UptownSaintsFan said

I've been looking into these for about a month. And here's the really dumbed down version of what i've found. I'm really going to try to dumb it down.

A few quick definitions:

1. Minting - this is how your get your NFT (minting costs gas, i.e., there is an ETH charge)
2. Wallet - just like your wallets for all your crypto. I use metamask
3. Whitelist - the presale list

1. NFTs are essentially just JPEGs, however they are created in a manner (at least i think most of them are) where they are all unique, such that if someone mints 10,000 pictures of something, each one will be different, having different attributes and rarity.
2. You can go to https://opensea.io/ to check out various different NFTs (this is powered by Ethereum, there are also NFTs that use other things, like Solana, but I haven't experimented with that). This is the specific one I bought - https://opensea.io/collection/thecryptodads
3. Each NFT has a transaction that is tracked using the blockchain. If you've used NBA Top Shots, you've taken part in this, but this allows you to see every transaction and what everyone owns. This also means only you can truly own the NFT (though of course someone can just copy and paste).
4. The various NFTs have different plans, often called "road maps" of what they intend to do to make you want to own their NFT and be a part of the community. A lot of these try to foster a community as that is what seems to make the NFTs sell and make people want to hold. For example, the one I'm in, CyrpotDads is doing the following: (1) after a few weeks, each wallet the holds a dad will be able to mint a free crypto mom; (2) a few weeks (months?) after that, a wallet that is holding a cryptodad and a cryptomom will be able to mint a crypto tot based on the attributes of the mom and dad). They are also doing a beer line, shirts, etc. and supposedly have interest from Netflix, but who knows. I think they plan to add to their road map as time continues.
5. I have found that the best way to get an NFT is to get in the presale. This allows you to Mint an NFT before it goes live on Open Sea. When the big NFTs go live, gas gets really expensive (you can check gas prices here - https://etherscan.io/gastracker ) and you are not guaranteed to get one. Also, the original price is generally pretty reasonable. Cryptodads were 0.07 eth each.
6. To get in the presale, you have to get on the whitelist (the list of people on the presale). To do this, generally you have to locate the discord for the NFT before it goes on sale and accomplish something (usually be really early, active in the discord, or invite people). Discord is where these communities live and its a lot of what you have to do check these things out. This is what cryptodads' discord looks like - https://discord.gg/v4d6dNaU
7. Generally when you are doing a presale purchase, you go to the website for the NFT maker, connect your wallet to the site, and mint directly from there. After that, the NFT will show up in your Open Sea account.
8. You can check out upcoming NFT releases on https://rarity.tools/upcoming/ . You can also use that site to see how rare the nft you got was. See here for the rarest cryptodads - https://rarity.tools/thecryptodads . It's generally good to check out their discord, see how many users they have, their twitter following, how active the mods are and to see if you like the people in chat.
9. If you get on the presale you are basically given a blank NFT and you don't find out what you get until a certain point (usually after all the NFTs are sold). You are generally limited in how many you can buy presale.
10. After you get your NFT you can hold it and play the market or try to sell it on Opensea (which is linked to your wallet).
11. There are a lot of scammers out there so be careful.

The way i see it is you want to try to identify something good so you can get in cheap on the presale. Some of these people throw ETH around like candy (i can only assume they've all made a ton off crypto), so once things really start trading, it's a little rich for my blood because who knows when all this comes crashing down.

I hope this helps. I'm still a novice, but i'm happy to try to answer any questions.

Click to expand...