that require learning completely arbitrary complex skillsets only useful inside the games themselves. The Curious Addys’ team identified Duolingo, an app I use myself to learn languages, as the model to use in order to spread the love and knowledge for crypto. So the idea here is to build the Duolingo for crypto.

However, Duolingo is the Web2 model of making an educational game. curious NFTs are just the Curious Addys’ trojan horse to get everyone behind a much bigger vision: creating the killer app to make crypto go mainstream.

The mint price was set at 0.08 ETH.

There’s a curious story behind the octopus (watch this documentary to learn more about this fascinating creature) and the name Addy as well. Addy is a curious ADHD octopus crypto companion, filled with boundless energy and hyperactive enthusiasm for learning each and every little thing about crypto. Smart, curious, and all over the place with eight hands to do eight things at once, the founders felt an octopus best embodied the essence of being a bold, brave new pioneer on the crypto frontier.

Mai and Ben, the developers behind this project, are both ADHD, and a large proportion of their friends in crypto are similarly ADHD – crypto is the perfect playground for an ADHD soul, with a million shiny infinitely interesting things to play with and what feels like thousands of things coming out every day. I can kind of identify with that. Contrary to popular stigma, ADHD has been profoundly beneficial for the founders, so they decided to incorporate a tribute into the name of this project.

The message of the founders really resonates with me. I feel that crypto is the biggest technological and financial opportunity of this generation, however, I struggle to get the people I love to be involved and thus benefit from all the good things that crypto brings, because there are several barriers to entry still.

Moreover, in a sea of get-rich-quick schemes and kids with too much money on their hands, this is a project that really shines by doing things differently and feels wholesome, and this is the main reason why I’m 100% in. I might not make any money on this one, but I love being able to be part of this initiative.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Kumo x World Residents

Kumo’s world is a world full of fun and adventures, where people can just be silly and be a big kid without being judged. It’s an interactive RPG-kind project where participants work together as a team to discover Kumo’s world.

I love the artwork and think it’s high quality in terms of design. It’s the kind of family-friendly, light-hearted design that just makes me happy.

I’m not sure if this project has legs price-wise, but the artwork is fantastic in my opinion, and I like the community. Again, this is the kind of project that I can share with my kids. I’ve already purchased a received a children’s coloring book for my son, and I’m looking forward to the storybook.

I’ve been pretty happy with what’s been delivered so far, the founder is hard-working and very sweet; I’ve also interviewed her on my podcast.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Bored Breakfast Club

Bored Breakfast Club is on the forefront of a revolutionary business model combining the benefits of blockchain technology with an NFT community to unlock both digital and IRL utility on a consistent basis.

The Bored Breakfast Club consists of 5,000 unique breakfast scenes, living as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. This is more of a fun experiment than a very serious investment, although it’s already been profitable for me. I like it because it’s an innovative idea that consists in delivering free monthly coffee to holders of the NFTs. In essence, Bored Breakfast Club is the first Web3 Coffee Subscription service.

The money to pay for that coffee is generated through the initial sale, secondary sales as well as merch. The founders have always been transparent from the start in saying that this is an experiment that might have to be wrapped up at some point if the flow of funds dries up, but so far they have delivered. I like the fact that it’s essentially a community of coffee lovers that I’m very happy to be part of and share my passion for coffee in. The idea of them being banners that could accompany bored apes, one of the biggest collections in the NFT space, is also good. I haven’t really seen any bored ape owners use these banners, but then again banners have not really taken off yet.

Several of my friends are owners of these tokens, and it’s been fun sharing our experiences with the coffee, as well as teasing each other about the delays of receiving them due to the customs bureaucracies and postage inefficiencies in each European country we are based in (the coffee is sent from LA, and postage is thankfully included, so we only have to pay customs duty).

