A question that most beginners in the NFT world face is this: where to buy NFTs from? The answer in most cases is: through an NFT marketplace. There are nuances, so we’ll be going through the landscape briefly and trying to make sense of things.

In this article, I’ll be dividing NFT marketplaces into two: Open and Curated.

I will also mention some tools that can be used to trade NFTs securely in a peer-to-peer fashion.

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 and trying to trick users into buying them. OpenSea 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.

Some alternatives to OpenSea are LooksRare, X2Y2 and Blur. All these marketplaces can be used to trade NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.

Objkt

Objkt is the equivalent of OpenSea on the Tezos blockchain. If you’re new to OpenSea, it’s probably a better idea to stick to buying NFTs on the Ethereum chain, but if you’re into generative art, it’s worth having a look at what’s available on Tezos. Typically art on this chain is much cheaper. For generative art on Tezos it’s also worth looking at FX Hash.

Rarible

One of the best use cases for NFTs is for token-gated communities.

In this post, I’ll share my favorite community NFTs, meaning that these online communities use NFTs as a means of authenticating users to their Discord, assign allow lists, giveaways, real-life meetups etc.

I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from my experience in these communities when I decided to start my own online community.

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. They’ve given a ton of value to their holders in subsequent drops like Moonbirds and Oddities as well. If it’s a great community that pays ETH dividends that you’re looking for, PROOF is your number one choice.

Website | Twitter | OS

gmDAO

The gmDAO is a community of NFT collectors, artists & investors created in September 2021 using a fair token distribution. Broadly speaking, the DAO was formed based on the principles of etiquette and mutual respect, making the community a haven within a typically hostile environment. This ultimately resulted in an extremely passionate & engaged member base.

Structurally the DAO consists of 900 members, the majority active within NFT sector, with backgrounds ranging from accredited investors, to renowned generative artists with collections featured on ArtBlocks curated.

The primary goal of gmDAO is to foster & encourage the development of the NFT space, whether through organic marketing, seed funding from the treasury or development from within the DAO itself. The DAO also seeks to provide an edge to members through information not freely available to the market. Lastly, the gmDAO will launch a number of internally managed projects that will act as a revenue source for the community.

The first project was gm.Studio, through which the wildly successful generative project Factura was launched in 2022.

The gm.studio is a generative art platform that claims to be the world’s first completely decentralized art platform. It is a direct challenger to Art Blocks and addresses the downsides that platform presents to new artists, namely extremely long application times, poor communication and financial barriers to entry.

The two main methods that these improvements are brought about are:

1. A blind curation process
2. Artists pay no fees upfront (the studio handles marketing, deployment & rendering costs)

In this way, every artist starts on the same footing, and the curators/judges have no idea who is the artist behind the project they’re looking at. While this sometimes results in famous artists being rejected, it does ensure a more inclusive and fair process.

Twitter

Grailers DAO

GrailersDAO is a community focused on supporting and collecting high-end “grail” art NFTs (with a particular affinity for generative art and Art Blocks.

Owning a GrailersDAO NFT does not, however, come with fractional ownership of the GrailersDAO NFT grail art collection. Each GrailersDAO NFT provides you with one governance vote over what the DAO does with its treasury. Currently, the treasury is composed of ETH, artworks, and some additional GrailersDAO NFTs.

Owning a GrailersDAO NFT enables you to verify as a holder on Discord which, in turn, provides you access to all members-only channels. The DAO is also working on additional perks for holders, including working directly with artists to produce artworks

GrailersDAO members include some of the world’s leading generative artists, some of the world’s top digital art collectors, expert Web3 builders, generative art lovers, and many others.

Each GrailersDAO NFT is a piece of generative art by Art Blocks Curated artist Stefano Contiero.

The floor price on this has stayed pretty constant, and I’ve enjoyed the conversations with artists and other collectors in this Discord.

GrailersDAO on OpenSea

Collective Strangers

Collective Strangers is a community focused on photography. It is both for those who are photographers or want to take up photography, and for those interested in collecting photography NFTs.

It’s a friendly community with its own PFP project as well, and the founder, Eric Rubens, is a well-known photographer who I had the pleasure of interviewing on my podcast.

