You can skip this whole personal thoughts section if you only care for the guide on getting started with NFT
Preface
Personally I think NFT is in its early bullshit days like cryptocoins, the utility idea is great and has tons of potential. This guide is simply for those who are interested in getting started and understanding the basics of NFT from my perspective. When I was in undergrad I missed out on $3/bitcoin, forgoing a coffee would have net me a fully paid off new Tesla Model 3 today. NFT seems to be repeating the phenomenon for the next gen, and rather than scoff at it as I’m supposed to as the stereotypical, older, condescending person, I respect the younger people’s energy and risk taking. Yes, it is more nuanced than 1:1 analogy of bitcoin of my time and NFT now because bitcoin was used illegally and not accepted mainstream then, whereas NFT rides off of a legal space created by its predecessor, removing the huge risk and reward of “$3/bitcoin”.
To quickly talk about the utility potentials of NFT, the following tweet sums up the relationship between NFT and the Metaverse concept (the virtual You).
Let’s get on with the guide.
TL;DR
- Setup DeFi wallet such as https://metamask.io/ I was actually and still am skeptical of this Gen Z connect recommended wallet, I treat it as a total loss even now.
- Fund DeFi wallet with the currency of the project you’re trying to mint, ETH in my example. I fund mine from Coinbase rather than the DeFi wallet out of precaution from fear of step 1.
- Go to NFT Project website such as https://apocalypticapes.com/ to mint the NFT to your DeFi wallet by connecting your DeFi wallet and paying the floor + gas price, initial offering basically.
- Sell on opensea.io or any other NFT trading platform.
- ???
- Profit! Utility!
Guide to getting started with minting, selling, and buying NFT
I’m gonna walk through the steps along with my newbie thought process and questions.
Step 1 Getting a Decentralized Finance Wallet:
Why can’t I use my existing Coinbase wallet, what’s the difference?
Coinbase is still connected to you via SSN. Email and Phone number can be easily supplied anonymously. DeFi wallets don’t ask for SSN. To be honest not sure why it’s significant to have DeFi wallet over Coinbase, maybe less central control, and allows for more freedom and less regulation, more potentially dangerous assets such as hyped NFT / crypto coins.
https://hackernoon.com/decentralized-wallets-leveraging-the-strength-of-software-wallets quick read up on the differences
What DeFi wallet should I get?
I don’t know, but my Gen Z connects have told me they use MetaMask. I looked at the reviews and it was terrible and scary to trust my finances to, but I’m here to learn and want to remove the friction from Gen Z knowledge share, so I took a risk for us.
How can I trust the DeFi wallets won’t steal my assets?
I still don’t fully trust them, and I accept it as a total loss from the start. I have ways to mitigate risk such as funding these wallets from a different source rather than from services offered by these wallets.
Step 2 Fund the DeFi wallet:
To protect myself I just sent crypto from my Coinbase to this DeFi burner wallet’s public address. I sent whatever currency I need to pay for the project I’m trying to mint.
What’s minting?
It’s exactly what it sounds like, instead of pressing a coin, you’re pressing, minting an NFT. Basically purchasing and putting it on the blockchain the initial NFT offering, everything afterwards is a resell, meaning this is the best price on the market, the minting price.
Step 3 Mint the NFT from the NFT Project Website:
Go to the official website, and make sure you spend the time to triple check what’s the real website. Lot’s of fake aliases on the trading platforms and everywhere. Would be so dumb to pay hundreds of dollars for a *.png to a fake fake entity!
Once at the NFT project website it should be very clear how to mint your first NFT. It usually goes like:
- Connect wallet
- Pay in their desired crypto currency to mint + gas fees (can be high unfortunately) I paid about 20% in gas fees.
- Your first NFT arrives at your DeFi wallets.
What’s gas fees?
It’s the fee paid to the Ethereum miners who compute to verify the transactions on the ledger. Very compute heavy, very profitable, and very suck for people who want to get their hands on an RTX 3080 for ML and games. Lastly I learned it also sucks for people who want to flip NFT. FUCK.
WHERE’S MY APE?
I was so confused, I got this picture of an ape skull. Wtf did I just pay $350 for this ugly pic???? I was expecting the below.
The answer was right in front of me. Have to refresh the metadata after minting and the NFT asset first arriving to your wallet, refresh by clicking the retry or refresh looking icon via opensea.io, maybe can do it from somewhere else too but that’s what I did.
What’s opensea?
opensea.io is simply a trading platform like eBay for NFT. There’s many others but this is a popular one.
You’re able to connect your wallet to this web NFT trading platform and can be opened as a browser from your wallet.
How can I find my assets on opensea?
I still haven’t really figured out a good way and I’m not sure if this is a limitation of design or bad UI on this new platform (which is clever use), but it is so damn hard to readily get to the asset I purchased from my MetaMask wallet. So my steps to get to my asset on opensea:
- Find the NFT item number via MetaMask NFT tab.
- Search for the NFT project’s opensea.io page and then further search for the item #.
- Update me if there is a better way; connecting my wallet and favoriting it doesn’t seem to help, it still seems to be missing from being readily available to access. I find myself clicking through in loops between wallet browser/opensea clumsily.
Step 4 Sell your minted NFT to others
5. ???
6. Profit
What’s the Best Offer? and what’s the Last mean?
From what I understand Best Offer is the current best offer made to the seller, and Last means what the asset itself was last sold for, I’m thinking this is what the current seller bought it for.
As mentioned from the sections before the “gas” needed for any transaction is hella expensive as you can see here. It’s confusing that to simply list on opensea.io requires you to pay these crazy transaction fees of $162 (lowest I’ve seen so far), I’ve seen as high as $300+ so far. Though off peak hours such as 3AM CST seems to exist the lowest price of the day. I have only listed my one and only NFT, so I can’t verify if I have to pay such high fees each time I want to list for sale. I’m not sure if the high fees were a one time initiation fee to sell on opensea and each subsequent listing would be a much lower gas fee of ~$10 vs $100+ or the high fee IS normal. Will update when I use next.
Step 5 CASH OUT, USE LUCKY HOUSE MONEY AND YOLO SOME MORE:
I did let go of my first NFT at first dip, and it proved to be a mistake. Because I only minted 1 NFT, I was stuck with limited options. I wanted to lock in and say yes, someone offered thousands to buy my *.png and it happened rather than risk it dropping back to minting price effectively me buying this *.png for hundreds. I couldn’t HODL because I only had 1. The answer is to buy 2+ if you’re going in on a project, and that’s what I should have done.
Cheers to you Gen Z, thanks for teaching this Millennial.
BTW HERES A CHART OF FOR REFERENCE:
