INTRODUCTION TO COLLECTION NFTs
We are at the most exciting part of the whole journey. How to buy and sell NFTs.
There aren’t many different types of NFTs you can buy. Coming soon PFP collection project, NFT profile photo. There will be some art NFTs you can buy and so much more to think about like the Mona Lisa. The digital artwork is unique. There will be gaming NFTs that we can buy and in-game assets, and then there will be super-inverse NFTs that you can buy. The actual land in the real metaverse virtual reality universe. There’s a lot to cover here, so get excited, and let’s dive in. First, let’s talk about the original type of NFT that people are buying today, which is the collection NFT. There are four main types.
HOW TO BUY AN ERC TOKEN? – PART 1
Collections encompass things like CryptoPunks. If you think about things that are avatars, those are things that people are putting. Jay-Z has CryptoPunk as his profile picture. These are specific subsets of composite NFTs known as PFP or project profile picture NFTs. That’s the main collection type, but there are many other types of collections out there like ArtPlus, which is created by code, and algorithms, that are performed in sequences of 1,000 or 10,000. Those are also collections. We will talk about both. Let’s dive into how to buy and sell those things. There are a few different ways. The first way is you are lucky, you will be able to create an NFT, and become the first owner of the NFT, and you can do that on the website where they sell each of these NFTs.
Minting is the process of creating Nft on your blockchain and being its first owner. In the past, if you were going to buy a CryptoPunk, you had access to larvalabs.com/cryptopunks, and this is where you can buy NFT that you probably made a free CryptoPunks four years ago.
HOW TO BUY AN ERC TOKEN? – PART 2
Unfortunately, you see CryptoPunks selling as low as 89.5 ETH or $390,000. So it’s a bit late to mint a crypto punk, but there are several other projects out there that you can still mint today, and we will detail the process of how to do it by using the latest minting site you can do it for free. First, if you visit some website with ArtPlus.
It is the composite art I was talking about. You can see all the different projects that exist right now, some of these have not been minted, so this is just a file of projects they like.
Usually, they all have the same kind of structure on them. Here is another one.
It is information that we are running for a big influencer in the space called Zeneca, you can find out directly from the website, and I will give detailed instructions on how to do it. Zeneca has what is called an access membership token. It is a type of NFT that you buy because it gives you access to something, and specifically what you get when you buy one of these tokens is you are gaining access to Zeneca. He’s a huge influencer in the space. He has 130,000 followers on Twitter. People trust him, he was soon involved in lots of different projects. He has made millions of dollars in the last six months buying and selling NFTs. A lot of people want to listen to his advice. So he realized that people want to take my advice? Let me create a membership token so people can reach me more, and he has two different tokens that are selling. He has a Genesis. It’s 0.033 ETH.
That’s pretty cheap. It’s like about $100 more than the other. Objectively it’s not cheap. But he has another one which is 3.33 ETH.
That’s $15,000. So that club is very exclusive. It’s more about reaching out to him. You’ll see lots of different tokens which are usually made of something like a wide-open sale, and then you have a token. More exclusive is much more expensive. We are not that rich. Just for this example, we will continue. We will give this Genesis token.
If you click here, we’re going to a mint. It will tell us things like the mint price is 0.033 ETH and the mint quantity you can mint.
It is an open version and it is a rare concept in NFT. An open version means no limitations. People can buy as much as they want. Therefore you’ll be asking where the value of scarcity lies. Usually, things have value only when they have a limit. That’s the whole idea behind NFTs. They were able to give digital assets real value for the first time because they are scarce. In his case, how did he do that, there was a 2-week deadline for him to be able to mint, and we see this window ends in about a day in 23 hours, so two days from now, you can no longer mint these Genesis tokens?
If we click this button right here
Most websites work like this, and let me make it look like it does when you take a look. I’m going to disconnect right here.
It is a technical trick you can do to disconnect from certain websites your Metamask address.
If you are visiting the website for the first time, a site where you are trying to mint, you will see a button that usually says something like connect your wallet or connect your wallet to mint. What does it mean? It means you need to connect your mask wallet. Usually, it’s always Metamask in this Ethereum mining site. It will be Phantom in case you are using Solana and that will allow the website to talk to your wallet and ask you to do things like sending money to mint. If you click the ‘Connect your wallet to mint’ button.
It will open a Metamask notification pop-up, and you will select the other account you want to connect to. It is something we can talk about in more detail later. But there will be another account that you can add to your Metamask wallet. Usually, if you’re starting, you have an account. It will be account 1. Just click on that.
You click the ‘Next’ button and then you should be able to connect.
You are connected, and now you can see this website has changed from being a connection to your wallet to you’re connected.
So you can mint if you click the ‘Mint Genesis’ button.
It will say minting is in progress, and it will pop up a Metamask message, and here we can see it saying, you are sending 0.033 ETH.