Collective Strangers website

Bored Breakfast Club

Bored Breakfast Club is at 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, but am not counting on that being very long.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS

Curious Addys Trading Club

Curious Addys Trading Club was the first educational NFT project with a 100% refund baked into the smart contract.

The focus of this project is on 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

Did I miss out on your favorite NFT community? Let me know in the comments below!

As with any other investment, it’s impossible to get everything right with NFT investments, especially in the early days when you’re learning the ropes. What is more important is to maintain a growth mindset and not be too hard on yourself.

The NFT space can be brutal for newcomers, with tons of poor projects, rug pulls, scams and all kinds of sneaky ways to make people lose their ETH.

In the interest of being able to look back and try to see why I got things wrong, I’ll be delving into my non-performing projects in this post.

I’ll start off by saying that I have not experienced any rug pull projects, meaning that I’ve done well in at least analysing the integrity of the teams behind the projects I invested in. The projects I bought into that didn’t perform well were simply the result of current market trends, or deficiencies in the projects themselves, but not a result of bad intensions from the founders.

Read more: How to evaluate NFT projects

I’ll also preface this by saying that this has been a painful post to write. It’s not easy facing failure after failure and seeing the now-obvious mistakes that I’ve done. On the other hand, it’s essential for traders in any industry to keep a diary of all their trades and review them periodically in order to refine their strategies.

NFT trading is no different. And while I don’t consider myself an NFT trader but rather a collector, as I invest for the long-term, it was important for me to look back on what I’ve done so far in the space with a critical eye and learn some important lessons.

So let’s get things going.

Winter Bears

Let’s start with Winter Bears.

The collection launched in September 2021 with a mint price of 0.03 ETH ($100 at the time of mint) and sold out within hours. I bought on the secondary market, meaning I paid a significantly higher price than mint and already started out at a disadvantage.

Here was my original analysis posted elsewhere on this site when I bought into it:

Winter Bears is a collection of 10,000 adorable polar bear NFTs available on the Ethereum blockchain.

Each bear is completely unique, created using over 150 individual features.

Winter Bears was created with the ambition of raising awareness for the endangered polar bear, an animal so beautiful and majestic whose habitat is quite literally melting away. Therefore charitable work and contributions is also part of the uses of the treasury (although there will be no DAO for now). The team has also donated $40,000 to @shesthefirst and committed another $40,000 to Polar Bears International, while noting that they continue to be charitable in the future.

This is another feel-good project. I feel that the artwork is adorable and among the best I’ve seen in PFP  projects. There is a wide range of easily distinguishable traits. There is already one major airdrop to look forward to; all Winter Bear holders will also receive a Summer Bear. Moreover, all gas fees will be covered by the project.

A merch store will also be made available for those who want to proudly wear their bears.  The license is non-restrictive, so you are free to do anything you want with them under a non-exclusive license.

Winter Bears was created by a team of DeFi builders who’ve been contributing to the Ethereum community since 2016.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the project for me from a learning perspective, is that Winter Bears is partnered with PieDAO to potentially have the Winter Bears featured in an NFT index, and there is also a bears vault on NFTX. You can stake your Winter Bear to earn with $BEAR, sell your bear w/o a buyer, own a fraction of a bear, or swap your Winter Bear for another Winter Bear in the vault.

There are some notable holders in this project. @punk2476 is the biggest holder of Winter Bears. She hangs out in the discord and brings a ton of positive energy to the community! Another one is @TheShamdoo, the creator of HeadDAO.

The roadmap is a bit weak in my opinion, animations could work but that’s a bit of a moonshot in terms of driving monetary value. I’m looking forward to the airdrops announced so far though (Summer Bears and Pixel Bears).

Turns out that I was quite right about the roadmap, and the DeFi part wasn’t really a high-value proposition. The steam for cute animal PFPs also ran out towards the end of 2021, so there really was no room for this project to grow.

The most expensive Winter Bear that ever sold was Winter Bear #1178, which sold for 15 ETH. I pity the person who spent that much on one of these bears. While it is ranked #1, there is practically zero chance he will even remotely get close to breaking even on this, let alone profiting. That’s the huge risk you take when you go big on the rare items in a collection. If the collection does well, you have an incredibly valued asset, but if not, you’re left holding some very heavy bags. On the other hand, it’s also interesting to see who makes these kinds of buys in the market. In this case, it was an OG punk owner that had already become rich by holding punks, so he can very easily brush off such a loss.

