NFT is a buzzword nowadays. It stands for Non-fungible Tokens. The non-fungible means are non-replaceable. For example, if you buy a bag of sausages, you don’t bother about which bag you are getting. Because sausages are fungible but buying a painting by Leonardo da Vinci matters. You want to be sure you buy a painting by Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent van Gogh. Therefore, these items are non-fungible. Here NFT started playing a role in business. NFT provides the opportunity to verify ownership digitally. It is an exceptional tool for tokenizing real-world and digital assets with better value assurance.
There are four items to know about dealing with NFT:
Items: The first is items that are tokenized
Owner: How many people own all these items.
Floor price: The floor price is the cheapest NFT in the whole collection. You can visit the following URL to track the Floor price of the NFT you want to purchase.
NFT Price Floor · Non-Fungible Token prices, charts, and sales data tracker
Volume: The last one is volume traded. And what this does is give you an overview of how much money has been spent within the whole collection
If you purchase NFT for the first time, you must follow five steps, as demonstrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Steps to buying your first NFT
Step 1: Select a marketplace where you want to buy. The recommendable marketplaces may include:
- Opensea https://opensea.io/
- Rarible https://rarible.com/
- Rarity rarity.tools
- Mintable Mintable.app - Home
Step 2: Create your wallet. To purchase, hold, sell or trade NFTs, you must create a digital wallet. This wallet can hold NFTs and cryptocurrencies in one place. These wallets are extremely secure as it doesn’t hold the asset in reality. Only stores the credentials regarding the location of your assets on the Blockchain. We can use:
- Metamask The crypto wallet for Defi, Web3 Dapps and NFTs | MetaMask
- Bitski Bitski
- Portis Portis - The Non-Custodial Blockchain Wallet
Step 3: Once you’ve created your wallet, the next step is to add some funds to your wallet. The popular NFT projects in the market are all built on the Ethereum blockchain. That indicates you must have Eth in your wallet before buying these NFTs.
Step 4: Once your wallet is funded, the next step is to go ahead and browse that marketplace to see which NFT you want to buy.
- Opensea https://opensea.io/
- Rarible https://rarible.com/
- Rarity rarity.tools
- Mintable Mintable.app - Home
An important point to note before you go for NFT shopping, you must have a clear idea about what you are going to purchase so that you should not spend more than your budget and end up with junk in your basket.
Step 5: Now, you must browse the marketplace and buy an NFT as per your interest. Remember, it can be anything like artwork, books, music, or gaming collections.
There is no guide on which marketplace is right for you. However, if you are sure about your interest, you can choose the marketplace correctly. For example:
If you admire Basketball, you can visit NBA Top Shot | Officially Licensed Digital Collectibles
If you are addicted to Video games, you can visit https://axieinfinity.com
These are the simple steps to buying an NFT. Although many scammers online don’t owe any NFT but sell it to fooling buyers and get profited. Therefore, before the purchase, you must follow the simple ways to verify the ownership of the NFT and NFT Authenticity:
To verify the ownership of the NFT:
- Verify the metadata of the NFT on the blockchain explorer like https://etherscan.io/
- Verify the NFT owner on the owner’s social media profiles and NFT Marketplace like SuperRare, OpenSea, etc., like when he announced NFT releases, what NFT marketplace he mentioned, whether he is still available on that marketplace or not, etc.
- Verify whether you can sell NFT using its ID
- Verify NFT Owner Through Digital Certificates if available. Digital certificates can verify digital assets’ ownership and transfer rights on the Blockchain. However, all NFTs don’t have digital certificates, but some of them have digital certificates.
NFT Authenticity:
Finding that the NFT Owner is genuine does not always ensure that the NFT is authentic. To verify the NFT authenticity:
- Verify metadata(as mentioned above)
- If it is an image, you can use Google reverse-check tool to confirm different versions of the same image circulated on the Internet or not
- Check whether the value quoted is too low or not
To find out the transaction information of the NFT, follow the example below.
Suppose we are in OpenSea and selected an item Doge Club:
On the same page, if we scroll down, we can see all details and click on “Contract Address.”
Now you will land on a page where the Txn hash will be available:
Clicking on Txn Hash will show full metadata regarding the creator’s transaction:
NFT is a current phenomenon, and people like to know that how common non-technical people can invest in it. This article guides a user on how safely NFT can be purchased. Have a happy and safe digital shopping!!