Use a calculator to convert this value to US dollars.
We’ll have a calculation of $145. For that, how much does it cost right now? It’s expensive but is Zeneca worth it? He’s the guy who made millions from NFTs. So if he gives you some good advice, that could be worth a lot of money if you click the ‘Mint Genesis’ button.
You see a pop-up from Metamask. This pop-up will show excessively core details that are important for us to understand. We will talk a little more about this in advanced. But for now, we see the price is 0.033 ETH.
We go to our calculator and do some simple math to guarantee I understand how much I’m spending.
So at the current price, it’s about $145. Not the cheapest thing in the world, but is it worth it? It depends on what you are trying to offer. Zeneca is someone who has made millions on NFTs. He gave a lot of good advice and access that can make you so much money.
HOW TO BUY AN ERC TOKEN? – PART 3
As you can see, this is a gas fee of $32.02
That is the transaction cost now. If you remember the transaction cost to send Ethereum back and forth was only $10. This time it was $32, and why is that? There are two reasons for this. One, this is for-profit, so we created the site for Zeneca, the co-founder, and CEO of our company created the entire site. So what did she do to make sure this would pass. If she puts a 1.2x profit on her estimate of how much gas it would take to make this transaction. Let’s talk about that quickly. We’ll go into more detail later but right now, what exactly is gas? What is a gas estimate? Gas is like fuel that is needed to generate processes on the blockchain. Every transaction requires a different amount of gas.
You can think of gas like gas in real life. You have gas in your car, and if you’re driving from Chicago to New York, you have to spend some gas. Let’s say 10 gallons of gas are consumed. It takes 10 gallons of gas to get from Chicago to New York. It is the same thing. When you do everything on the Ethereum network on the blockchain, you will have to use Ethereum as the essential fuel to make these transactions. That’s because it needs real work. Since the computational costs involved in the Ethereum calculator are the same as the actual utility costs involved in driving from Chicago to New York, we can estimate how much it might cost to get from Chicago to New York.
You can run 1 gallon of gas for 50 miles, and we are driving 500 miles, so we need 10 gallons of gas. We’re going to go exactly 50 miles each time, think per gallon of gas. You just put 10 gallons in your tank and start driving from Chicago to New York and imagine that you have no other way to get more gas for the trip. It is not true in real life, but it is true on the Ethereum blockchain. What if you have to go through some big hills? That you don’t expect. It uses more gas than before, and now you can only get half the 25 miles on one of those gallons. Now maybe, you have a hard time when you’re only 50 miles from your destination, but you’ve run out of gas because it’s a lot harder, and you’re stuck in traffic. You know some accidents happen. Who knows what will happen? Some unexpected things can happen in real life while you’re driving causing you to use more gas than you expected. It’s the same thing on the Ethereum blockchain. If that happens, you’re now stuck 50 miles from New York, but you’ve run out of gas. You’re stuck there forever. You cannot go back. Not in real life. In real life, you buy some more gas and keep going. In the Ethereum blockchain, that is dangerous. If you set the gas limit to low and you’ve run out of gas. You lose everything you have to revert the transactions, and nothing happens, but you still pay for all the work you did.
You still lose all that gas, that’s dangerous, so most sites will have a program there that will add a little buffer. They would say, we think it takes 10 gallons of gas to get from Chicago to New York. Do you know what we’re going to say? Why don’t you add 12 gallons of gas to your tank? That way, even if you land an invoice you didn’t expect, or you get some traffic you didn’t expect, you still have some small flaws to work through. If we click the ‘Edit’ button.
We’ll see three things. There is a gas limit for these transactions.
We’ll take a look at those fees for this transaction. There is a maximum priority fee for this transaction.
Let’s talk a little about these three, and we’ll go into more detail later. Now, when you first go into a normal Metamask.
You won’t see what I saw there.
Because I went into my advanced settings and I set up those features.
So I’m going to turn those features off quickly, and I’ll show you what you can see for yourself if I disable those two advanced features.
I went back and tried making some mint.
I click the ‘Mint Genesis’ button.
I look here, where you’ll see this edit button instead.
Then you can see low, medium, and high.
If I click between these buttons, I realize the difference between low and medium is 2 cents, and the difference between medium and high is 10 cents. That’s not helpful. So what you can do is click the ‘Advanced Option’ button.
Then it will show you what we just saw earlier.
We have a gas limit, max priority fee, and max fee, and we can make this similar to real life. The gas limit is how much gas you put in the tank to do this transaction. That’s the same thing you know for ten or tons of gallons of gas that you put into your tank to drive from Chicago to New York. The gas limit is one where this transaction probably won’t lose 50,000 gas units.
