The opportunities that are happening in the NFT market right now are insane. The market is blowing up and sixteen-year-olds are making loads of cash.

So if you are on the verge of entering the NFT market to seize this amazing opportunity, you are right on time!

Now, to get you out in the fields as soon as possible so you don’t miss out on any new opportunities, you’re gonna follow our basic training.

Reading this article will prevent you from making the same mistakes as I did, which sometimes had cost me over 5000$.

Within just 30 minutes, you’ll save time and money and massively shorten your learning curve.

We’ll cover the basics like how to use Open Sea, but also dive deep into less accessible information like proven strategies that made me and my community a lot of money.

Alright, no more time to waste, let’s dive right in.

What is Open Sea and NFTs?

Open Sea is the biggest marketplace for NFTs. You can trade NFTs here with other people, but Open Sea also provides tools to make your own NFTs.

Just in case, you don’t know what an NFT is, I’ll give a short explanation:

“An NFT is a token on a blockchain which has more information like a picture, music or even videos. Unlike regular cryptotokens such as Bitcoin every NFT is unique.”NFTs have gained popularity since 2017 and are now good for over 4 billion in volume per month, thanks to roughly 1 million traders.

That’s all you need to know, now let’s quickly find out how Open Sea works.

How to use Open Sea?

Let’s take a look at the homepage. Scrolling down the homepage, you can see some quick data overviews of new collections, categories, and helpful resources.

In the navigation bar, you’ll find the search bar and some other highly interesting pages that we’ll discuss now.

Explore

The explore tab shows collections that are currently trending, the top collections, and more categories to filter collections by type.

Stats

The stat tabs show rankings and trading activity. Let’s head over to rankings.

Here we can see data separated per collection with a sorting option.

We see data like the total volume in Ethereum, the percentage change over the last 24h or 7 days, the lowest selling NFT of that collection (also called the floor price), the number of unique wallets owning an NFT of that collection, and the current total NFTs available.

You can use filters to your liking. For example, if we’d change the timeframe to last 24 hours, we’ll see more recent collections appear. 

Activity

The activity tab allows you to explore all recent sales, listings, bids, or transfers.

This tab will come in very handy. Especially when you’re monitoring a specific collection, as you can filter by collection.

In the rows, you can see the price at which the NFT was sold, the quantity, the seller’s address, the buyer’s address, and the time of sale.

Resources

Next, you have the resources page which is filled with info, the create NFT tab for the creators out there, the profile page where you can find stuff like your watchlist, liked collections, account info, etcetera. And lastly, your wallet and its balance.

Now, you can also search for an item, collection, or account using the search bar. 

Search

If we search for a collection like Prime Ape Planet, we arrive at the collection page. At the top, we can see a summary of the total items, unique owners, floor price, and total volume traded.

At the items tab, we can scroll through all their NFTs, which are automatically sorted by price from low to high.

On the left, you can use the filter section to show specific NFT attributes that the collection uses. 

Let’s take a look at an individual NFT.

The first one we see on the top left is named # with a number. You might find it an odd name, but it resembles the mint number. 

The mint number is just the order in which the NFT was minted. The collection exists out of  8000 items and this monkey was the #th NFT to be let into existence.

right of the mint number, you can see some info about the pricing, but let’s click on it to see more detailed information. 

We’ve now arrived at the asset page. 

On the left, you can see all the details about this NFT. And on the right, details about the sale: when the sale ends, the highest bid,  the bid history, price history,

And at the bottom, the item activity. This shows you every market transaction this NFT has gone through (including the sale price), starting from inception when the NFT was created, also called minted.

So, you might be wondering about the different currencies that you’re seeing such as ETH, WETH, and DOI. 

ETH (with a grey icon) is the main currency used.

WETH (with a purple icon) is short for wrapped ETH and is used for auctions. WETH allows a time delay so it charges you only if you end up winning an auction, which is not possible with the standard ETH.

