A to Z on Buying & Selling NFTs

Jose Ortiz

The technology of a Non-Fungible Token is much more than just a digitally created photo (.jpeg) that one trades for the hopes of profit. Auction houses like Christie’s are preserving history permanently on the blockchain by auctioning off popular 20th-century art like Andy Warhol, which fetched values in the millions of dollars per collection. This is just one example of how NFTs can preserve history permanently. As the adoption curve progresses, the technology of digital identity will be another crucial step in our society. This is because counterfeiting and falsifying a specific NFT contract on the blockchain doesn’t exist in the crypto space, currently. This is making giants, like Ticketmaster, look toward blockchain technology for providing tickets to events.

Here are some of the most popular NFT marketplaces to date and what types they are:

Centralized Market Places:

American sports franchises NFL (nftallday.com) and the UFC (ufcstrike.com), have capitalized on the NFT collectible trading card market by creating their own proprietary marketplace on the Flow blockchain. Users can register and purchase easily with a credit card, and some sales have topped over $60,000.

Popular fantasy sports platform DraftKings created its own marketplace (autograph.io) built on the Polygon blockchain. Even Tom Brady is getting in on the NFT action, and to date his NFT sales have over $1.3 million on the secondary market.

Crypto.com, Coinbase, and FTX US are large centralized crypto exchanges that have NFT marketplaces. Though not as popular with the NFT community due to ID verification, all 3 marketplaces have made partnerships with popular NFT collections or celebrities to feature collections.

Auction houses

Both Christie’s (christies.com) and Sotheby’s (sothebys.com) are auction houses that sell physical and digital (NFT) assets. Each auction house, respectively, has specialized in high-end art sales, and sales volume for each marketplace for the year 2021 has topped over $100 million (US dollars).

Decentralized Market Places:

1

LooksRare (LooksRare.org) is an Ethereum marketplace that only accepts ETH cryptocurrency. The secondary sales marketplace is comparable with 100 wallets using wallet connect, which is permissionless and anonymous (hence the term decentralized). LooksRare received its initial funding from upset NFT traders that didn’t like the controversial insider trading, and NFT collection censorship that we’ve seen with the top NFT marketplace, OpenSea (opensea.io). LooksRare has a unique model for the NFT marketplace, which allows you to share the profit from the marketplace’s fees. The startup NFT marketplace’s revenue topped $8 billion in trading.

2 X2y2 (x2y2.io) is a secondary crypto marketplace, like LooksRare, which allows you to profit on marketplace fees. And like LooksRare, you would have to buy its native crypto token to stake on the platform. Volume for X2y2 to date has exceeded $2 billion (US dollars).

3

The king of NFT trading marketplaces is still held by OpenSea (opensea.io). There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the platform with the leaking of clients’ emails and personal information, insider trading, and project censorship from the self-proclaimed “decentralized” marketplace. Unlike LooksRare and X2Y2, OpenSea does not share any of its fees with the users of the marketplace. OpenSea has the majority of the market share for NFT trading volume and sales. With close to $40 Billion (US dollars) in value traded in its marketplace, OpenSea stands to be the top marketplace by user activity and sales.

4 An honorable mention would be Magic Eden. This NFT marketplace supports Solana and now Ethereum blockchain, but the majority of the sales volume is on the Solana blockchain network. With collections like Solpunks, one can see why it has been a force in the Solana NFT space. With a total trading volume of about $100 Million, it’s quickly becoming a contender in NFT marketplaces.

Your Next 250X Return May be in Web3 Gaming, Here’s Why:

$1000 invested into popular web3 game Axie Infinity on New Year’s Day 2021 would have been $296,249 just 10 months later! Axie was the first web3 game to reach mainstream success as hundreds of thousands of players were earning enough money to quit their jobs to play full time.

It wasn’t just a fluke. $1K invested in metaverse game The Sandbox on January 1st, 2021 would have hit $221K in value mid November later that year. It’s clear that web3 gaming is the future. Games built on the blockchain can provide transparency and asset ownership to players as well as income from playing the game by being able to buy, sell, and trade your characters or other earning mechanics that are continually being introduced.

However these first versions of web3 games have proven unsustainable. Poorly planned tokenomics with inflationary tokens have tanked prices by 90%.

So what’s next and is it too late to find the next 250X gaming return?

There’s a new movement called “play-to-own” that is a more sustainable, gameplayfirst model where companies focus primarily on providing value to the player, versus the player extracting value from the ecosystem.

Games like Honeyland (https:// honey.land) are pioneering the play-to-own movement, creating innovative earning mechanics with a completely sustainable economy while following traditional gaming principles of creating an insanely fun and profitable game. And the potential is HUGE. Think about a Candy Crush or Farmville where the players can earn actual money. They’re the first web3 game to build their economy on a single token with a fixed supply, which means as more players come in, the value of the token goes up, instead of down.

We’ve seen 250x returns on boring games that lack sustainability, who knows how high the next games could go.

With companies like Honeyland building the future of web3, it could be that the next 250X is hidden in plain sight, wrapped in a fun mobile game played by millions of users around the world.

Scan the QR code below to learn more about Honeyland and the future of web3 gaming.

So where do you start? That depends on what you value the most. Ask yourself, do you have something you want to catalog and or sell? Maybe you just want to collect a favorite NFL star trading card. Whatever the reason for wanting to start your NFT journey, there is a marketplace to meet your needs.

By now you should already have access to a Metamask wallet. If not - from a chrome browser on your computer, download the (metamask.com) extension - follow the online instruction, and do as most of us in crypto do, and save your seed phrases, which is like a fixed password to regain access to your special Metamask wallet, in a laminated paper stashed away in a safe. If not, remember to practice security, and never store seed phrases anywhere digital.

If you still don’t know where to start let’s look at LooksRare.org. Here you can browse collections of different NFTs that are just art, or NFTs with utility, like Once your Metamask wallet is funded with ETH, you can proceed on to connect the wallet to LooksRare. org (green connect button on the top right of the screen). On the top left, there is a search bar where you can search for a specific collection, or you can browse.

characters in games. Art is very subjective - so something that may have value to you may not have value to someone else. If you’re looking at NFTs as an investment vehicle, please consult a financial advisor, but know this: Just like any volatile asset, price points can be manipulated, and inflated. There are many tools used to analyze the performance of an NFT collection. Websites like Nansen. ai and Dune.com, are some of the most widely used analytical tools for NFT collections and marketplace research.

Now having a Metamask wallet set up, you will have to fund the wallet. Since we are starting on LooksRare.org, you would have to transfer ETH (Ethereum) to the wallet. You can refer back to Crypto Magazine issue 1 page 26 on how to exchange dollars/fiat to crypto. Once your Metamask wallet is funded with ETH, you can proceed on to connect the wallet to LooksRare.org (green connect button on the top right

of the screen). On the top left, there is a search bar where you can search for a specific collection, or you can browse. Once you have the NFT you are wanting to purchase, it’s as easy as selecting it, then hit buy now or make an auction offer and wait to see if the owner accepts the offer. If you hit buy now - just follow the instructions from the menu. Congratulations, you are now an NFT owner. It’s industry recommended that if you value your crypto or NFT, you place the asset in a hardware wallet to store them securely offline.

Interest in selling the NFT just takes decisions on when, and how much, to sell it for. Or accept the offer if there is one place on the asset. Luckily, that research can be done using online tools like Dune.com and Nansen.ai. To sell your NFT on LooksRare.org you would hit the same place where you hit the connect dial on the top right of the page. That will bring up your wallet and you would select the “My Items” tab. Select the NFT you are wanting to sell by clicking anywhere on the NFT. As long as you hold your NFT in your online wallet, it will be viewable to everyone, and they are able to place an offer. If you happen to get an offer in the price range of which you are willing to part with your NFT asset, you can select the offer tab and accept the offer. Once this is accepted it cannot be reversed so be careful.

If you are interested in selling the NFT, then from the “My Items” section back when you selected your wallet, you would select the sell button in the middle of the page. You can do a fixed price only at this time. Here you would select the time frame, select desired price, and hit sell.

Select the NFT you are wanting to sell by clicking anywhere on the NFT. As long as you hold your NFT in your online wallet, it will be viewable to everyone, and they are able to place an offer

Congratulations, if you have decided to join the NFT community by owning your very first NFT. The NFT journey is an artistic, and collectible way to approach crypto. Whether it’s for investments, or just because you want to own a piece of cataloged history, you have a growing, open sea (pun intended), on which blockchain technology you want to start, or continue your NFT journey. Happy Sailing.

Possible Issues Coming This Year for Binance Coin (BNB)

Coin Bureau’s host speculates about what could happen to Binance Coin (BNB) after the SEC announced last week that it is investigating the crypto asset over possible securities law violations. According to Guy, a pseudonymous cryptocurrency analyst with 2.07 million YouTube subscribers, the worstcase scenario for BNB is that it could be delisted from Binance. US this year. Guy points out that delisting in the U.S. wouldn’t affect the token’s price that much since most of its trading takes place abroad. Here is what Guy said, “BNB may be delisted from Binance.US in the worst case, but considering that most of BNB’s trading occurs on the international version of Binance and other exchanges outside of the United States, it is unlikely to have a profound effect on BNB’s value. Binance may have to pay the SEC a small fine over its

BNB ICO (initial coin offering), which is pennies on the dollar compared to how much it earns today. However, this settlement could come with a clause that BNB is a security and therefore cannot be listed on U.S. institutions.” Due to Binance’s increasing decentralization, Guy says the company may attempt to convince the SEC that BNB is no longer a security. “Alternatively, Binance could argue that although BNB was a security at one point, it has since become sufficiently decentralized, that it is no longer a security. If Binance takes this route, I don’t think the SEC will approve it since it doesn’t like that the Binance team holds so much BNB.”Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that they would investigate Binance to determine if the 2017 ICO of BNB violated securities laws.