It could only cost us 45,000 units of gas, maybe even less. But we wanted to add some gas to it to be safe. That doesn’t mean you lose all that extra gas. If you don’t use up all the gas in your tank, half of that gas you can use for your next transaction.
HOW TO BUY AN ERC TOKEN? – PART 4
You can keep the gas level a little higher and sometimes if I’m not sure if a website tells me the correct gas limit or if they give an accurate appreciation. You know, it can end, and you will lose that money. Many people lost millions of dollars in gas fees just because websites didn’t exactly program that extra buffer, and it was 99.5% of the weight of this transaction, ran out of gas converted, and we lost everything. Sometimes if I’m not sure, I’ll move that gas limit a bit higher.
I would do something like 55,000, but going up won’t cost you more keeps you safer. In any case, you shouldn’t move the gas to limit lower. Moving your gas limit lower will likely cause your transaction to fail, and then you’ll lose all of the money you spent on gas to get 90% of the way to New York.
You’ll have to revert and essentially go back to where you started. So never move the gas limit lower. But what we can do is change the max fee.
Now we can see it tells us the maximum charge is 214. We’re going to change this quickly. We’ll make this a little lower. I’ll do this 130.
Then we see the cost has dropped significantly to $29 compared to before.
If I move this a little lower, it could be $100.
We’ll talk more about the advanced kind of gas tutorial when you do that. What you’re doing is changing the price that you’re willing to pay for gas. It’s like, you go to a pump, and then you say, gas is $100 a gallon, that’s crazy, and I’ll wait until the gas is $5 a gallon, and then you still would pay half the price to drive to New York from Chicago. But you will use the same amount of gas. So you must never change the amount of gas in the tank. You should say I will only put 5 gallons of gas in my tank to drive from Chicago to New York because the amount of gas you need to drive from Chicago to New York never changes, but what you can change is the price you pay per gallon of gas. You could say, I can wait a few days. I’m flexible when you change your gas prices. Be careful about this tool. But just knowing this is something we can do. We changed the price we pay we put a limit order on gas. If you remember, when we bought Ethereum, we could say we’ll pay the market rate for gas, or you could say, I’m flexible. I can wait. So I’ll wait a bit and click the ‘Confirm’ button.
It shows ‘Transaction in progress… Check your transaction on Etherscan’.
All of this varies depending on how well the website you are accessing is programmed. The site I think my co-founder did a great job, so click here, and you can go to Etherscan.
But don’t worry if the site isn’t well done. You can click on the Metamask extension, and there is currently a pending transaction on your list.
HOW TO BUY AN ERC TOKEN? – PART 5
What exactly does the ‘Mint Genesis’ token mean? It means this transaction hasn’t gotten through yet and why this transaction has not been done yet. There could be a few reasons. In this case, the reason the transaction didn’t go through was that I set the gas lower than the current gas price. So let’s go in there, and you can see there are things we can do here.
We’ll talk about each of these but right now if I click the ‘Mint Genesis’ button.
There is a ‘View Etherscan Transactions’ button. I can go there.
I will see the same thing in that link.
Check your transactions Etherscan.
It will be sent to me.
It shows this transaction is pending, and the estimated confirmation time is more than 1 hour because I set the price of gas to only 100 Gwei, which is the price of gas per gallon that I am trying to pay. Then if you look at Etherscan, it will tell you the current gas price you need to pay is 174 Gwei, which is quite high.
These days gas is quite expensive on the Ethereum blockchain, and until this price drops to 100 Gwei, this transaction will not go through.
That’s why this transaction is pending. There are a few reasons why transactions might be pending. It takes a while for your transaction to go from your local Metamask to the entire Internet. It’s like a centralized network that you might consider a BitTorrent. These are computers that are connected all over the world, and this is like a centralized network those computers will need to talk to each other, to be able to figure out who wants what data, and so when you have this node of Ethereum blockchain is validated as it is very similar to this BitTorrent centralized network.
It will take a while for your transaction to be accepted by all the different computers in the world serving the Ethereum blockchain, or it may be included in a block. If you remember, from day one, your transaction only comes to reals when it is included in a block is a set of data like it is stored in the blockchain. So, this could take some time, and now we could see gas prices change pretty quickly. Now it has dropped 138 Gwei.
That’s a price I’m willing to pay. Now I want my transaction to go through and up to 150 Gwei.
This change is very rapid, it changes every 10 seconds on average, or when every single block in the Ethereum blockchain is generated, an average of 1 block is generated every 10 seconds. At this point, you might be pretty excited to have just received your first NFT, but you know it’s just the beginning of the journey. We have a pretty cool NFT in this case, so I’ll give you a few technical details about the different NFTs you can get. If you look at the transaction we have here. It’s an ERC-1155 token. What does that mean?
Remember, we are talking about how you have non-fungible tokens. The non-fungible tokens mean that everything is unique. If we think carefully about whether the token we have is unique?