Dai (with the gold icon) is a stablecoin cryptocurrency which aims to keep its value as close to one United States dollar (USD). Due to the volatility of the cryptomarket some people prefer stablecoins.

You can swap ETH to WETH in your open sea wallet. To show it in your metamask wallet, you need to add the WETH token support to your wallet. 

DAI can be bought on exchanges like Coinbase, but it’s not available on Binance.

Now before we can participate in buying and selling, we’re gonna need an account. So let’s dive into that right now.

Creating an account and logging in to Open Sea

Open Sea works with the blockchain and is therefore not similar to other platforms that you’re used to.

To trade on Open Sea, you’re gonna need a blockchain account, also known as a wallet. We use this wallet to send, receive and store tokens.

Let me walk you through the process of creating a wallet and logging in to Open Sea.

Head on over to the website of the most popular crypto wallet: metamask. 

Metamask can be used as a browser extension or as an app on your phone. 

As you can see, they support the following browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Edge.

Just follow the setup.

Click, create a wallet .. agree.

Now you need to create a password to access your wallet on your device.

Lastly, you have to secure your wallet. MetaMask uses a secret phrase, which is the private key that gives you access to your wallet. Write this down and make sure no one ever gets to see this.

Now we’re done. You can scan the QR code to download the MetaMask app on your phone.

Let’s go over the interface.

In the top right corner you see the network or blockchain it’s currently synced with.

Below is your account name and address. 

The big numbers resemble your balance.

These blue circles are hotkeys to buy, send, or swap tokens.

This section on the left shows all your tokens, and the section on the right shows all the transactions you made. 

Ok, so now you have a wallet, you can click on log-in on the Open Sea platform, and it will show you are now recognized. 

Before you can start buying NFTs you need to load your wallet with money. 

How to transfer money to your wallet on Open Sea?

Deposit

Your wallet can only hold cryptocurrencies and it’s also the only viable payment method on Open Sea. 

Now we need to load our wallet with some tokens. 

To buy and send cryptocurrencies to your wallet, you first need to have an account on a crypto exchange like Binance, Coinbase or any other platform. 

Once you’ve registered, deposit money through your preferred method.

Next, you have to buy a cryptocurrency that Open Sea accepts. Ethereum is the most popular one, so head over to the trading tab and exchange your currency for Ethereum.

Lastly, we have to send Ethereum to our wallet. 

You can do this by going to withdraw > crypto > copy pasting your wallet address, double-checking and then click withdraw.

It can take up to 15 minutes before the funds will show in your account. This is because transactions in the blockchain need to be confirmed several times. 

Withdraw

Withdrawing money is quite similar to depositing money. You just need to know the wallet’s address on your exchange. You can find out by going to deposit and clicking on the token you want to deposit. Copy the address.

Now you just need to go to your meta mask wallet, click on send, paste the address. Select the token and the quantity you want to send. Check the transaction details, and if everything seems correct, approve it. The funds should arrive within a few minutes.

How to buy NFTs on Open Sea?

Alright. Let’s get started and buy our first NFT on the Open Sea marketplace.

As you can see, I logged into my wallet and already have some funds available.

All we have to do is pick a collection we like choose an NFT, and click on the “buy” button.

Metamask will prompt with the transaction details for you to verify and when you’re ready click on “confirm”.

But wait. What is this?? A 100$ transaction fee to buy a 100$ NFT? 

Unfortunately, this is not an error. Transaction fees, also called Gas, are vital to the blockchain as it funds the miners that are keeping the blockchain operational. 

The Ethereum blockchain is still in its infancy and the load on the network is skyrocketing the transaction fees. This is referred to as Gas war. 

It sounds ridiculous to pay more fees than the actual NFT is worth, but since NFTs can easily 10x in price, people generally shrug it off.

There are ways to minimize the gas fee like

1. Reducing the priority, which slows down the transaction speed for you.
2. Or executing transactions when the network is less crowded.