As I mentioned, the funds to keep this project running come from the Community Coffee Wallet. This is an aggregated fund with the sole purpose of supporting free coffee reward shipments worldwide for Bored Breakfast Club NFT holders. The wallet is funded by royalties from secondary market sales, as well as a percentage of profits from other mechanisms, including Reserve Roast sales, Blends with Friends releases, merchandise, and more. Once the wallet reaches a threshold that allows the company behind Bored Breakfast to share a new blend with the Bored Breakfast Club members, they drop a new blend and ship it out for free around the world.

The Community Coffee Wallet funds go toward paying for everything that goes into reward shipments – custom packaging, sourcing the highest quality beans, expert roasting, fulfillment, and of course, free shipping worldwide.

While the first two reward shipments were funded via the project’s mint, all future reward shipments will be funded by the Community Coffee Wallet.

Based on the volume of secondary sales transacted to date, and the incremental funding mechanisms developed since mint, the founders are confident that the Community Coffee Wallet will be a sustainable fund to help fuel free coffee via reward shipments for the foreseeable future. I’ll definitely be enjoying it till it lasts.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Blue Chip Projects I’d Love to Invest In

There are certain projects that have been popular for a long time and have pretty stable floors. They tend to cost a lot of money and have made many of their owners rich beyond their dreams.

Here are the ones I’d love to own one day.

Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs

This is an Artblocks project that really blew up on the secondary market. Tyler Hobbs is a well-known artist and this is undoubtedly one of the blue-chip NFTs. Fidenza is stored eternally on Ethereum. Each individual work of Fidenza is a specific constant applied to the Fidenza algorithm. This is the beauty of on-chain, generative, eternal art.

Apart from its investment value, I really like the designs and would love to have a few of these adorning the walls of my house or office. This is one of the examples of projects that people really who aren’t familiar with generative art struggle to find value in. I would recommend reading this piece by Tyler to understand some of the work that goes into creating such a project.

Other Artblocks projects that I’d love to own are Ringers, The Currency. These are all examples of generative art projects, and you really need to dig into the process behind their creation to learn how to appreciate them. I do, however, find Fidenza to be aesthetically pleasing even to the untrained eye, so it’s my favorite so far from the Artblocks collections.

One other thing I’d say about Artblocks is that some of their projects achieve incredible valuations, while others don’t really take off. I don’t yet understand the huge differences in valuations so I will be keeping a closer eye on the Discord group and new projects, in order to see if I can learn how to appreciate things better and estimate the value of a project at an early stage. The other issue with these types of projects, especially when their prices go up, is that there is almost no liquidity. Therefore, I’d probably only buy early and buy something I loved and that I would be happy to hang onto for years, rather than try to snag an expensive piece with hopes to flip it in a month or two.

Website | Discord | OpenSea

Crypto Punks

This is the ultimate NFT item to own if you want to show to all the world that you’ve made it. These were originally minted for free a few years ago, and then gained popularity in 2020 and 2021 as the NFT space exploded. Now, many of the holders of space punks have pseudonymous accounts on Twitter and are known to be big influencers. Some go on to create their own projects. It is definitely a project that you need to be in if you want to flex and if you want to meet the wealthiest and best people in the NFT space.

@punk9059 posts daily stats on punk sales and floor. It’s a good account to follow to get a quick idea of how cryptopunks are doing, especially if you are looking to find a good entry point.

The punks were created by Larva Labs but their IP has been acquired by Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Apes, in March 2022. This makes Yuga Labs the biggest player in the NFT space, and unifies two collections that were competing very intensely for OG status over the past few months under one overarching brand. Most importantly, the license will be changed to be in line with that used for the Bored Apes.

Some people are extremely bullish about the Crypto Punks. Will they eventually trade for ¢10 million each? We’ll have to wait and see.

Further reading: 

• The Fat Punks Thesis
• Cryptopunks – The Ultimate Guide

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Bored Ape Yacht Club

The BAYC were pioneers in the licensing terms they used. They allow commercial use, which led to holders using them in marketing campaigns, swag and even one holder launching his own BAYC-themed beer.

