how to blow your wad on the hottest new JPEGs


so you've probably been hearing a lot about nfts and you're wondering, "how do i get in on this action so i can buy some jpegs and be one of the cool kids with a penguin profile picture on twitter?"

well, you're probably not in the right place but i'll share some information anyway on what i know and hopefully you find it useful.

if you don't already have a wallet and metamask, maybe go back and read through dippin your toe in crypto first. i'm not covering that again.

the adventure begins

my journey started by getting familiar with opensea.io. this is by far the most popular marketplace to buy and sell nfts. click on the little profile pic in the top right and make sure you know how to connect your wallet by signing in:

next, make sure you know how to navigate around and explore some of the collections. i won't get too much detail here, this is pretty basic "how to use a website" stuff. our real focus is going to be on how to jump in a hot trend.

what's hot

if you're anything like me and don't have any friends, then you have to find the hot stuff by yourself. you could probably find a discord to join, but again, you would need friends to invite you.

the easiest way - browse the newly created nfts on opensea. this link takes you to the "all nfts" marketplace and sorts by recently created. just hit refresh until you see a bunch of images being created from the same collection, then go to the collection and find a link to the website to see where to mint. remember - not everything is worth minting, but if you see a bunch coming in at the same time there's a good chance it's pretty popular.

another good resource, and what i like using, is the etherscan nft transaction page. this is another refresh clicker 'til you see a pattern page. but if you watch closely, you can see when there's a run on minting something and click through right to the contract to take a gander, by selecting from the token column:


gravel? (take notice of all the 0's in the from address as a good sign of minting)

seeing a bunch of mint functions being called in the contract could be a good sign that something might be heating up:


note - contract address top right of page

but, do your own (very quick) research. the next step should be to see if the contract has social links, or google the project name to find the website. also try to check them out on twitter if they have one.

***UPDATE - forgot to mention, you can copy the contract address from etherscan and paste it in the search on opensea to find the project

mint-a-palooza

once you pick a good nft project and find the website it's going to be time to mint. this is not toothpaste, candy, or shitty ice cream related. minting is the process of actually creating the nft and then you becoming the official owner. let's look at gravel for an example.

looking at gravel on opensea, i found a link to the gravelnfts.com website. here, we'll see that only 2500 gravel can be minted:

in the middle of the screen was a link to connect a wallet:

after connecting, i'm presented with the mint offer:

mint up to 30 gravel nfts for 0.03 eth each. it also shows me that 690 have already been minted. some sites will have slight differences, but the functionality is the same; once you click mint, you'll be taken to your metamask wallet to complete the transaction, showing you a total for the 0.03 eth you pay the nft creator plus however much the gas is at that time. (disclaimer - i don't have enough eth to buy gravel right now)

after minting, you'll be able to see your new jpeg over on opensea, and you can also check out the full collection of gravel:


interesting note - the floor price is lower than the mint+gas. buy high, sell low.

for now, this is the end of my intro into nft hunting. kind of wanted to just whip this out because someone asked me. so hopefully that bozo found this useful. coming -eventually-, i intend to get a dev box running where i might do a step by step tutorial with screenshots, but don't hold your breath or miss out on any action because you're waiting for that.

closing notes

it's getting late and i kind of sprinted through this (also not going to proof read anything, just whip it out there) but i do want to mention that i just stumbled onto the gravel nfts while writing this and have no opinion on whether or not you should ape into it.

*** UPDATE - there's a site with upcoming nft drops:
https://rarity.tools/upcoming/
lots of cool stuff here to check out