Let’s move on and tank the transaction fee.

The transaction will take some time to go through, one minute tops, and the NFT should arrive in your wallet right after.

Check your freshly acquired asset in your Open Sea account as it doesn’t automatically show in your Metamask.

As you can see, buying an NFT is not too difficult.

But.. just buying NFT’s is not going to make us money. As a mather, in fact, blindly buying NFTs will probably bankrupt you.

So where do you find good projects and how do you know which ones are going up in value?

Let’s start with finding good projects.

How to find NFT projects early?

We all want to find the next Bored Ape or Crypto Punks, but that’s easier said than done.

The first skill you need is to find potentially interesting NFT projects. Ideally, you have to be aware of all the NFT projects released so you can spot the gems early on.

We’ll go over the most effective strategies to find them.

Finding opportunities 1: Looking at other peoples wallet

Big wallets know what they are buying. these are most likely the most experienced people in the market, and you can take advantage of the transparency of the blockchain and basically copycat their trades. 

A good way to track them is to use a tool like Etherscan, which is a blockchain explorer. 

It allows you to enter a wallet address and see all the NFTs a wallet is holding, but also the activity of the wallet since day 1.

To do that, simply enter the address in the search bar (0x449eB1399F433a411eC270c875D713F5EBEFBeCF). 

Scroll down to find the transactions. 

And click on ERC721 or ERC1155 which is basically a fancy name for NFT. 

Here you can see INgoing transaction or OUTgoing transaction. IN means bought, OUT means sold.

In case you don’t know any big wallets, you can find some using the following method

1. Pick a popular collection.
2. Click on an NFT. And go to details.
3. Now click on contract address. This takes you to Etherscan again. Here you can see all transactions that happened with this collection.
4. If you click on tracker at the top right, you can access data such as the biggest holders of this collection. And there are your wallet addresses.

Or if you’re lazy and prefer to use a simple external tool in exchange for a subscription, you can use Nansen. Great tool to get insight in such data.

This is how some people made a lot of money. 

However, you can make a very costly mistake which you can prevent. So listen closely.

Scam projects can send NFTs to the big wallets to deceive the public. They will try anything to make it look like the NFT was sincerely purchased by the big wallet.

There will always be more ways you can be tricked, so unfortunately I cannot prevent that for you.

What I can do, is teach you how to keep your eyes open. So the best advice is to always DYOR. 

You can use the whale wallets as a lead, but always check the project’s website, socials and get a vibe of the idea, before you invest any money.

Finding opportunities 2: Trending collections

Every project starts small, so another way to find new projects is by monitoring volume increases. You can spot projects that just started minting and catch early trends.

As you know, you can use the Open Sea’s Stat tab. Unfortunately, the lowest timeframe is the 24h, which might be too slow.

Alternatively, I’d recommend using an external tool that can zoom in and monitor on smaller timeframes, such as icy.tools. This tool will give you a bigger advantage as you can spot trends way earlier than those using just Open Sea.

You can see the floor price, average sale price, volume, sales, and market cap in one view. You can also click on a collection and see more stats like the chart, activity, and even holders.

The free version allows you to see the 1H which is decent, but I personally got the PRO version which enables timeframes as low as 1min, but the 15min timeframe is definitely the best. 

The pro version costs 70$ per month.

Finding opportunities 3: Listing sites

Some websites are all about showing new and upcoming projects. To name a few, you have rarity.tools and also NFT calandar.

Anyone can and probably will list their project here. So that’s good, but the only downside is that there’s a lot of crap among all these projects and you need to weed out the good ones.

Try looking at the pictures and pick out the ones with the good art for further research. Please never just base an investment decision on whether it has been listed on these sites.

Finding opportunities 4: Social media

Generally, it’s easier to do stuff together. The same rule applies in the NFT market. If you know friends that are on the same journey as you, team up and combine your knowledge.