The Winter Bears team did keep to their promise of launching Summer Bears, which I also minted, but that didn’t really affect the project value much.

I ended up taking a loss on this one. I bought my bear for 0.378 ETH shortly after mint ended and sold the summer bear and winter bear for a combined 0.14 ETH. The same bear I sold ended up being traded a few more times, with the last sale being for 0.25 ETH. That was a nice sale compared to what I let it go for, although it doesn’t even come close to what I originally paid for it. The floor price as I write this is slightly below 0.1 ETH, so holding the bear wouldn’t really have helped either.

The real winners in this project are clearly those who minted. They had the opportunity to sell for 10x+ right after mint, and even if they rode all the price fluctuations and diamond-handed, they would still be able to sell for 3x at the time of writing.

Financially this was the biggest realized loss I’ve taken so far.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Perseverance

Upon purchase, here’s what I had written:

Perseverance is a generative art project made up of 500 unique pieces by the artist Giorgio Balbi. There are 4 different types of variations in their algorithms, each type is randomly distributed and the amounts are not equal. The “perseverance” arises from the idea of ​​creating a generative art model that combines multiple variations in its strokes, colors, density and angles, generating different visual textures.

This was my first purchase of a generative art piece, and I bought it because I liked it. There is no utility planned for these artworks beyond owning and displaying it wherever you want. This is the kind of artwork I’d like to have in my house, so I’m happy to own it long-term.

The one downside I see is that not all items in the collection are hi-res, meaning many of them will not be that suitable for printing and hanging on your wall, which is a shame as that is the main purpose for them in my opinion.

I was pretty aware of the fact that there was no utility attached and that I could need to hold this long-term as generative art projects sometimes have low liquidity. I would still put it in my list of failures as I again bought on the secondary market during the highest day of hype, when the project was featured on the frontpage of OpenSea. I believe that was how I came across the project in the first place.

I’ve learned to completely ignore the OpenSea frontpage since then. As a beginner, I used to think they would curate what they post and only include big projects, but that wasn’t the case. I’m not sure to this day what algorithm they use for that. These days, I use my own tools to understand what’s happening on the market and to know what’s hot or not, apart from being able to make a qualitative analysis of projects based on my experience.

As you can see, the volume chart is an absolute disaster. Secondary sales dried out a few days after the project launched, with the floor price several times lower than what I paid for my piece. I’m pretty much stuck with this artwork forever unless I basically give it away for free, and that’s not what I was planning for.

Even though I was prepared to hold for the long term, I wanted the possibility to put it up for sale at some point and be able to sell for a decent price, even if I’d have to wait a few days or even weeks. This isn’t the case as things stand today, and I don’t see it changing since the artist doesn’t produce much and is not well-known.

To make it worse, a few other projects were released that used a similar generative art algorithm (Wavelength being the main one), further diluting the value of this collection.

This piece ends up taking the throne as the biggest unrealized loss for me. I bought for my piece for 0.8 ETH which was quite expensive, considering the price of ETH was around $4,000 at the time. With the experience I have now, I wouldn’t have paid that kind of money in dollar terms for a piece of generative art from a fairly unknown artist.

The winners here are again the guys who minted at a mint price of 0.077 ETH. Total including gas price was around 0.1 ETH, and the current floor is more than double that, so they can sell at an easy profit anytime they want. In fact, several of those selling at low prices at the moment are those who minted, not those who bought high on secondary like myself.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Bushidos

This was a project I invested in with high hopes, but looking back, I should have considered the risks more seriously than I did, given that I had already flagged them in my initial review:

The Bushidos are a clan of 8,888 Samurai warriors established to “preserve the decentralization of the blockchain and protect against FUD”. Bushidos is meant to be a cultural movement, not a one-and-done NFT project. The founding team’s goal is to grow an active creative community around the theme of samurai lore and culture.

The project aims to have several seasons in its roadmap. The first Season sets the foundations, including the minting and setting up of the community.

Season One is dedicated to:

• Building partnerships, community, and foundational story
• Launching an eternal mint pass
• Launching the Bushidos
• Launching the Katanas airdrop
• Preparing the story for Season two

Season Two will be dedicated to telling the story of the Bushidos.

