Ready to buy your first NFT?

Here’s what you should know to not totally mess it up like I did…

So you are ready to buy your first NFT and maybe you’ve done some research and possibly found an NFT project you love. That’s great! I wrote about my experience when I tried to buy my first NFT and I thought writing an article about the steps I would take now looking back could be helpful to other first-time NFT buyers.

Luckily more resources are popping up every day to help explain the complexities of blockchain, wallets, and gas fees — but to save you some time I’ll share some of the resources here so they’re all in one place.

One note: NFTs aren’t for everyone — it’s a high-risk investment, there is no guarantee of making money, and you do need to stay actively involved and stay informed to make smart decisions and find profit opportunities.

Steps for a Successful NFT Purchase

1. Set up a wallet. You need a wallet to link to marketplaces and purchase NFTs securely. Here is a list of wallets OpenSea accepts. I personally recommend MetaMask — I found it to be more flexible than Coinbase Wallet personally. Here’s a great article on setting MetaMask up.
2. Research NFT projects. Decide why you want to invest — for art collecting, for-profit opportunities, or to join a community? Maybe it’s for all of these reasons. You should consider various things when picking a project to invest in, for example — does the artist have a good reputation? Do they have an active community? Do they have a clear roadmap for future development? If you’re buying on the secondary market, does the project have good momentum of sales? Moment Ranks provides a good list of things to consider. I recommend joining the Discord channels and following them on Twitter to learn more about the community and hype around the project.

Some NFT variants from the Women Rise project.

A view of the roadmap for Derp Birds NFT project.

3. Transfer your cryptocurrency. You’ve found the NFT project and perhaps the specific NFT you want to purchase and it’s time to prepare to pay for it. Now that you successfully have a wallet set up, you’ll need to transfer money into it. Important: Make sure you are transferring the right currency for your purchase!
I personally do this via Coinbase, but you should be able to do this from other platforms as well. For OpenSea, you need WETH (wrapped ether) to make a purchase — meaning you need to convert your ETH to WETH somehow. I did this in my Coinbase Wallet by sending ETH from Coinbase to my wallet and then converting to WETH there, but you can also do this directly in OpenSea. Be prepared to pay gas fees!
If you are minting a new NFT, you likely can use ETH or another cryptocurrency and can skip the conversion step and send money directly to your MetaMask wallet from Coinbase. Other marketplaces may accept different tokens, like Solanart.io which takes SOL or Cardano’s Marketplace that accepts ADA tokens.

If minting an NFT, you can ‘Pay’ money to your MetaMask wallet directly from your Coinbase app.

4. If you’re buying via secondary marketplace, create an account and link wallet.
If you are buying your NFT from a secondary marketplace like OpenSea:
- Create a new account on OpenSea
- Link the crypto wallet you just set up (every marketplace likely has their own linking process)
Most NFT purchasing processes will involve linking your wallet. On OpenSea your wallet is also how you ‘sign’ transactions to the blockchain for record of transactions. Even if you want to ‘favorite’ an NFT on OpenSea your wallet will verify you want to complete this transaction so that it is documented permanently in the blockchain.

Solanart is another marketplace similar to Opensea, but is run on the solana blockchain rather than ethereum.

5. If you are minting an NFT from a project’s website, link your wallet. Newer NFT projects may not have completely minted their collection yet. This is different than buying an NFT in that the project is allowing you to enter the asset onto the blockchain yourself often by randomly generating an NFT which means you do not choose what NFT you get. The appeal here can often be that you get to enter before the majority does at a lower price and that you may end up with a ‘rare’ NFT.
Often when minting a new NFT, you need to go to the website of the project and directly mint from the site. This means connecting your wallet directly to their website. Usually, you will see a button to “connect wallet” on their website, or follow instructions from their Discord or Twitter accounts.
I recommend downloading the MetaMask extension for your browser which seems to be more widely accepted as a wallet when minting that will make it easy to launch from any website. Setup a new MetaMask account. Securely store your secret phrase!!
Once you have downloaded MetaMask, you need to effectively do the same process you did when transferring money to your Coinbase Wallet, but transfer to your MetaMask wallet instead. Now that you have ETH or the cryptocurrency you need in your wallet, you’re good to go mint!