If you don’t know anyone, try joining social media channels of influencers, mingle in, and read the messages from time to time to get new leads. 

Feel free to join our Discord as well!

Twitter is also a good source of finding good projects. Follow some huge accounts like: Alex becker, elliotrades, and JRNY crypto.

Conclusion

Alright! So now you know a ton of ways to find new projects. But as I mentioned, there are way more bad projects than good ones. And investing in bad projects is not going to end well for anyone.

So you need to know how to evaluate projects to decide which ones are worthy of your money.

How to pick the gems, the best NFT projects

People often get scammed by fake projects that run away with all the money. So you’re gonna need to know how to avoid investing in these fake projects.

And of course, when picking a project you want to pick the projects that are going to perform best, so how can we do this?

There are a few important indicators that NFT experts look at when assessing a project. 

• Is the team of the project anonymous or did they reveal their identity (also known as doxxed)?

It’s easy to stay anonymous on the internet as it will not lead to personal responsibility in case shit hits the fan.

You can also imagine that a person that is planning to scam everyone, is not keen on revealing his true identity. 

On the other side, a team that has revealed their identity is not afraid to take this risk and is proud to be associated with it.

It also reduced the likelihood of it being a rug pull, which is a project that was created just to abandon the project and run away with the money right after its launch.

Lastly, it allows you to do more research on the background and experience of the team, which ultimately helps you to form a better investment decision.

• Does the art of the NFTs look good?

NFTs are all about art, so the visual representation has to be pleasing. We’re not all art directors, but that’s okay. 

People generally like it when there’s originality or MEMEworthiness in the art.

And when there’s a nice story behind it. I love to see coherence between the different art pieces that together transmit the story.

Of course, you also want to check out who the artists are behind the project. Have they worked for big companies, do they have an impressive track record? 

And make sure that there are enough variations between all the different NFTs to give the individual holder the feeling that they really own something unique.

• Does the website and external communication of the project give you the impression that they put a lot of effort into it?

Beautiful websites and papers cost more money to make, require a good team to build, and attract the most investors.

Projects that spend a lot of money are committed and this will radiate throughout everything. Having a good team is fundamental to the success of any project, so these are just tiny tells that can help you to filter out bad projects.

• How strong is the community of the project?

Any project usually has a discord telegram Twitter or any other type of social media. When you head over to their channels you can quickly find out the mood of these investors how many investors are there are in the group and also the general hype they are creating.

You can scroll through all of their external communications their announcements and see how professional these are constructed.

What you want to see is a lot of people talking positively about the project and with a lot of people I mean that the general chat is like going so fast that you can’t even read all of the comments if you wanted to.

• How are the project’s marketing skills?

Another important aspect that projects can easily screw up is their marketing.  

If the project wants to attract many more investors, they need to spend resources in attracting them. They can do this by investing in advertisements on popular websites or by collaborating with influencers.

They also use some sort of referral program where people can refer friends or retweet posts in order to win a spot on the whitelisting.

 The better these funnels are designed the more chance of success the project has.

You can also get a good feel of the marketing by looking at their announcements or just generally in the way how they speak to the community under social media channels.  

What you want to see is easy to comprehend text and which also doesn’t contain any grammar mistakes. Now they can get plus points if they can speak on the same level with their target audience.

In some cases, there could be projects that have an excellent product for example A-grade art and a great website and the team looks good except for maybe their marketing.

This could actually be a very interesting opportunity because in this case, the only thing that they have to fix is their marketing which is actually something that is quite easy to improve.

Since they didn’t have very good marketing it probably means that you are one of the first that are in the channels which also gives you the advantage of making it on the whitelist and benefiting from all the other early adopter advantages.

• What’s their roadmap like?

Then the roadmap is something that also piques the interests of a lot of investors.  

Just having an ambitious vision could make the project way more valuable in the eyes of investors because of the increased perceived value. 

Just like when Tesla announced that they were going to build electric cars but still didn’t have any cars on the market, the price still went ballistic, solely based on speculation that something in the future was going to happen 

When you are investing in a project you always want the project to continue to develop its product, so a roadmap is definitely a must.

Alright, this should from the basis of your Due Diligence. By answering these 6 questions for any project that you’re researching, you’ll prevent falling into traps and have a decent chance to catch potentially big gems.

Now we covered the basics, it’s time to get into the practical knowledge. The secret sauce you’ve all been waiting for: Money making strategies.

But before we dive into this, I want to ask you to subscribe to our channel if you’re enjoying this content, as it really helps me grow and keeps you posted on future tips.

Okay, let’s move on.

How to make money investing in NFTs?

There are basically 2 general ways of making money in the NFT market. Either by joining a project early on to get a shot at minting or by rampaging on the secondary market.

Minting NFTs

Ideally, you’d want to be as early as possible. As the price of NFT’s is usually lower the earlier you catch them. 

That’s why a lot of people are hunting for the whitelisting to get an opportunity to mint.

You might be wondering, what is minting?

Minting is the first point in time where users are able to acquire a project’s NFT. It’s basically buying the goods from the vendor itself.

You can get the least amount of risk if you are the one minting the NFTs, since the prices are often the lowest you see them.

So everyone wants to be the one minting the NFTs, but unfortunately, not everyone gets to do this. 

In most cases, there are only 10.000 NFTs available. Given that a project allows every user to mint 2 NFTs, there will be only 5000 lucky people tops.

NFT projects take advantage of the high demand for minting by letting users jump through hoops and compete for a spot: also called whitelisting.

if an NFT project uses whitelisting, only the approved wallets will be able to mint. 

Some projects might not use whitelisting and work on a first-come-first-serve basis, but most actually do.

Some of the tasks that you need to do to get on the whitelist could be some of the following:

1. Invite friends.
2. Retweet, like, or comment on posts.
3. Create content.
4. Keeping an eye on the socials for cues.
5. Pay money.

It can take a lot of time and effort to be included in a whitelist, so some don’t even bother anymore.

If you are on a whitelist and are allowed to mint an NFT, the project will announce a timeframe in which you can execute the minting, which you can do on their own website.

Then at some point, the minting event will happen and all the people in the whitelist will be able to mint some NFTs. 

The users who got to mint an NFT are now able to list them on the marketplace. On Open Sea you’ll see many NFTs being listed and sold.

This is the second opportunity where you can make money with NFTs

Guerilla on the secondary market

Buying NFTs on the secondary market can be done for 2 different goals: long term investing (holding) or short term investing (flipping).

Long term investing (Holding)

If you plan on investing for the long term, timing the market doesn’t probably matter too much. 

Always make sure the project checks all the boxes we discussed. And if you really feel like it’s going to be huge, invest some money and let it sit there. 

Long-term investing is a strategy that can work, as you can see with the most successful projects, but the likelihood of a project increasing in value in the long term is very low. Especially with all the projects releasing nowadays.

In the end, nobody can predict which project will be the next BAYC, but if you really believe in it, go for it. I’m not stopping you, although I would advise not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Short term investing (flipping)

If you plan on making some quick buck here and there, flipping might be the strategy for you. We’ll go over some smart ways to make quick flips.

Low volume bids.

After a project has had its glory, the volume will start to decrease. Some investors that need to sell can panic because it takes too long to sell. This is the liquidity problem that is common among NFTs.

Bot makers actually exploit this liquidity issue.

There are scripts that automatically place low offers on NFTs on the secondary market in the hope of having it accepted.

You could say it’s mean, but it’s actually healthy for the ecosystem as it prevents people from selling to low. It also gives people the opportunity to quickly liquidate an NFT if they are in need of cash. 

In low volume times, you can see a wave of people trying to undercut each other which ultimately provides you with an opportunity to pick up great bargains.