Much of the value in owning a Bored Ape lies in being able to participate in the apes’ closed Discord community. Apes are known to grant favors to each other, and owning one of these gives you a lot of clout. BAYC holders have gone on to launch their own projects successfully, again driven by the hype they were able to generate by being BAYC holders in the first place.

The BAYC NFT is also known for creating extra value through airdrops like the Bored Ape Kennel Club.

The associated project Mutant Ape Yacht Club is also a great way to access the BAYC private Discord rooms without actually having a Bored Ape. If you’re thinking of making the big leap of getting a Bored Ape but you’re not yet convinced of the benefits, I would say that getting a MAYC would be the first stepping stone.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Meebits

The Meebits are 20,000 unique 3D voxel characters, created by a custom generative algorithm, then registered on the Ethereum blockchain. The original 9000 Meebits were available for purchase through a Dutch-style auction starting from 2.5 ETH. The remaining NFTs were distributed to holders of CryptoPunks as well as Autoglyphs.

Owners of a Meebit are given access to an additional asset pack that include the full 3D model. Use it to render and animate your Meebit, or use as your avatar in the metaverse. All Meebit owners can also access a T-pose OBJ file that be imported into any most standard 3D modelling and animation software.

Also included in the assets pack are high-resolution, lossless renders. I’ve interviewed the general manager of Meebits DAO Danny Greene, so head over to my podcast page to learn more about Meebits if you’re interested.

Website | OS

Nouns DAO

The Nouns NFT project is actually a DAO. The artwork is very very cool, and more importantly, it has been released under an open-source license. Other projects are free to reuse the same artwork, in fact, HeadDAO has already done so.

Nouns are an experimental attempt to improve the formation of on-chain avatar communities. While projects such as Cryptopunks have attempted to bootstrap digital community and identity, Nouns attempt to bootstrap identity, community, governance and a treasury that can be used by the community.

This means that they can be regarded as one of the first players in this niche, and they’re banking on that, among other things, to give them long-term value. This project needs some reading to understand properly, so I highly suggest you head over to the Nouns website and read the docs.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune

Autoglyphs

Autoglyphs are the first “on-chain” generative art on the Ethereum blockchain. A completely self-contained mechanism for the creation and ownership of an artwork.

Once Larva Labs deployed the project to Ethereum, they no longer control the code that generates the art, nor the code that manages the ownership of the glyphs. This is a crucial difference from art that is editioned and sold by an artist or gallery. It allows a long-term guarantee of ownership, provenance and edition size that is independent of any central authority.

The Autoglyphs are a highly optimized generative algorithm capable of creating billions of unique artworks, wrapped inside an ERC-721 interface. While ERC-721 is the standard for “non-fungible tokens” (something that the CryptoPunks helped define), it is generally used to manage ownership of digital items stored elsewhere. The key difference with the Autoglyphs is that the art is inside the contract itself, it is literally “art on the blockchain.”

This becomes obvious if you examine any glyph creation transaction on the blockchain. The event data contains the full output of the generator, and hence the artwork itself. See here for an example. It doesn’t look like much as hex data, but it encodes a character art pattern. This pattern can then be drawn to a screen or even on paper by following the written instructions in the comments of the smart contract itself.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OpenSea

Tom Sachs Rocket Factory

This is just extremely cool. You can either buy a complete rocket NFT or buy parts and assemble your rocket. The fun part is the “meatspace” event, where the people behind this project will create a physical version of your assembled rocket and actually launch it. If they recover the rocket they will send it to you, together with a video of the launch. So complete ownership includes the rocket token, the video and the physical rocket.

Website

Projects I’ve Researched and Discarded

This is a list of projects I’ve done my research on and decided not to invest, or invested and then exited due to a change in fundamentals or a change in my opinion on the project. Most of these I’d have come across through Discord channels of projects that I’m already invested in.

It will be a fun exercise for me to see how many of these I get right and if I get it completely wrong on others.

