Passionate about blockchain, tech, freedom, critical thinking
When the next bull run starts, you want to be ready.
The First-Timer's NFTs Playbook.
(Read this if you want to avoid scams, pumps and dumps, and getting hacked
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Step 1:
Project layout.
We start with its Twitter account, if the account is not followed by anyone you know or follow, that's a big red flag.
Check their site. If the easiest part is poorly made, imagine the rest.
If their art is a direct derivative, 90% it's a money grab.
There are no stealth mints! 99.9% are scams.
If you feel adventurous, then use a burner wallet.
In fact, burner wallets will be the go-to choice for all minting processes!
Step 2:
If their Twitter posts don't get a proportionate amount of likes/retweets while having above 25k followers, chances are their following is botted.
(hopefully, this has changed with Elon's takeover)
Red flag.
Step 3:
Discord. If their discord counts something like 25k+ members but you barely see 10 people talking, again it's a sign of botting.
Look at announcements. If there is no announcement daily, means the team is everything but professional. Especially if it's a new project.
Watch how the team interacts with questions from the community:
Are the moderators active? Are founding team members active throughout the day to engage with the community?
If not, 9/10 times they are waiting to collect minting fees and bounce.
Step 4:
Pay attention to their mint date through the official announcements or the dedicated discord channel.
Should you receive DMs about mint date changing, it's 100% a fake link to gain access to your wallet.
Step 5:
Buying a project on secondary:
Pay attention to the activity tab.
Sales: Who is buying? Are they usually blue chip holders?
That's one indication the project will get fewer paper hands.
If the buyers are accounts that hold only tokens of this project, it is most likely the project is wash trading and faking traffic.
Big Big red flag.
If buyers are only buying floor or next-to-floor pieces, chances are they are not into holding the project but are mostly traders-flippers.
Not a good sign for the future of the project. (but not definite)
Step 6:
We look at some general stats:
For this thread I used as an example @InvsbleFriends 3D:
Unique holders > 50%: very good distribution, fewer chances to get dumped on by large wallets.
Listed count: usually we look for below 10%, but still is not the only indicator
Step 7:
Minting:
Usually, the day of minting the scam links through Discord are in a crescendo. If you see messages popping up saying:
"minting time changed", it s a scam link.
That's why I protect myself with the below method:
Minting directly through the project's smart contract:
We navigate to the project's etherscan page:
In the middle of etherscan page we navigate to the contracts tab, and in contracts tab we choose Write Contract:
As shown below we press the "connect to web3" to connect our wallet, then in payableAmount we put the mint cost (excluding gas fees!) and in amount the number of tokens we want.
This way we protect ourselves from fake minting links.
Step 8:
During difficult market times, if the project is not hyped or marketed adequately, when minting starts, we give it a few minutes to watch the minting volume.
If minting volume is low, chances are the project will flop.
There are exceptions to this rule of course.
Step 9:
Don't ever treat NFTs as investments, anyone trying to convince you otherwise, is just luring you to become their exit liquidity!
Always have 100 or even 1000 times the amount of an NFT, before you purchase.
This will save you from great stress in the future.
Step 10:
Get familiar with NFT analytics tools like:
https://dappradar.com/ @DappRadar
https://nftcalendar.io/ (for minting dates)
https://dune.com/ @DuneAnalytics
https://www.nansen.ai/ @nansen_ai
That's a wrap! If you got any value from this follow me at @Vyggor_Tz and retweet the first tweet.
For the full article go to: