How to buy your first NFT

More and more people are interested in buying NFTs, from ordinary people to celebrities. For example, Snoop Dogg collected his portfolio at 4 million dollars, and all NFTs owned by Gary Vee at its peak were worth about 100 million dollars. In this article, we’ll briefly consider what  NFTs are and how to buy your first non-fungible token.

What is an NFT?

NFT stands for a non-fungible token. NFTs first appeared in 2017, and the main difference between them and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that an NFT is a unique digital object. In simple terms, an NFT is the digital equivalent of a document that certifies your rights to an item, such as an image or a music file.

NFTs come in different flavors: art, collections of cartoon characters, gaming assets, music, videos, and so on.

Where to Buy Your First NFT

NFTs are traded on various NFT marketplaces. These digital platforms allow users to list NFTs for sale, be it for a fixed price or at an auction. Some NFT trading platforms also feature mints of new NFT collections, NFT staking, and other tools.

In exchange for a service fee, the NFT trading platform will usually handle the process of initial gasless minting and transferring an NFT from one address to another. Commissions, types of NFTs traded, supported blockchains, and the mechanisms of buying and selling can differ somewhat, but once you’ve learned to use one marketplace, you’ll be comfortable using all the others.

In this article, we'll break down the process of buying your first NFT on OpenSea, as it’s the biggest marketplace of all. But there are several NFT marketplaces worth knowing about:

‍1. OpenSea - a marketplace that can be called ancient, because it was launched in 2017. Regardless, OpenSea is still at the top in terms of the turnover, and it’s here that you’ll find the biggest variety of popular collections on Ethereum and Polygon, as well as Solana and Klaytn.

2. Rarible - a trading platform that supports blockchains like Ethereum, Tezos, and Flow and positions itself as ‘community-centric’.

3. Binance NFT - an NFT marketplace created by the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, in 2021. It’s one of the top marketplaces, especially for NFTs on the BSC blockchain.

4. SuperRare - Here you can buy specially selected, curated items - at a higher price but also high in quality.

5. Magic Eden - this marketplace lets users create, buy and collect NFTs based on the Solana blockchain.

So how to buy your first NFT?

Now we suggest proceeding to the most important thing: buying our first NFT, using Opensea as an example.

The process itself is not too hard, but we still suggest breaking it into several steps and having a closer look at them.

Step 1 - setting up a wallet

To buy any NFT on any marketplace you will need a blockchain wallet. There are many different ones, but we suggest looking at the process of buying, using the most popular wallet- MetaMask as an example. The process of creating and using it is straightforward:

• Installing a browser extension
• Creating a password;
• Saving the secret seed phrase of 12 words (the system will provide it during registration);
• buying or transferring cryptocurrency to MetaMask.  

Once you have MetaMask and enough crypto to buy an NFT on the chosen blockchain, we can buy and sell our NFTs on OpenSea.

Step #2 - choosing a token

Next, we need to select the NFT we are interested in. Most of the NFTs on OpenSea are divided into collections, which, in turn, are divided into categories and different statuses. The site has a handy filter (on the left side of the menu) that can help you sort all the NFTs by category, such as:

• Available to buy immediately;
• Active auctions (which means you need to bid on an item);
• New collections and new NFTs, etc.

Like on any marketplace, on OpenSea you can sort by price, listing date, cryptocurrency for which it can be bought, genre, and blockchain on which it is hosted.

Each NFT contains information about the owner, the collection it belongs to, and other basic information such as past and current offers, past sales, etc.

Step #3 - Payment

After we have chosen the NFT we want to buy, all we need to do is to click "Buy now" with a few clicks of the mouse, to confirm the transaction.

* Attention! We advise paying attention to the gas fee, which you’ll need to pay to confirm the purchase. On Polygon or Solana, the fees aren’t a problem, but on Ethereum, the final amount you spend may be quite different from wahtt you were counting on.*

Done! Now we have purchased our first NFT.

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