Jean Galea

Health, Wealth & Happiness

How to Invest in NFTs

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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.

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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.

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:

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:

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

Rarible is another open marketplace, however, unlike OpenSea, it is more focused on art assets such as books, music, albums, digital art, movies, photography, games, metaverses, domains, and memes.

Rarible integrates with OpenSea – minting on Rarible can populate the NFTs on OpenSea. Users can view the collectibles they created on Rarible on OpenSea and manage the NFTs on OpenSea as well. However, unlike OpenSea, Rarible only lists NFTs that were minted on Rarible.

If you’re looking for a higher risk/higher reward investment, look into the RARI token, which you can buy on Kraken.

Buy $RARI on Kraken

RARI has a total supply of 25m and is considered to be a utility token. By owning RARI tokens, users gain the ability to submit and vote on proposals to change its rules. This includes voting on possible fee changes, how those fees are spent and the rules governing creator promotion.

It is important to note that voting with RARI is non-binding, and that the Rarible company still needs to accept user decisions and implement them. However, Rarible’s goal is to eventually transfer power to a software-based system controlled by users called the Rarible DAO.

The idea behind buying the RARI token is to gain exposure to the growing NFT and digital content market or to have a say in how one of the leading NFT marketplaces develops.

Curated Marketplaces

A curated marketplace determines which NFTs are allowed to be minted, posted and sold on it.

Compared to an open marketplace, a curated marketplace is more limited and exclusive, requiring artists to apply and be accepted before being able to mint or sell NFTs in an attempt to keep fraud down and quality high.

SuperRare

SuperRare’s marketplace focuses on a limited number of hand-picked artists. Though aspiring creators can submit an artist profile form, entry barriers are high. Artists must submit their work for approval before it can be minted and listed on SuperRare’s marketplace.

Foundation

Foundation’s marketplace is community led, so artists invite new artists to join the platform and mint their NFTs. Creators can access the “creator invites” feature after selling their first NFT. Foundation also has OpenSea integration, so by minting on Foundation, the NFT can automatically be displayed on OpenSea.

KnownOrigin

KnownOrigin focuses on digital art. It is more difficult for creators to get accepted onto its platform. Artists submit their artwork in .jpeg or .gif format to the KnownOrigin gallery. As of April 2nd, 2021, applications are closed to creators.

Nifty Gateway

Nifty Gateway offers crypto assets and art called Nifties. Nifty Gateway partners with top creators, brands, athletes and artists, so it is difficult to get accepted for crypto art – only famous artists, brands, and celebrity creators will be selected to use the platform. Collectors can even buy items for sale on OpenSea using Nifty Gateway and pay using a credit card.

MakersPlace

MakersPlace also offers digital art. MakersPlace is invite-only, so an invited artist will fill out the creator application and sign and mint its NFT.

Proprietary Marketplaces

The third type of marketplace is “proprietary.” These platforms typically only offer NFTs created by the marketplace operator and usually do not facilitate the sale or display of other NFTs. Given that third-party creators are not invited to list NFTs on their sites, the exclusivity and scarcity of their NFTs often results in very high demand and high prices. In contrast to proprietary marketplaces, which only mint their own items, creators on other marketplaces retain the rights to the IP underlying their NFTs. This is because marketplaces that permit minting on their platforms are merely facilitating the creation of the NFT, but are not developing the actual artwork. Another distinguishing aspect of proprietary marketplaces is that some offer their own online “Showcases” where users can display their collection of the marketplaces’ NFTs. While OpenSea similarly allows users to display their items on its marketplace, the Showcase is not OpenSea’s proprietary collection, so it contains NFTs with other third party IP. Some examples of proprietary marketplaces include Top Shot, Vee Friends, and Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Here’s a nice comparison between platforms in the form of a Google spreadsheet.

You can also exchange NFTs in a P2P fashion on the following platforms:

This is useful if you strike a deal with someone who is willing to buy/sell within a project’s Discord channel. This happens a lot and is a great way to find good deals.

Trading NFTs

The biggest NFT platform is OpenSea, and that’s where most of the trading happens. You can also get a quick overview of which NFT projects are the most popular at any point in time. As I mentioned earlier, make sure that you interact with original projects, as there are a lot of fakes and copycats. Look for the blue checkmark next to the project name to make sure it’s the original project you’re looking at.

Interest in NFTs ebbs and flows, you can check out this chart to see the daily volume on OpenSea to get an idea of where we’re at.

In general, when Ethereum and altcoins pump, you’ll see lower interest in NFTs, and vice versa. Gas prices also influence the volume in a big way. On some days (or even periods extending for several days) gas fees really spike, pushing down project floors as traders delay their operations on OpenSea. Especially on lower-priced NFTs, you will get killed with gas fees when trading, which will make it next to impossible to turn a profit. Therefore it’s very important to keep an eye on gas prices and find a good time to push your transactions to the blockchain:

If you’re flipping then it is a better technique to buy at the floor and resell as the floor rises (provided you’ve done your research and are convinced it will do so) than going for a high rarity but well-priced item, as liquidity tends to be much less for the rarer and more expensive tokens. I suggest only buying the expensive rare items if you really love the artwork and wouldn’t mind holding it forever, or at the very least over a span of a couple of years.

Are NFTs a Speculation Game?

It’s hard to disagree with the claim that NFTs are a speculation game, because many participants treat the space as such. But I believe things will get better over time; we are still early.

I’ll just share this tweet as I think it really describes what we are seeing at the moment.

Basically, there are bad-faith actors who will stop at nothing to fleece their followers and fail time and time again to deliver on their promises. I’ve seen many projects use current trends to bolster their sales, only to basically rug pull everyone once the money is in. There are certain causes that are being abused, such as the lack of females in the industry, or being young (and thus deserving encouragement), environmental issues, etc. Be aware that people will use your sensitivity to a cause as a way to make money off you.

Valuation of NFTs

Evaluating NFTs

A lot of the value accrued to NFTs is highly subjective, however, there are also important things to consider, such as an item’s rarity within its collection. Some other useful sites for evaluating NFTs:

  • Rarity Tools – ranks project items by their rarity.
  • Traitsniper – rarity ranks
  • Golom – rarity ranks
  • Moby – trait analyzer, whale watcher
  • NonFungible.com – analyze, track and discover NFTs.
  • ICY Tools – on-chain analytics and wallet watching
  • NFT Stats – statistics on best-selling items, price over time, volume, etc.
  • Dune analytics – check this example for The Surreals project.
  • Nansen.ai – on-chain analytics
  • Paperhands – view your best and worst trading decisions
  • NFTBank – portfolio valuation, identify underpriced assets in the markets
  • DegenData – free wallet and project analysis tool
  • SuperSea – trait analyzer, profile value calculation and more
  • Whatsminting – tells you what are the hot ongoing mints at the moment

Keep in mind that the real drivers of value for NFTs of the PFPs type (personal profile pics) are the following:

  • flex power
  • rarity
  • community membership

One of the best ways to judge whether an NFT project will do well or not is to check the Discord channel and see what kinds of conversations are taking place there. You want to ask questions like:

  • Are the developers public? While many are anonymous, I maintain my idea that real names or companies behind projects are better. I don’t really understand this obsession with being anonymous.
  • Where are the NFTs themselves stored?

When we talk about rarity, we need to make sure we’re all looking at the same rarity classification. Different tools might be using different settings. You can think the trait normalization is something like this. For an NFT that has 2 1/1 traits, if the trait normalization is OFF, these traits would get the same score. Traits that have the same % will have the same score. If the trait normalization is ON, these traits will get a different score. It will depend on more things and other traits, besides the %. On Rarity.tools, most of the projects have it set as ON.

There are 3 types of NFT:

    1. fully centralized NFTs (like NBA Top Shot), where no information is in a public blockchain;
    2. “pointers”, NFTs where the certificate of provenance is on a public blockchain, but the artwork itself is elsewhere;
    3. fully on-chain NFTs

Most NFTs fall under the first two categories. Surprisingly few NFTs today attempt to use the blockchain itself as a medium and storage. The innovation of NFTs is not to have a database of certificates of provenance linked to an artwork stored elsewhere. The innovation is to have the token be the artwork itself. Fully on-chain NFTs are the closest you can get to holding a physical artwork. Autoglyphs were the first fully on-chain art. Created in 2019, they’re a completely self-contained mechanism for the creation and ownership of an artwork.