An example of the minting page for Wild Goat Gang NFT

6. Place bid or ‘Buy Now’ on OpenSea or Marketplace. Now that your wallet is linked and you have an account, it should be fairly straightforward from here — similar to checking out online or placing a bid on Ebay. Visit the NFT you want to buy or bid on, hit ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Place Bid’ and complete the transaction inside your wallet — if you use MetaMask this will happen inside the extension. Remember you will pay gas fees and gas fees will fluctuate throughout the day based on the amount of demand for transactions. A tip — if you don’t have sufficient funds when you click to ‘mint’ or to ‘buy,’ gas fees may seem crazy high — like $15k. Don’t panic — for some reason when you have insufficient funds for the base NFT + reasonable gas you will see a very inflated price.
Once you add money to your wallet that should drop to a more standard amount. Keep an eye on gas fees — I’ve seen them drop from $200-$60 in ~5 minutes and it can really impact your final price. Try late at night or early in the morning for potentially lower prices due to lower traffic.
If you’re placing a bid, learn about the structure of auctions in your marketplace. For example, on OpenSea if an auction has a ‘reserve price’ set — know that the minimum reserve price is 1 ETH. If you bid lower than the reserve, the owner may likely reject and you will be out your gas money.

Checking out on OpenSea

7. Mint your NFT. If you’re minting a new NFT, then you should return to the website you connected your wallet to and click ‘Mint.’ If you do not see a button or link for minting, you may be out of luck and the collection has sold out. Many NFTs launch with ~5,000–10,000 NFTs available for minting and popular projects may sell out very quickly. When a project sells out, it means you will need to buy from a reseller on a secondary marketplace like OpenSea.
If your project isn’t sold out, you should be able to click ‘Mint,’ and this should launch your MetaMask wallet extension to proceed with the transaction.
Depending on how the site has developed the completed transaction process — you may only see confirmation in MetaMask itself when the transaction is done. If the blockchain is busy, you may see your transaction as pending for a bit (I’ve waited 10 minutes before). It’s usually recommended not to change the transaction speed from the project’s recommended speed because it can lead to your transaction failing.

An example of a MetaMask completed transaction.

8. Check out your NFT! Congratulations, you bought your first NFT! If you bought your NFT on a marketplace like OpenSea, you should be able to simply go to your profile and tab to ‘Collected’ to see your new NFT. You’ll notice when you click into the details of the NFT that OpenSea surfaces data from the smart contract to show all transactions. This is where you will also be able to look at properties (to check rarity levels) and any offers you may get on your NFT from interested buyers.
If you minted a new NFT it can be a bit trickier to see your NFT. If you purchased it with your MetaMask wallet and you connected your MetaMask wallet to OpenSea, you likely will still be able to see your NFT in OpenSea though you may need to wait a bit for it to appear. A note that sometimes this can take 24–48 hours for your NFT to reveal itself. Depending on the project the owners may not reveal your NFT until the project sells out.
If you download the MetaMask Mobile app you can also see your NFT in the app by tabbing over to ‘NFTs’. If you cannot find your NFT in either OpenSea or MetaMask, you should be able to copy your transaction ID from MetaMask and paste it into something like Etherscan to locate it. Here’s an article explaining how to do that.

A closer look at an NFT description page on OpenSea. Here you can see the various properties this NFT has.

9. Get Involved with the community. You may wonder, now what? After buying your NFT. It’s highly recommended you join the communities of your NFT projects for a variety of reasons. Often the OpenSea profile of the project will give you all the links to the project’s social media channels and discord. Keeping up with the community and social media accounts will help you stay on top of the hype and popularity of the project which is key if you’re planning on reselling. Another benefit is that you can learn a lot from communities, meet people, and get involved in events.
Even if you just liked the art and don’t want to sell it, you can benefit from joining the community because many projects offer incentives that could involve printing your NFT for you or special merchandise to celebrate your unique work of art. Communities are also great for showing off your NFT to others and seeing the unique pieces they minted or collected.

There you have it! I hope this article was informative in some way to your NFT purchasing journey and that you can get excited about all the opportunities and projects arising from this space.

Have other tips for beginners or learned something during your first purchase? I’d love for you to drop it in the comments to share with others!