• Jungle Freaks – extremely hyped during the time I was investing in Doodles, but I never vibed with the evil-looking artwork, and the project ran into problems later, however it did experience a sharp rise in price after launch.
• Entropes – another project I really like in terms of both the art and the mechanics behind how it is being generated. The floor is at 0.2 ETH as I write this (early October 2021) but I can definitely see this going slowly but surely higher. It’s been featured on the Opensea frontpage to0 so that helps. Unfortunately, development and Discord aren’t very active, and the artwork itself is not made for the masses, so it could also struggle to get any traction. Update Jan 2022: price ended up floundering.
• Nobody – cool project but didn’t seem like it could generate big interest to fuel price appreciation.
• The Arcade OG Series – amazing art from a famous guy (co-founder of Atari). It was dropped on Makersplace and honestly, I hadn’t used the platform before so I decided to sit this one out. Probably a mistake as the drop was very successful.
• Breakfast World – couldn’t see any utility, reminded me of the ICO days, mint didn’t even sell out within hours.
• Kuma World – team with no track record, promoting their own project on Twitter as if they were a third-party, no apparent value beyond being one of the first projects (self-claimed) from South East Asia and run-of-the-mill artwork. Had whitelist by being a Doodle owner but skipped minting.
• Bitcoin Billionaires – delay in reveal without any explanation or notice, poor community focused on hyping things up and insulting anyone with any “negative posts”. Artwork and roadmap doesn’t resonate with me.
• Spaceman – Trash rip-off of Doodles and Cool Cats as well as Spaceboys. NGMI.
• Tunney Money – No roadmap, very localized to Miami, high mint price, minters had no idea what they were buying and were clearly beginners on the most part. “Trust Peter Tunney” was the only reason offered up for someone to invest. Thanks but no thanks.
• Wonderpals – Cute art but looked quite generic and the team didn’t seem particularly strong.
• Starcatchers – Didn’t vibe with the art at all and thought they were too hyped.
• ResidenceDAO – These guys expected investors to pay for them (through the mint) to purchase apartments in Miami that token holders could then timeshare between them. No thanks.

What’s Coming for NFTs in 2022?

I believe that most of the big projects in the NFT space in 2022 will have some kind of utility attached to them. Said in another way, I believe the era of simple PFP images is dead. The market is flooded with animal/cute/colorful/scary PFP projects and it’s hard to get noticed unless you offer something more.

On that note, I think the crypto punks will lose a lot of their value and other projects like BAYC will flip them.

Renting NFTs should become a thing, as gaming guilds and utility become a bigger component of NFTs. Imagine you own many Party Degenerate tokens (see above for project details) but are not able to attend a real-life event they are organizing. You could easily rent out your tokens and let others enjoy the party while you make some money.

Dilutive airdrops will become less popular. Non-dilutive airdrops like the one pioneered by Doodles will become the norm. There are two problems with regular airdrops. The way they usually work is that holders of a collection are offered a time window where they can mint an additional token for free. This could be a pet companion, or another similar additional thing that pairs well with the original token.

The first problem is that many holders lose out on the opportunity simply because they are not following the Discord and Twitter social channels on a daily basis. Secondly, the airdropped tokens end up either being worthless, casting a negative light on the project, or else accrue part of the valuation of the original token. Both are negative outcomes.

I also hope that decentralized competitors to OpenSea popup. As of January, we are seeing LooksRare take a shot at it, and I’m backing that platform by staking my tokens. 100% of LooksRare’s trading fees are redistributed proportionally to LOOKS stakers, versus OpenSea where all the profits go to the platform’s owners. You can also earn LOOKS every time you buy or sell an NFT from an eligible collection via LooksRare. Moreover, for the DeFi fans, you can provide liquidity to the LOOKS-ETH pair on Uniswap V2 to earn additional LOOKS rewards on top of Uniswap’s regular liquidity provider rewards.