That will look like:

• A virtual comic book with physical implications
• Start working on a plan for 3D skins for the Bushido (for use in the metaverse)
• Download high-res images of your Bushido
• An ERC20 token
• And at least 2 new NFT collections

The four project founders all work at Coinbase, and this led a lot of credibility to the project. Jeremy Booth is the illustrator for the Bushidos. I like his art a lot and this was one of the reasons I got into Bushidos.

As for the risks for this project, I would say that it’s hard for the untrained eye to distinguish between different Bushidos, and I don’t see them catching on as a PFP either due to their niche style and lack of distinguishibility. This is why it will be very important for the story to be sustained over time by a strong team and community participation and interest.

From my perspective, the biggest doubt I have is whether the project can sustain interest long enough for value to accrue to the tokens. Time will tell, but again, Bushidos gives me exposure to one more niche of the NFT space, so I’m happy to be part of it as a learning experience, and I like the artwork. I like the idea of learning more about samurai culture as well.

So basically, here I invested because I like Japanese-themed art and I wanted to learn more about the Samurai history (should have just read a book or watched a documentary for that), and because the founders work at Coinbase. I liked the art but as I flagged initially, each NFT does not stand out from the rest and they don’t really make great PFPs, hence little value in the current NFT space.

The fact that the founders work at Coinbase does not really mean much. At the time when I invested, Coinbase was hyping up its move into NFTs with a marketplace that never materialized (hopefully sometime in 2022), and that swayed my emotions into giving this fact too much importance than it deserved.

To make things worse, I bought on the secondary market (yes, I did finally learn my lesson about buying high on secondary after reveal), and have been holding my bags ever since, with little hope of recouping the cost.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Galaxy Eggs

Here are my notes when I invested:

There is a solid team of three in place. Two guys come from the bored ape community and they are backed by the fantastic artwork of renowned artist Gal Barkan, who serves as art director.

The 3D artwork is quite breathtaking, and the sneak peeks from the upcoming Galaxy Metaverse are amazing. I’m looking forward to both the promised airdrop and the launch of the Galaxy Warriors, which is the second phase for this project.

Similar to the Bushidos, this is a long-term project so hopefully, people will not lose interest along the way.

I spent 1.38 ETH for Galaxy Eggs and 0.21 for minting the Galaxy Warriors, whilst I recovered 0.719 ETH from Galaxy Warriors sales. Gas fees were high when I was buying these so I spent a good chunk on that as well.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that this project was really suitable for being an NFT; it’s still unclear to me what is the overall goal. It seems that most collectors also feel this way. I sense that most invested just because the 3D art looked amazing and there were a lot of big promises, but things got too complex or took too long and people lost interest and flipped these to get into simpler projects.

At the time I invested, projects were being given a lot of weight when people from Crypto Punks or Bored Apes were involved (the OG effect), but it turned out to be very irrelevant in this project. I kind of liked the art but didn’t really understand the end goals, so I should have avoided it rather than speculated. And again, buying on the secondary market made it exponentially riskier.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Surreals

I invested in this one to experience how a project that was focused 100% on the art would perform. While I’m happy with the community and the founder’s initiatives to sustain the project, the price has not done terribly well. Here are my initial notes:

Surreals are a collection of 10,000 generative portraits with a surreal, vintage naturalist aesthetic.

I like the quirky artwork and the founder is definitely doing his best to drive value forward. The artist who launched this project promised nothing in return apart from the art itself and was very open about his limitations.

However, he is very open to suggestions and this has been reflected in the way that the community has taken ownership and taken the lead in moving things forward. The Discord channel is a fun place to hang out, so there is a strong community aspect for my incentive to own pieces from this collection, quite apart from the artwork itself.

As usual, my biggest mistake is to have bought on secondary rather than mint. I did receive an airdrop but it’s basically not worth anything either.

I don’t see how the price will ever come close to its all-time highs of around 0.3 ETH. I bought very high at 0.237 ETH and I didn’t even manage to grab a rare one, so I got destroyed by the price action. Right now I could sell it at floor for around 0.055 ETH, which is even less than the original mint price of 0.06 ETH.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

HeadDAO

I made several mistakes on this one. First of all, the founder should have been an immediate red flag. He’s not doxxed and says he is 16 years old. His Twitter is a constant stream of babble; he seems to spend more time on Twitter shitposting than building anything.