In case of low volume, a strategy is to place low bids in the hope they can get filled. You’d have to place a lot of bids, but if some get filled, you instantly make a lot of profit.

High volume signals.

Projects that are booming can see insane amounts of volume. 

We define high volume if there’s a buy every few minutes or so. When this is happening, the price is likely pumping and you can choose to buy an NFT to ride the wave.

Typically projects that just launch spike in volume or sometimes when there’s a news event that caught people’s attention.

If you catch this spike early, you can actually make a decent profit here.

You have to understand that price increase is also tied to the supply.

In case you plan to buy NFTs at the floor price, it’s a good practice to check out how many NFTs need to be sold to increase x in price. 

The fewer NFTs are available, the quicker the price could potentially rise.

You can also use this to your advantage when selling NFTs again. So not undercutting people, but placing your order below certain gaps.

To monitor volume, you can use Open Sea’s Activity tab. But since the lowest timeframe, the 24h, is way to slow for this strategy.

You’re also gonna need an external tool that can zoom in to smaller timeframes. Icy.tools will also do just the job.

Or you can even see live minting happening on a tool like Moby.

Buying floor or buying rare.

NFTs come in different sorts of rarities. So is there merit in buying a rare NFT instead of just the floor ones?

It’s good to know that you’re better off buying either the rarest NFTs or the least rare NFTs. 

This is because these are the ones that investors are most interested in. Given that the liquidity can be very low with NFTs, it’s always good to own assets that have the highest liquidity. 

Especially when the volume is really low after a project has peaked, it can be hard to sell your NFTs. So if you buy either the cheapest or the rarest, you have the highest probability of selling.

With regards to buying floor, there are a few things you have to check. The lowest price doesn’t always reflect what people are actually wanting to pay for it. 

It’s always good to check the sales history. If it hasn’t been sold for weeks or longer, the NFT is maybe overpriced and there might not be a buyer at all, even if you try to sell it below floor price.

When it comes to buying rare NFTs in general, you will find a lot of price differences.

Each NFT has different properties, which you can see at the properties tab on the NFT page on Open Sea. 

Looking at the Pierce & Friends collection, you can see that there are 13 different backgrounds, 4 different eyes, etcetera.

Some properties are rarer than others. How rare they are, can be viewed by clicking on an NFT and checking out the properties tab. 

To find the total rarities of NFTs, you can go to rarity.tools (link 4), enter the collection, and it’ll show you all NFTs sorted by rarity. This way you can verify how rare the NFT is relatively and estimate the value for money.

Sometimes you can find several NFTs for the same price, but some will be much rarer. Knowing this can help you find a better deal.

Be mindful that data can be delayed, so it might not show a new collection, and always verify the rarity of certain traits on Open Sea. 

Reveal and effect on price.

A lot of projects choose to sell NFTs without revealing them directly. NFTs can come in different rarities, and when people end up with low rarity NFTs they tend to sell them quickly.

This has a negative effect on the overall price of the NFTs and projects found that if the NFTs are not revealed yet, other investors are more likely to buy them, which makes the floor price increase. 

At some point, the project will reveal the NFT rarities. Usually, this is followed by a significant drop in price. Some flippers use this opportunity to start buying NFTs for relatively low prices and you can make a lot of money following this strategy.

Project updates and effect on price.

Since most projects will continue developing their product, they will have regular updates that they share with their communities.

Sometimes an update can be very huge, making a lot of people excited. This can cause the prices of the NFTs to increase.

On the other hand, bad stuff can also happen. This can make investors lose their confidence and have a negative effect on NFT prices.

Wrap up

Now..  you’re…  ready… 

You have all the knowledge to work your way around Open Sea, you know how to find projects, how to evaluate them, and some money-making strategies to get started.

I did my best to give as much information as possible while keeping it concise and to the point. 

So I really hope you enjoyed and got some value from this.

Good luck trading NFTs!