An NFT is a non-fungible token. I’m sure you’ve heard that term before but what does it mean? In layman’s terms, it means it exists exclusively digitally online on the blockchain. It can be a piece of art, memorabilia, music that you own. It essentially is a unit of data that can be composed of almost anything.
It is a distributed public ledger that records transactions. This means you can verify the legitimacy of an NFT. You can see everyone that has ever held this specific item tracing all the way back to the creator or the person who minted the NFT. The two most popular blockchains that NFTs exist on are the Solana blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain.
A minted NFT or a mint, in general, refers to the person who first bought or received the NFT straight from the blockchain. Usually, the mint is going to be the cheapest price you can purchase for a good project. The price should theoretically continue to climb as the project progresses.
A transaction is any change to data on the blockchain completed by miners.
Gas is the cost paid to miners for hashing transactions on the Ethereum network. The Ethereum blockchain can handle 15 transactions per second, something ETH 2.0 should rectify. This means you are competing with everyone else to complete transactions causing the gas fees to go up to premium prices. This makes gas the cheapest around 1-3 am EST.
Essentially what a whitelist is is a document in which you can earn yourself onto a whitelist spot and secure an NFT for an upcoming mint. This allows you to not have to wait in a queue or compete with any other people to get your NFTs, you are already secured a certain number of NFTs to purchase at the mint that is reserved specifically for you. A few projects do this in different ways; in some, you might have to be very active in a Discord or reach a certain level in terms of XP so that you can get automatically whitelisted. In other places they specifically target out those who they feel would be a good contributing member to their project, sometimes they have Twitter campaigns in which maybe you retweet a certain tweet and you might get selected. There are different ways of compiling a whitelist.
There are marketplaces specifically designed with each network in mind. For ethereum, the go-to marketplace as of 12/22/2021 is very clearly OpenSea. The landscape of this might change however with Coinbase launching their project sometime in 2022. For Solana, it would be Solanart.
A combination of things make a good NFT project. A good NFT project should have good utility meaning that it provides you with some sort of value whether online digitally through a video game or access to an exclusive Discord community or it should provide you with real-life opportunities. A project like Bored Ape Yacht Club provides members with the opportunity to access actual life yacht parties that they can network with high net-worth individuals. They also have exclusive Discords and communities where they can chat with other holders; something else like VeeFriends allows members the access to go to an annual conference (Veecon) that is centered exclusively around NFTs. It also has a tiered utility in the sense that different tokens can do different things, there’s one token that I know of that allows for 15-minute personal calls with Gary to discuss whatever you might want to, another token even allows for access to courtside seats to a Knicks game-attending with Gary. At the end of the day, a good NFT project is only going to go as far as the team behind it is willing to take it.
A DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program, is transparent (by way of the blockchain) and community led. Many NFT projects utilize DAO’s as a way of adding utility to a project. Holders would vote on how to use funds that lay dormant in a community wallet.
We recommend buying a hardware wallet to transfer your NFTs/crypto over to. We also recommend turning off your discord dms and please pay attention to what websites you are connecting your wallet to. Also be aware that Discord servers themselves are not infallible. Although a project might be legit, that doesn’t mean the risk of a mod being hacked and the discord being compromised has gone away. 9/10 projects will never post a link to a surprise mint without some form of prior notification or verification that it is legit.