Second, part of why I bought these is because I loved the Nouns project but couldn’t afford one of those. This project uses the Nouns artwork, and it sounds stupid now but it did influence me in buying these. Even worse, I went for the rarer items even though rarity played no part in this project from the very start. The fact that I bought on the secondary market didn’t help – I paid too much because I was buying on secondary, and I paid extra because I went for the rare ones.

Thirdly, it wasn’t clear to me what the project actually did. I understood the basics but not the roadmap to this project’s potential eventual success. Here’s how I had described it:

This is actually a DAO and the artwork itself is borrowed from the Nouns collection, which is open source. The idea here is to buy blue-chip NFTs and fractionalize them. Thus every Head NFT holder will accrue part of the value of those blue-chip NFTs.

You can also stake your NFTs in a vault and earn $HEAD. This is done on the project’s website. When you stake the head NFTs they will disappear from your wallet and go into the community wallet but you still own them and can unstake them anytime.

The fractionalized vault’s reserve price will always be adjusted to be at least double the current price of the NFTs in it. So the likelihood of the vault being bought out is next to zero. That being said, as a HeadDAO holder that automatically makes you part of the DAO, gives you voting rights in what the DAO does, and makes you eligible to redeem and offers of utility that the team put out.

However, you will need $HEAD in order to redeem any utility, so it’s best to stake in order to earn $HEAD to get access to the utility offers and that is where the real value is/will be. A small example is a collaboration between HeadDAO and an upcoming project, where those who have their heads staked will be in with a chance to make the whitelist of the other project.

After spending a week in OpenSea’s top volume charts and duping me into thinking it was a great project, it quickly tapered off into oblivion, as so many of those 1-week chart-toppers do. I wasn’t experienced enough back then to know that I should not look at OpenSea’s charts (as I mentioned earlier).

I also ended up wasting some ETH in the staking process and game that was released as part of this project. A ranking tool that was supposed to be the best in the industry ended up being a complete sham; at least I didn’t put money in that as well.

This project’s discord is extremely noisy, which made it impossible to follow what was already quite a nebulous roadmap. Ultimately, I staked all my tokens and hoped for the best, but I doubt I will ever recoup my investment. I’ve written it off in my head.

I spent around 5 ETH on this and although I haven’t sold anything yet it would practically be a total loss if I were to sell now with the floor below 0.1 ETH. I would classify this as my worst investment of all.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

The Diamond Hands

Here’s another one that didn’t pan out as I planned. You can see from what I had originally written about this collection that I knew I was in for a rough ride:

This is another project where the artwork itself is not the main thing you’re paying for. It’s a DeFi + NFTs concept. The idea here is to buy and fractionalize blue-chip NFTs and then hold onto them with diamond hands.

The concept of Diamond Hands stems from the cultural significance of someone who doesn’t “cave under pressure” and has unwavering conviction in the asset they own. The team is solid, including some punk owners, and the designer is Yanis Georges, a well-known designer on SuperRare. The one thing I’ll say is that the website is quite simplistic with grammar mistakes and a lack of refinement in the writing. I know people don’t pay much attention to these things, but to me it always suggests a lack of polish and rigor in the person/team.

Unfortunately, the project is off to a rough start with a big decline in value, but I’m still hoping that the next purchases and subsequent fractionalizations will bring some attention back to the project, and hence take the price back up.

I like original use cases like this so I want to be involved as a learning experience. If I don’t buy I’m not incentivized to keep in the loop on the team’s Discord, check prices, etc. So I buy to learn.

At around the time when I bought, there were quite a few projects trying to do some sort of DeFi+NFT play, and the concept was trending. Eventually, the trend fizzled out and none of those projects ended up doing well. HeadDAO is another example of this trend.

I thought this would be a good project, given that top collectors like Pranksy had bought an insane amount of them. Of course, what I had not checked was whether they had minted or bought on the secondary market. Seems like we’re seeing a recurring theme here huh?