Storing NFTs

While MetaMask is a very convenient tool to get you started with NFTs, you should switch to using a hardware wallet (referred to as cold storage) when your portfolio grows to a meaningful financial value. This guide will get you started.

Accounting and Taxation for NFTs

If you’re buying NFTs through a company, you need to make sure that your accountants and auditors understand what you’re doing. The same applies if you’re an individual, but to a lesser extent. On an individual level, in the US some people have been using them to optimize their taxes by donating them.

Tax departments in many major countries will usually consider an NFT as a capital asset held for investment purposes. his means that sales or disposals of an NFT will usually generate a capital gain or loss for tax purposes. Capital gains are subject to Capital Gains Tax (CGT). If you are creating your own NFTs, consideration would need to be given as to whether the NFT is subject to capital treatment, or is instead a trading activity, which is taxed and accounted for differently.

The gain on the disposal of an NFT is typically the NFT’s value at disposal in £GBP less:

  • The cost of purchase
  • Transaction fees

Further reading on NFTs and taxation

History of NFTs

You can listen to this three-part podcast about the history of NFTs or have a look at the Twitter thread below.

Building in the NFT Space

I’d love to try my hand at creating a new NFT project, so if you are interested in that feel free to contact me with your ideas.

In the meantime, here is a quick guide to creating NFTs.

I also consider creating tools related to NFTs.

Are NFTs Art?

The majority of people that see NFTs for the first time are a bit perplexed at what they see, and even more so by the prices being paid for some of these pieces.

A valid question is whether these NFTs can be considered art. In my opinion, while a lot of the projects are trash or copies of famous projects, there is no doubt that the best projects are art.

I struggled myself to understand why these would be art pieces, especially because the “weird” artworks I was seeing within most projects conflicted with my idea of art. Upon further reading, however, I realised that my own ideas of art were very limited, and it drove me towards learning more about art and how to appreciate and understand it.

Here’s a Twitter thread of where NFTs fit in the history of art:

As for learning about art in general, I’ve started a course about European art history on Wondrium, which is a platform I use for educating myself on various topics like math, history, electronics etc. I basically use it instead of a Netflix subscription and you’ll usually find me following some course on most evenings after putting the kids to sleep.

I’ve learned that for every art piece or project, I need to consider the following points

  • Subject
  • Interpretation – how the subject is expressed
  • Style – the means of interpretation (each artist has his own style)
  • Context – contemporary political events, artist’s own life, historical period
  • Emotion – our response to the art

Generative art is not something new, it’s been done for decades. What is new is its introduction into the blockchain. With previous generative art pieces, delivery of the piece was quite clunky as it came with a screen and some sort of computer attached to it. Now, you can take electronic delivery in seconds through an NFT.

Suggested Reading on Generative Art

Take a look at this Twitter thread, there are several great books that are a recommended read if you want to understand the history and technical aspects of generative art.

The Future of NFTs

I am absolutely fascinated by the possibilities that NFTs are enabling, and beyond the current price bubble, I expect NFTs to play a significant role in the future of crypto, with lots of real-world applications up for grabs once the technology matures and regulations catch up.

Right now, it’s certainly a niche that is extremely high-risk to participate in as an investment. A report by Bloomberg has already shown that the JPEG market is highly illiquid. Only a quarter of the NFTs sold through the OpenSea marketplace during the period analysed have changed hands once or more. In addition, the top 3% traded NFTs account for 97% of the total NFT trading volumes.

One area that is already growing is borrowing and lending through NFT collateralised loans. These are the best sites for lending NFTs:

  • NFTFi
  • Drops – place your NFT as collateral and access a loan of up to 80% of the floor value of the NFT.

The way it works is that you can take your NFTs and use them as collateral for a crypto loan. You can also take the other position and accept someone’s NFTs as collateral in return for giving them a loan in crypto.

Further Reading

Sites for News and Articles about NFTs

What do you think of the NFT space? Are you invested in any projects? Let me know in the comments section below.

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Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete.

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