How to Buy NFTs

Some of the most intriguing facets of NFTs are the astronomical values they can rack up. Over the last couple of years, NFT purchases have been nothing but impressive as the most expensive NFT ever sold ran for $69.3 million dollars. The piece was called 5000 days, and was created by Beeple, a digital artist.

Of course, there have been other popular NFTs that have been bought and sold for crazy numbers. But on average, most NFTs aren’t back-breakingly expensive. And one of the coolest parts about NFTs is that no matter the price tag, the process is basically the same.

When was the first NFT bought?

As covered in our Non-Fungible Token Academy piece, the first ever Non-Fungible Token, Quantum, (a rather famous NFT) was created and sold in 2014 by Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash. The NFT is a video clip that was registered on the Namecoin blockchain, and was sold by McCoy to Dash for a whopping $4.

Their entire process was a demonstration of a newfound technology the pair had named “monetized graphics”.

Since then, many new developments in the NFT industry have taken place. Now NFT marketplaces are the best way to mint, sell, buy, and trade NFTs. But there is of course a method to buying NFTs, both from a practical and frugal perspective.

How to buy an NFT

The actual process to buy NFT art isn’t all that complicated, and only requires a handful of steps to be accomplished:

1. If you don’t have one, you will need to download and create a crypto wallet that supports NFTs. When making your wallet, be sure to physically write down your seed phrase and either store it safely or remember it. This seed phrase is your asset and NFT security should anything happen to the device your wallet resides on.

2. In order to buy NFTs, you’ll need to own a bit of cryptocurrency. Make sure you know which type of cryptocurrency you need as different NFT marketplaces often accept different cryptocurrencies. Also, keep in mind that the cost of buying an NFT comes with fees for transactions. These fees are called gas fees on Ethereum. Place your new crypto in the same wallet you made for your NFTs.

3. Connect your wallet to the NFT marketplace where the NFT you want is being sold. You may need to verify your identity through KYC (know your customer) in order to create a profile in the marketplace. But once you have your profile set up, you’re ready to go about purchasing your NFT as you would anything else.

4. Send your crypto from your wallet to the seller’s wallet, at which point you will receive your NFT. There will be a few steps such as making sure the send/receive addresses are correct, as well as the amount, and that you have enough crypto to transact fees with. But this step is relatively straightforward.

Buying NFTs the smart way

Finding your favorite NFT marketplace will be a personal decision, but there are a few things to keep in mind before you pledge your hard earned money to an NFT artist in a random marketplace.

Grading Marketplaces

The first thing to look out for when perusing NFT marketplaces is whether or not they provide metadata or smart contract data for the NFTs on their platform. If it’s not easy to find contract data, your best bet may be to move on.

Another positive sign to be aware of is if the marketplace verifies users. There are a lot of scammers out there, and this process helps eliminate most threats.

But also make sure to gauge the opinions users have about a platform. Is the platform easy to find and trade NFTs on? Are there high fees or any transaction latencies? Have there been scams on the platform, or has anyone lost their NFTs on the platform?

Finally, as mentioned earlier, make sure you know what types of crypto are accepted in the marketplace. Not all cryptocurrencies are made equally, and the same goes for blockchains. It’s useful to know whether a crypto is trustworthy or not before making any sort of purchase with it.

- Also, the type of crypto the platform uses to make NFT transactions will impact how much you pay for fees. But you can always cross check fees from different platforms that use the same underlying cryptocurrencies to make sure you won’t get taken advantage of.

NFT Background Check

While NFTs do technically exist on a blockchain their data is hosted on an Interplanetary File System (IPFS). An IPFS address is created from a group of uniform resource identifiers (URI), which is perhaps the most important metadata related to your NFTs.

The URI is what is actually hosted on a blockchain and is what a blockchain uses to refer to the decentralized IPFS which secures all the NFT data. IPFSs are like blockchains but are designed entirely for large data storage and retrieval. These IPFS are the secret ingredient to making your NFT immutable when paired with a proper blockchain.

To find out if an NFT is legitimate or not, perform a background check on it:

1. Is a minting smart contract available for you to check metadata with? If there is, you should see a smart contract address, a token ID, the token standard, and the blockchain it was minted on. 2. Using [etherscan](https://etherscan.io/), enter the address data from the smart contract. Then find the “Contract” tab, and click “Read Contract”. 3. Next, use the ‘query’ function to find a function called “tokenURI”. Enter your Token ID from step 1 and you should now see your NFT’s IPFS metadata. 4. Copy the IPFS into your URL. Rather, copy everything after “ipfs://” from your metadata, and then paste it onto the end of “https://ipfs.io/ipfs/”. That should then take you to your NFT or more metadata. If you see more metadata, repeat from step 3 with the newfound metadata. 5. Extra metadata? New IPFS goes after “ipfs.io/ipfs/” in your URL. 6. Enjoy proving the security of your NFT!

If at any point during this process the data didn’t check out, abort the mission.

With Fayre buying an NFT is simple

Choosing a marketplace isn’t easy, and the process for researching NFTs can also be energy and time consuming. Luckily, the Fayre marketplace is launching and will offer fans and brands a handful of unique NFT experiences. Along with making tools to help creators and brands establish and manage fan clubs, Fayre is working to ensure NFTs have unlimited functions in real life, and online in virtual worlds.

Trading NFTs on Fayre will mean low fees, special perks for those that stake $FAYRE, and multichain (ability to use several cryptocurrencies to trade) transaction capabilities. Also every user will be required to whitelist (KYC) to join. Our NFT data will be stored on an IPFS via Pinata, making our NFTs very secure NFTs.