I also think that we’re going to be seeing NFT-related tools really improve and new ones to enter the space. There’s a huge need for software to help with analysis and trading. The amazing thing with Web3 web apps is that you can be early and get rewarded for it. Many apps offer a lifetime “founding member” token that you can then trade on the secondary market for a much higher price when the tool becomes popular, so you are actually invested in the success of the tool and are aligned with the founders.

Finally, in 2021 we had several airdrops, like $SOS and $ENS and I expect to see more of those in 2022. One from MetaMask could be coming, for example. With an airdrop, you get rewarded in tokens based on your previous activity with a platform. This could be the platform that is providing the airdrop, or another platform, for example the LooksRare trading platform I mentioned earlier provided $LOOKS tokens to users of OpenSea based on their historical OpenSea trading volume. This makes sense as you want to incentivize big users of your main competitor to take an interest in your project and potentially switch their business over to you.

Concluding Thoughts

For those who are entering this space for the first time, know that you’re still early, even though in crypto it might seem that you’re always late. I get that feeling myself because things move extremely fast in crypto. I’ve seen big fortunes made in a question of months, so it’s very easy to feel like you’ve missed your chance when you start hearing rags to riches stories left, right, and center.

With all my investments, I tend to invest only after doing considerable research about the investment in question. With NFTs things are no different. I choose my projects very carefully and I’m generally not interested in flipping for a few hundred dollars profit within days or weeks of the project’s launch. It wouldn’t be worth my time to do so and I would miss out on all the learning and enjoyment I get out of being within the various project chats while knowing that I’m a stakeholder and can do my small part in adding value to the community and the project’s overall value.

That is why I will continue striving to be in 10-15 projects at any one time as a maximum. More than that and I will lose my ability to monitor the projects. I aim to hold at least 3-5 tokens in any one project, so that I can sell one or two of them when I see it fit to take profits, without necessarily exiting my position fully. If I only have one token, I find it very hard to sell while I’m in love with the project and the token I hold. That is the reason why many blue-chip NFT (Cryptopunks, BAYC, etc) don’t sell even though they could get millions of USD in return.

Ultimately, if you have a really rare blue-chip NFT that you’ve built your brand around, it’s best to just keep it and never sell. Since we’re still early, you’ve got a good chance of the token continuing to rise in value over time, and if you need liquidity, you can already take out loans using your NFT as collateral.

I hope that you’ve found my thought process and reasoning for my choices useful. Let me know what your favorite NFT projects and use cases are, I’d love to know what you’re up to.

It looks like the summer of 2021 will be remembered as NFT (Non-Fungible Token) summer, following the DeFi summer we had in 2020.

Non-fungible means that something is unique and one-of-a-kind. NFTs are therefore unique digital tokens representing something.

If you already know how NFTs work and want to explore some projects, head over to my article about my favorite NFT collections.

NFTs have grown on the Ethereum blockchain, but they are also available on other chains like Solana. The future seems to be pointing towards a multichain space. One major problem with Ethereum is that gas fees needed to make transactions go through are very high, thus pricing out many smaller investors. Right now, however, I don’t see much innovation on other blockchains.

Most projects on Solana are direct copies of the successful projects on Ethereum. the Flow blockchain is also popular since it hosts NBA Top Shot. However, Ethereum is by far the most important blockchain for NFTs at the moment, so I’ve only looked at and experimented within that ecosystem so far. The only interaction I’ve had with other chains is with Polygon, since some airdrops are conducted through Polygon to avoid the gas fees on Ethereum. Read this Polygon Matic 101 tutorial to learn everything you need to know about buying/selling/trading on Polygon.

Anything digital can be made into an NFT on the blockchain; however, the most common form of NFTs is digital art. Images, audio and video files can also be sold as NFTs. Once a digital asset has been made into an NFT, it will be unique on the blockchain and can be traded in exchange for money, just like physical art would be.

Tax-free NFT gains? Check out Portugal!

