🖼️ The NFT marketplace

Revealing one of the coolest NFT marketplaces and a step-by-step guide to buying and selling an NFT.

Well, I have already written about what are NFTs and how their growth has been a turning point in asset creation. You can check that out here! Now let's unravel how one can buy and sell NFTs (not a recommendation though).

Pre-requisites

So what do you need when you go to the funfair? You need a wallet full of money and knowledge of where the fair is happening.

And with NFTs in the digital world, you need a digital wallet where you can load your money which is the Metamask wallet (Metamask is just a crypto wallet where you can hold your crypto earnings). There are a lot of other wallets but Metamask is well popular and you have great community support. Metamask is just an extension that you need to install on your browsers. And Ethereum is the only dominant currency for trading in NFTs. So next time when you are trying to buy crypto, try to divert your money to ETH and if in case you wanna jump into NFT in the future you can use your ETH coins.

The Marketplace

The opensea is the marketplace where you can buy and sell NFTs. It looks like and is an E-commerce platform. So when you enter the market, you can witness a lot of Digital art, gifs, etc. You can buy one of them using your Ethereum coins hoping that the price of that particular NFT will grow soon and you can make a profit via flipping (something similar to the equity market).

But one thing that you should keep in mind while buying an NFT is the properties of the artwork. To give a parallel example in the equity market - how do you buy stocks of a particular company? You check if the company is fundamentally strong, its balance sheets, and its alpha, and beta values. Why do you check these? Because it helps you to determine that this company will grow in the future and it creates a demand for this particular company's stock which eventually increases your portfolio holding profit.

Similarly, you need to check the properties of the artwork while buying the NFT. This will help you to determine whether this particular art piece will create a demand in the near future.

For instance, this is the property of a popular NFT in opensea.io. Each property of the NFT shows how unique and how different it is from the rest of the NFTs. Only 1% of the NFT have a particular big beard type which makes the NFT special. So more uniqueness to your NFT the more it can stand out making the value of the NFT grow.

So once you are satisfied with a particular NFT, just hit on the buy button and your Metamask wallet extension will throw a pop-up, and just confirm the transaction, and voila you have bought an NFT. It is as simple as buying a product on Amazon or Flipkart. Just like how you make an online transaction via your credit/debit cards but here you pay via your crypto wallets.

And it is the same procedure when you want to sell your NFT. As simple as when you buy an NFT.

Duplicating artwork

The next evident question is - it is just a simple piece of art or poster and anyone can duplicate it, right?

Yeah true that NFTs are just jpegs or pngs and anybody can copy or save this photo but the instance of the particular photo that you bought, you own that and no one can duplicate that. NFTs are recorded with a unique code on the blockchain, which can be used to verify the original owner of the NFT piece, so yes if an NFT is copied or duplicated you can easily distinguish between reals and fakes using the unique code that it holds on the blockchain.

In short, NFTs sit on the blockchain technology where there is only one instance and the duplicated copy will be obsolete.

Can we buy NFTs then?

As of now, while I am writing this blog in March 2022, the NFTs are in the evolutionary stage. Don’t get too fascinated or overwhelmed and put your entire money into it. But you can definitely get curious about the tech behind that and even I am inquisitive about it.

So is it better to avoid NFT? The answer is Yes and No. Don’t take NFTs as an investment option but look at the tech behind that. That’s what is fascinating to me actually - An art piece sitting on a blockchain and if you buy them you get exclusive perks.

Tech behind NFT >>> Looking NFT as an investment opportunity.