NFTs: An Introduction to Buying Cardano NFTs
An introduction to where you can buy Cardano NFTs (sometimes called CNFTs), how you can check there rarity, & where you can check what items in the collection have recently been sold for.
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Table of Contents
Relevant Websites
Nami Wallet Setup
CNFT.tools
opencnft.io
www.jpg.store & cnft.io
Relevant Websites
Nami Wallet: One of the 3 wallets (ccVault & Flint are the other 2) that are compatible with jpg store and cnft.io
CNFT.tools: Website for searching an NFT collection by price, rarity rank, traits, & sale status.
opencnft.io: Website for viewing what different items have recently been sold for on marketplaces.
www.jpg.store & cnft.io: Websites you can use to search up specific cNFTs & then purchase or if you own them sell them.
Nami Wallet Setup
There are several wallets available for holding Cardano and connecting to www.jpg.store & cnft.io but as all three have similar features I am going to focus on the Nami wallet. If you would like to explore the others that are compatible they are ccVault & Flint. There are also several well-known wallets that can’t be linked to the store sites such as Yoroi & Daedalus. As all have different strengths/weaknesses you may want to consider having several wallets that you transfer funds between for different purposes.
A great example of the advantages of this approach is that different wallets have different transaction speeds. If you want to participate in a project’s mint (initial randomized release) & they are set up for Daedalus & Nami with a first come first serve minting model you would likely want to use Daedalus as its known for faster speeds increasing your odds of successfully minting (assuming your computer is powerful enough to run Daedalus, I go into the required specs in the below article). If the project limits the amount of NFTs per wallet you can buy you can also use several different wallets on one platform or a waller per platform to participate (ex: making multiple on Daedalus or making one wallet on Daedalus & one on wallet Nami). My article comparing Nami, Yoroi, & Daedalus is available at the below link if you were considering this.
Nami is an extension-based Cardano wallet (found here).
After adding the extension to your browser you can create or import a wallet. In either case, make sure to save the recovery phrase as if you lose access to the wallet it’s the only way to recover the account (the downside of crypto being decentralized is there is no “forgot my password option”). I have mine written down (in case my computer was hacked) & have confirmed its accuracy several times to prevent the case of a lost wallet. Another note is that the password they have you create will be needed when you want to buy or sell tokens/NFTs so make sure to save it as well.
Next, you will want to transfer Cardano to the wallet from an exchange. You will do this by clicking the extension on the top right side of your screen & clicking the receive button (picture below).
You will then be able to see this field showing your receive address which you will use to send yourself ADA from an exchange to your new wallet.
Each exchange will have a slightly different process so I would recommend looking up a guide on your exchanges process but all of them will use your receiving address to send the ADA from your exchange to your wallet in Nami. When doing this make sure that you don’t make any mistakes copying your address and pasting it into the exchange as once the funds are sent they are gone if they are sent to the wrong wallet. If you are nervous you can do separate smaller transactions & pay a few extra fees until you are comfortable with the process. Also, be aware that no exchange (or anyone else) should ever ask for your secret phrase, they will only need your receiving address to send funds to a wallet. If they ask for your secret phrase they are trying to steal your wallet’s funds.
After adding funds you will next need to add collateral. This is required in order for you to be able to buy or sell NFTs. This is required as adding it prevents people from spamming the buying sites with fake offers. To add this click on the robot icon on the top right of your extensions window and click collateral.
You will then have the option to add 5 ADA in collateral. As I have already done this step it instead shows me this window.
If you plan to keep a large amount of Ada in this wallet long term you may also consider staking the wallet although that is unrelated to NFT investing so I won’t be diving into it in this article.
The last step to setting up your wallet for buying NFTs is connecting your wallet to your site of choice. For jpg.store you will connect the yellow connect wallet button in the top right. For cnft.io you will first create an account on their site & then connect your wallet.
CNFT.tools
cnft.tools allows you to search up projects on their main page (which features general project statistics such as floor price) & after selecting a project it allows you to go through a collections information in more depth.
To demonstrate the site’s use case I will be using the Disco Solaris project. When viewing the project you will see the below screen.
By default, the site sorts from highest rarity to lowest rarity showing all NFT pieces released for that project. You can change any of those filters with the dropdowns featured below.
Other than Rarity you can also sort by the series number, price & when it was listed. With listings, you can filter by specific marketplaces or by which NFTs are on sale or not.
On the left sidebar, you can filter by a specific NFTs serial number, filter within a price range, filter within a certain ranking, filter based on specific traits, or use all of the above.
Below is an example of what it looks like when I search up a specific serial #
You can do the same search from the top right “Asset Search” bar as well.
To demonstrate how I use this site I’m going to give a quick example scenario. Let’s say I just heard about the project, have done my research, & want to buy in with a budget of 200 ADA. I would first start by just setting my max price to 200 ADA & keeping the sorting to be by rarity to see if any NFTs are underpriced relative to their rarity.
If you look through the rows you can see that there is a wide range of prices with many being set higher than others even if they are less rare. This difference in price could be due to the NFT piece itself not looking good relative to other pieces in the collection or the seller could have mispriced it. I will often start with a certain price as my maximum and gradually shift it around to see if I can spot anything that I like that’s underpriced relative to the NFTs around the same ranking. If you click on an NFTs image it will show you the same screen you see when searching by serial number but if you instead click the blue price it will show you the listing on jpg.store. Sometimes an NFT will be listed as available but if you click to jpg.store it will have already been sold due to the site not yet updating so make sure to check before deciding on a specific NFT.
opencnft.io
Opencnft shows a variety of information for a collection including its overall ranking as a project, the price history(average price, total volume, & total sales), floor price (minimum sale price & floor price), the number of assets in a collection, the highest sale, the current floor price and more. It also has a full transaction history which you can look at to see what different pieces have sold for & when they were sold what the NFTs art looked like.
www.jpg.store & cnft.io
I have used both sites to buy at different times as I have wanted NFTs posted for sale on each. Other than the setup discussed in the “Nami Wallet Setup” section of connecting the wallet and setting collateral for smart contracts there arent any major steps other than clicking buy on the NFTs you like. One small note is that transactions can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours depending on network congestion.