So Pransky minted 250 of these at a cost of 0.09 ETH per token, while I paid 0.028 ETH. However, this is misleading. This project bought and fractionalized a crypto punk, then airdropped DHCP tokens to holders. These DHCP tokens represent the value of the crypto punk fractions corresponding to each holder. So what happened here is that the guy who sold to me had collected his DHCP tokens (which are obviously still valuable as Crypto Punks are still a blue-chip) then dumped his Diamond Hand token on me. The lesson here is that before you invest you need to do your research and understand what the utility for the token is and how it works. I just got caught in the hype and didn’t even realize that the crypto punk fractions had already been airdropped to holders before I bought my token, hence making it pretty useless.

Luckily, I still managed to sell off the token at 0.04 ETH, more or less breaking even when costs are factored in. Still, it definitely wasn’t a great investment and there were a few important lessons I learned from this one. As I type this, the project is still alive but there are few secondary market sales, with a floor price of 0.02 ETH, basically being handed out for free.

Website | Discord | Twitter | OS | Dune dashboard

Cosmic Cowgirls

One of the founders is the girlfriend of scammer Colethereum, but I didn’t know that when I first bought in. Looking back, this project had little substance and I would have easily dismissed it now that I know more about the NFT space. The relationship of the founder would have been an immediate red flag, let alone the project art and the roadmap.

For some reason, I liked the art at the time and bought two rare items. The floor price got so bad that it wasn’t even worth minting the follow-up to Cosmic Cowgirls, the very imaginatively named Cosmic Cowboys.

I caught a lucky break during a week of hype about women-led projects, where this collection pumped along with all the other projects that had women founders, and I got out at that point. I put in 0.18 ETH and sold for 0.26 ETH, so considering fees and commissions it’s more or less break even. It could have been worse.

I consider it a bad investment because I didn’t do my research properly and that goes against my investing principles. Since I usually aim to hold long-term it pains me to hold projects like this one.

Noodles

Here the project itself is good but I paper-handed too early on. I minted them based on my doodle holdings (1 mint per wallet + 3 mints via whitelist), then sold my 4 Noodles for a combined 0.175 ETH, with the floor price now sitting at 0.3 ETH, so I missed out on an easy 10X on each of my tokens (several of them eventually sold for more than 10X what I let them go for).

I’m not sure there’s much to learn from this for me, beyond not selling below my own mint price. I should have had more conviction before minting, allowing me to wait until the price settled before selling, or just holding long-term.

At the time, I didn’t really vibe that much with the art, but the team have been absolutely killing it, so kudos to them for underpromising and overdelivering. It’s not usual to see a derivative project doing so well not only price-wise but especially in terms of delivery.

Planktoons

This is the only project I was involved in that ended up rugged. I absolutely should not have minted any of these NFTs in the first place as they didn’t look great, the team was not doxxed and basically are a few kids from the Philippines with zero credibility as far as I can see. To make matters worse the funds that were supposed to be used for development of the project ended up being stolen by the founder LALA and that was basically the end of it. She even refused to turn over the assets to a member of the community who wanted to carry on with the project without her. Truly a despicable scammer; unfortunately the fact that these lowlifes are not doxxed means that she will probably escape any repercussions for her actions. That’s one reason why I don’t invest in projects with undoxxed founders.

Lessons Learned

Looking back at my journey, I can see that even though I’m a very skeptical person and like to analyse things very thoroughly, I did get swept up by the hype on some projects. I also definitely overtraded. I should have bided my time and held my ETH tight rather than constantly going all in and running out of ETH.

The best investors in this space always keep a healthy store of ETH ready to pounce on the next big opportunity. If you check Pranksy’s wallet, for example, you’ll see that he always keeps a minimum of 1,000 ETH ready to go at any point in time. That’s massive firepower that he can use to influence the market or take a great position in a project early on.

Timing purchases and sales remains a very tricky business. 

For example, I sold a Doodle for 5 ETH only to see it being resold 2 days later for 10 ETH. I sold it to a friend of mine so at least I was happy for his gains, but it was a terrible trade for me. I couldn’t really have predicted that floor price move though, so it’s just a matter of understanding that prices move dramatically and quickly in the NFT space, and you’ll be caught either holding bags or paper handing quite often if you do many trades.

