How a beginner can to get into the NFT market
During the 2021 NFT boom, a lot of people started from scratch and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of them were very young. That’s one of the greatest advantages of the NFT market: you don’t have to be an IT or finance professional to get into NFTs, build a portfolio, and perhaps even become successful at NFT trading.
This article will go through the main steps to help you get started with NFT marketplaces. We’ll use the popular Liquidifty NFT marketplace as an example, as it features NFT collections issued on BSC (Binance Smart Chain), a blockchain with fast processing times and low fees. For a beginner with a limited budget, BSC is preferable to Ethereum, as it only costs around $1 to mint an NFT, whereas on Ethereum, it can cost $10 or more to move an NFT from one wallet to another and upwards of $50 to mint one.
Liquidifty also focuses on the trendiest niches in the NFT market: Play-to-Earn games and the metaverse. It’s easier to start with NFTs in these categories, as they are cheaper than NFT artworks.
For example, the prices on the NFTs from the popular Drunk Robots game collection on Liquidifty start from $24, while on OpenSea, you’ll have to pay at least $500 for an item from a top-10 collection.
Set up your wallet and connect to a marketplace
Before we look at how to get NFTs on a marketplace, we need to go over some technical basics. Here’s what you will need:-
1) MetaMask Wallet – You can install it as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Brave (see the instructions here). The most important step is to copy and save the secret seed phrase you’ll be shown during installation. If something goes wrong with your device and you need to reinstall MetaMask on another laptop or phone, the seed phrase will be the only way to restore access to the funds.
2) Adding BSC to MetaMask – To get started with NFTs on Binance Smart Chain, you’ll need to activate this network in the wallet first. By default, MetaMask comes with the Ethereum network pre-activated, but you can add many more using the Add Network here. It takes a couple of minutes, and you’ll find all the details on this page.
3) BNB Coins – BNB is the official cryptocurrency of the BSC chain: it’s used to pay the transaction fees, and BNB is the most common way to pay for NFTs on marketplaces like Liquidifty. You can buy BNB on most crypto exchanges by funding an exchange account with BTC or ETH using a credit card.
Alternatively, suppose you already have MetaMask with some ETH, USDT, or another cryptocurrency. In that case, you can bridge those coins to BSC and then use a BSC-based decentralized exchange to convert them into BNB. However, for beginners looking into how to get an NFT without getting too deep into the technical complexities, buying BNB on an exchange like Binance is probably easier.
4) Sending BNB to MetaMask – Once you have BNB in an exchange account, use the Send or Withdraw feature and paste the address of your MetaMask wallet. Note that the address is the same for Ethereum, BSC, and any other networks you may add to MetaMask.
The transaction will use a small amount of BNB as the exchange withdrawal fee, and you should see the coins in MetaMask after a few minutes.
5) Keep Enough BNB for Transaction Fees – Remember not to spend all your BNB on NFTs: you’ll need some to pay the blockchain transaction fees. For example, if you plan to spend $100 worth of BNB on NFTs, it’s better to send over at least $105-107 in BNB to cover the fees for several transactions.
6) Connecting MetaMask to the Marketplace – Make sure that MetaMask is set to BSC, then click on the Connect Wallet button in the top corner of the marketplace website. You’ll be prompted to choose a wallet and then confirm the connection. Note that a trustworthy app will ask only for permission to access your coin balances and suggest transactions; it can’t execute any transactions without your confirmation.
How to get an NFT on a marketplace
Now that you’re all set on the technical side of things, we can finally explore how to get into NFT art and games and start building a portfolio.
Spend some time browsing through the trending collections on Liquidifty and compare their floor prices – that is, the lowest price for any NFT in a given collection. NFTs differ by rarity, and a single rare trait can push a price much higher than the floor. However, if your main concern is ‘How do I get an NFT without losing money?’, buying an asset at a floor price is probably a safer bet.
Make a list of several NFTs you like together with their listing URLs – then check the official website of each collection and its social media pages. Suppose you are getting into NFTs intending to trade them. In that case, this part of the research is crucial because the activity in a project’s community can indicate future demand for the collection.
Also, if you are looking into buying the assets of Play-to-Earn games or metaverse projects, check out their in-game utility. Will you be able to stake the NFT to earn rewards, or perhaps fuse it with another NFT from the same collection to produce a character of a higher rarity rank? Or maybe the NFT can be used to mine resources in a game, and those resources can be exchanged for cryptocurrency?
Now that you’ve made your choice, it’s time to see how to get the NFT you like. On Liquidifty, this is intuitive: click on the NFT you want, wait for its page to load, then click Buy Now. Once you agree with the terms of service, MetaMask will open and prompt you to confirm the transaction.
Make sure you have the required amount in the right cryptocurrency, including the marketplace’s 2.5% service fee. For instance, Drunk Robots, the highest-ranking collection on Liquidifty, is traded for its own $METAL tokens, which can be purchased on the decentralized exchange PancakeSwap.
Once you’ve confirmed the purchase in MetaMask, it will take a few seconds to process, and you’ll see the success notification. Occasionally transactions on BSC don’t go through – if that happens and you receive a ‘transaction failed’ notification, simply repeat the steps.
The purchased NFT will appear in your Liquidifty dashboard, which you can access by clicking on your wallet address in the top right.
How to trade your NFT
If you decide to sell the NFT, you can easily list it from the dashboard (section ‘My NFT’). You’ll need to decide on the price based on the asset’s rarity and the current price floor. Note that listing is also a blockchain transaction, so you’ll need to pay the blockchain fee in BNB (around $10). You’ll get a notification when the NFT is sold, and the funds will automatically appear in MetaMask.
The easiest way to trade NFTs is called ‘flipping’: buying an asset soon after it launches, while the price still isn’t too high, then reselling it for a moderate profit. By doing many of these ‘flips’, one can gradually build up the capital to purchase more valuable NFTs that can yield better profits.
Of course, like everywhere in crypto, success and profit are never guaranteed. If the crypto market drops, NFT prices can drop with it; perhaps a specific collection won’t reach your expected popularity. That’s why it’s important to diversify, buying assets from different collections and niches (games, art, etc.).
Luckily, thanks to versatile marketplaces like Liquidifty, this has become easy to do. And as NFT prices remain very advantageous, now is a good occasion to start exploring the trending collections.