I find the NFT space to be extremely fascinating for many reasons, and I’ll be gathering my notes here. The one thing that I would start off with, is that after looking at NFTs for a while, the regular crypto space (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) starts to look downright boring and run of the mill. If you thought understanding the valuation of cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum was very hard, the NFT space is just wild in comparison.

Buying Blue Chip NFT Projects

One of the best strategies for getting exposure to NFTs as a beginner is to stick with the so-called “blue chip” NFT projects.

• CryptoPunks
• BAYC
• ArtBlocks

Buying Factionalized NFTs

While the prices for these projects are currently quite prohibitive (some popular ones have sold for more than $1 mln), you can invest in their fractionalized versions on the following sites:

• Fractional – the most popular fractionalization platform.
• NFTX – mint and trade NFT index tokens.
• Unicly
• nftfy

Social Trading

Apart from fractionalization, investors are increasingly forming Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to pool their funds and gain exposure to the priciest NFTs. Here are some examples:

• FlamingoDAO – minimum 330 ETH investment to join.
• ARK Gallery
• Beets DAO
• PleasrDAO
• ApeDAO

Social trading is becoming a big thing. The first ideas of social trading were introduced and popularized by platforms such as eToro, where you can follow traders you respect and who have gotten great results, and you can even choose to copy their trades.

But with NFTs, the social element has been taken to the next level. NFT traders basically live on Twitter and on Discord, where an essential part of their job is to engage in discussions and follow the moves of the best collectors in order to find the next alpha opportunity.

Now, while in Web 2 you could follow your favorite traders and even automatically copy their trades in certain cases, Web 3 opens the floodgates of possibilities for social trading.

You can now team up with a few buddies or even total strangers, and quickly set up a structure where you can invest together by pooling your funds, then voting for buying and selling decisions.

A tool that can be used for group investments is NFT Squad by Prysm. You can also read more about this new type of social trading here.

Minting NFTs

The best opportunity for huge profits lies in getting in early on a project, especially if you can be one of the original minters. Every project has an initial minting stage, which can last just a few minutes or hours if the project had already garnered a lot of attention prior to launch.

The minting stage can also lead to gas wars, so be aware of that and try to avoid them if at all possible. You can read this tutorial about gas and how you can set your own gas prices.

There are hundreds of projects launching every week, so it’s hard to spot the best ones unless you’re already in some kind of community of knowledgeable NFT collectors. That’s when the benefits of being in NFT communities like the BAYC or Crypto Punks could be very useful. Alternatively, being part of an NFT collector DAO can serve the same purpose. In the latter, you might not need to do anything beyond buying tokens of the DAO itself, as the DAOs leaders will do all the research and purchasing themselves.

One tool I’ve used to discover currently hot minting projects is the site ultrasound.money. It features a burn leaderboard where projects being minted en masse typical show up. It’s just another way of sniping new and hot projects, but I’d still combine that with previous research through Discord groups relating to NFTs.

The best way to find good upcoming projects is through Twitter and Discord, but the key thing is to know who to follow and which Discord channels to be on. Being in the Discord groups of good projects and NFT tools, or even DAOs, will yield you the best alpha information on new projects. You can always pay to play with the big boys, for example Nansen AI has an Alpha plan that costs $3,000/month but gives you access to a private Discord community whose main purpose is to generate alpha for you.

Basic Mistakes NFT Newbies Do

Not understanding gas fees

When you are interacting with the Ethereum blockchain and manipulating it, you will pay a gas fee for the transaction you are initiating. This means that if you transfer, mint or stake an NFT you will need to pay a corresponding fee. Some newbies can be caught unawares by fees charged to delist an NFT on OpenSea, so be aware of that too.

Gas fees also fluctuate throughout the day, and can get ridiculously high at times. Use a tool to estimate the current gas fees, and wait for a suitable time when gas is cheaper if your transaction is not time-sensitive. Always check what you will be paying before you confirm the transaction. You can also use MetaMask and similar tools to set the right gas price manually.