On the other hand, it’s easier to avoid catching falling knives. What might look like a great deal might in fact be the start of a significant descent in the floor price of a project. I’ve been caught in these situations a few times and will be much more aware of this going forward. I’m pretty good at negotiating a lower price on what I want to buy, but I’ve sometimes paid less attention then I should have at the current market conditions and timelines of the project I was getting into. The result is that I did get a great deal after spending a lot of time negotiating, only to see the significance of that deal melt away as the floor price descended a couple of weeks later to the same level I had bought at and below.

From the projects above and their price evolution, we can easily conclude that minting a project gives you a massive advantage compared to those who buy on secondary. For most projects that don’t do as well as expected, the floor price trends back to the mint price, allowing a minter to exit without any losses. This is how many big names in the NFT space got rich in the first place. Pranksy is a great example. Just to cite one example of his OG purchases, he minted 250 Bored Apes. Mind-blowing stuff.

Even the idea of sticking to blue-chip projects is not really 100% reliable. For example, I bought into Cool Cats and Creatures because I think they are great projects, and they had been doing well and very stable, but they both tanked for different reasons. I didn’t include them above as I don’t consider them failures so far; I love the art and community in both cases, and am hoping that in the long run they will do well price-wise. But again, I might be proven wrong and have to revisit this article in a few months’ time to jot down another lesson learned.

That’s why these days I prefer building very strong conviction in a project and going in heavily for the long-term. I will then only sell when I have at the very least done a 2x on my initial position, and even then, it would only be to let go of a small percentage of my tokens.

Going forward I’m going to be very choosy in the projects I go into, and I’ll either be going in at mint time or at a much later stage when the price has consolidated. I’m sure there will be exceptions to be made, but that is the general rule I’ll be adopting.

What are the best lessons you’ve learned while trading NFTs?

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.

I use ICY Tools as my home screen for getting a bird’s eye view on whatever is happening in the NFT space. This is mainly done through the Trending Collections screen.

You’ll usually see a mix of just launched projects along with others that are experiencing a surge.

One of the things I personally like to keep my eyes on is the latter. I have a list of projects that I’m invested in and love on a fundamental level, so when I see one of them spiking, it’s a good indicator for me to buy more and ride the wave. In these cases, I don’t really need to do much due diligence as I would have already done that previously. I would just have a look to see what’s causing the pump (a quick trip to the Discord server is usually enough), before I actually pull the trigger.

As a premium user of ICY Tools, you’ll get the 15m and 30m time periods. In my opinion, these are essential as the NFT niche moves at breakneck speed, and a few minutes can make a big difference, especially if you’re trying to snipe great deals around the floor price.

When you’re looking at this screen, you need to keep an eye on how the projects are sorted. By default, they are sorted by the number of sales, which is not that clear at first glance. Over time, as you become an experienced NFT trader, you will develop your own rules and strategies. For example, you might not want to consider projects below a certain floor (most likely due to the impact of gas fees) or vice versa (maybe if you are looking for outsized returns). Volume is also an important factor. Hopefully, you know that NFTs can be a very illiquid asset to own, so more volume means a better likelihood that you will be able to pull off the trade you have in mind.

I like to click through the various time periods to compare and contract project activities. If you’re looking at the very short time periods, you might encounter projects that are just minting, experiencing a floor sweep, or otherwise being manipulated, whereas the longer periods give you a better picture of whether a project is experiencing sustainable growth, or conversely consistent declines.

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

Uniq

Uniq is a free tool that has a lot of interesting statistics on projects that can be used as cues to enter and exit positions. In a sea of copycat tools, this one stands out for being completely free and for providing some interesting data points that are not available on other tools.

Uniq

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

Compass Art

Compass is an alternative to ICY Tools, with a lifetime pass that can be purchased off OpenSea, or pay-as-you-go options. The interface is one of the best I’ve seen among NFT analytics tools, and the features work as advertised.

Compass

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

Prosper Circle

Prosper Circle adds a layer of context that is not available on other tools, and that is the main reason for using it.

Prosper Circle

Artacle

Artacle’s uniqueness stands from the fact that it is the only tool I know that caters to generative art, a niche of the NFT world, that I feel will be growing a lot bigger in the coming months and years.

I especially like using Artacle to explore Art Blocks collections. If you know any other tools that help in analysing generative art drops, do let me know in the comments section below. So far, Artacle is the only usable one I’ve found.

Artacle

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

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

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.