Typically, you’ll find that every hour gas fees spike as some new NFT project is launching. You can get a quick glance at what’s causing gas fees to spike at the moment on Ultrasound.money. Depending on your time zone, you might find that gas fees are lower late at night and in the early morning.

If you’re minting a hotly anticipated project, you might want to set the gas price much higher than normal, because it’s first-come, first-served, and if the transaction doesn’t go through by the time all the NFTs in the project get minted, you’ll not only be left empty-handed but out of pocket, as the transaction will fail but still cost you gas fees.

Not understanding how Ethereum transactions are processed

Transactions from one wallet are processed sequentially. If a transaction gets stuck in a pending state, posterior transactions sent from your wallet will have to wait until the stuck one is processed before getting processed.
You can start multiple transactions but the entire Ethereum blockchain is processed sequentially so there is only one active transaction at any given time. Transactions from your wallet are processed in the order of Nonce.

If you submit a transaction with Nonce 10, then another with Nonce 11, the one with Nonce 10 must process before the one with Nonce 11.

You can:

• Speed Up: Resubmit Nonce 10 with the same transaction at a higher gas price
• Cancel: Submit a 0 ETH transfer at Nonce 10 at a higher gas price
• Replace: Submit a totally different transaction at Nonce 10 at a higher gas price.

Speeding Up

Speed Up transactions are virtually identical to Cancel transactions – with one critical difference. Specifically:

• On Ethereum, a Speed Up transaction is an attempt to overwrite a currently pending transaction with a new transaction.
• Just like Cancels, Speed Ups are a convention and not a standard.

Whereas a Cancel transaction is an attempt to overwrite a pending transaction with a zero value replacement, a Speed Up is an attempt to accelerate a pending transaction.

In other words, you still want the transaction to happen; you just want it to happen faster. Therefore, a typical Speed Up transaction will have:

1. An identical nonce,
2. From the same Wallet address,
3. At least a 10% higher gas fee, and
4. The identical value, plus
5. Gets signed-and-successfully-submitted before the original transaction is confirmed.

You might notice that step 4 is the only difference between a Cancel and a Speed Up. They both work on the identical principle: since miners are incentivized to prioritize transactions with more gas, the identical nonce Speed Up transaction should be confirmed before the original transaction – even though it entered the mempool later.

Speed Ups are easily done via the MetaMask UI. When a transaction is taking long, you’ll see a Speed Up button that you can click.

Canceling Transactions

On Ethereum, a Cancel transaction is an attempt to overwrite a currently pending transaction with a new transaction.

Typically, a Cancel transaction will have:

1. An identical nonce,
2. From the same Wallet address,
3. At least a 10% higher gas fee, but
4. Zero value, and
5. Gets signed-and-successfully-submitted before the original transaction is confirmed.

The core of the idea is that, since miners are incentivized to prioritize transactions with more gas, the cancel transaction should be confirmed before the original transaction – even though it entered the mempool later.

Despite the options, the new transaction still needs to be mined to take affect. You can end up in a situation where you submit a cancel, but your original still makes it to the chain first.

Replacing Transactions

Replacing a transaction uses the same principles we already discussed. We can submit a transaction with the same identical nonce as a previous transaction we submitted (and is still in pending state) while changing the value or even the destination address. Again, we increase the gas fee as an attempt to have this transaction mined before the original transaction is confirmed.

Failing to understand security basics

Make sure you save the seed words of your wallet somewhere safe, and preferably use a cold wallet for the items that you want to hold long-term. For example, you can combine a Metamask wallet for regular trading and buying with a Ledger wallet for cold storage.

Here’s how you can move your wallet from MetaMask to Ledger. Or just watch this video.

Be very careful when signing transactions on Metamask and read what permissions you’re granting. Also, note the gas fees associated with the transaction (see the previous point).

Falling for scams

There are lots of NFT-related scams within Discord channels, especially through DMs, and also on Twitter. If you’re offered something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is a scam. Triple-check everything, especially if you’re signing any transactions with your wallet. Never share your seed words with anyone. NFTs and Web3 in general are new niches and thus are akin to the wild west, as this site quite clearly portrays.

Unfortunately on non-curated marketplaces like OpenSea, there are a lot of scammers. One of the easy ways these scammers trick buyers is by putting up fake collections. Know the number of items in the collection you want to buy from. Most fake accounts will only have 50 to a few hundred NFT’s in them at most. So if the project you’re interested in buying has 10k items, it’s easy to spot the fake collections.

Beware of the price change scam. When new hot projects come out there is currently a scam whereby people list at the floor then change quickly to a higher price. The idea is that other people will click buy then approve the transaction without double-checking. Always double-check your checkout price on MetaMask before hitting confirm.

NEVER interact with NFTs that appear in your wallet if you don’t know where they came from. They are airdrop scams, if you interact with them to sell them it’s a hack to get into your wallet. Either leave them alone completely or hide them.

If you ever buy NFTs in a bundle, open up the bundle and actually make sure all the NFTs in the bundle are legit. Some scammers will place 1 real NFT in a bundle of fake ones or ones from other collections.

Not keeping all costs in mind

You will need to pay taxes on your NFT-related profits, and that will eat a big chunk of your profits. Make sure you have enough cash left over from your NFT adventures in order to pay tax. You can calculate your NFT taxes using a tool like Cointracker or Cointracking.

When you buy an item on OS or other marketplaces, you will pay a gas fee. If the item you’re buying is cheap, you might even end up paying more in gas fees than the item itself is valued. You might have to pay gas fees again when you sell, depending on how you decide to conduct the sale. If you’re thinking of flipping that item, this fact alone can make it impossible for you to turn a profit.

OpenSea itself charges it’s own fee for selling, and you will also typically pay a royalty fee back to the project, which can range between 2.5 and 10%.

There are gas fees when the item is sold and who pays the fees, depending on the transaction.

• Buyers pay the gas fees when purchasing fixed-price items.
• Sellers pay the gas when accepting offers.

When making offers or accepting offers on OpenSea, you will need to transact in WETH (Wrapped ETH). You can easily wrap or unwrap from ETH, but there is a small fee for doing so.

Always shorten the time frame when putting items up for sale so you don’t pay cancellation fees. The default is 6 months, but you can change this to 24hrs, 3 days or 1 week.

Use the same principle when making an offer, or you could end up buying a useless NFT 3 months from now because you forgot to cancel your bid.

When the gas price is super low go through all your collections and activate the sales option for each collection, so you don’t have to do it when gas is high.

Going in with great expectations

Despite a number of high ticket NFT sales taking place, according to Nonfungible.com, 58.55% of NFTs traded were sold for $1000 USD or less. Yes, there are people who made millions in a few months while playing around with NFTs, but these are by far the exception not the rule, and even they will admit that they got lucky. Go into NFTs to learn, first and foremost, and secondly, for the art. Profit should be third place. If you keep that order in mind, you won’t be disappointed and you’ll reduce your chances of making any stupid FOMO-based decisions.

NFT Marketplaces

Open Marketplaces

An open marketplace is one where anyone can mint and sell NFTs. There is no need to apply and get accepted – creators just connect to a wallet and mint the NFTs. Existing owners of NFTs can list their NFTs for resale.

OpenSea

OpenSea is easily the largest NFT marketplace. When you see people talking about buying and selling NFTs, 99% of the time they are referring to doing this on OpenSea. The platform has seen trading volume skyrocket into millions of dollars during 2021.

By being an open marketplace, scams abound, so you need to be careful to get the right URL for a project, as there are usually copycats posing as the real project trying to trick users into buying them. OopenSea verifies the largest projects and adds a checkmark next to their name. Look out for that, although some projects are having to wait days to get the checkmark, so not having a checkmark doesn’t mean the project is not trustworthy either.

Rarible