How To Buy Or Gift a NFT in 2022
NFT might have been Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2021, but its ubiquity shows no sign of letting up in 2022. Melania Trump has got into the NFT game, Eminem has spent nearly half a million dollars on one and Samsung have said their new TVs will include “the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator”. And it’s only January!
So with NFTs going mainstream, now is the time to learn how and what to buy. And – even more importantly – you can prove how up with the zeitgeist you really are by gifting one!
This guide compiled by the crypto experts at Cloudbet will show you just how to do it all.
NFT stands for Non Fungible Token.
Fungible is not a word we normally use but all it means is that something is interchangeable or replaceable by something identical. So two dollar bills are fungible as one is worth exactly the same as the other (and indeed all dollar bills). But the idea of a Non Fungible Token is that each is one-of-a-kind.
The term refers to a purely digital asset – rather than anything in the real world.
The NFT craze has been swirling around sections of the internet for a few years but really caught public attention in 2021.
A piece of digital art by a graphic artist known as Beeple called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was sold in March at Christies for $69.3 Million. That instantly positioned him in the top 10 most valuable living artists, alongside David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.
Let’s get started:
Step 1: Open an account with a crypto exchange.
You’ll need to sign up and give some information proving who you are but then you can just use your debit card like you would to buy anything else.
Coinbase and Binance are good places to start.
Step 2. Buy some ETH
Most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain also supports NFTs.
The absolute majority of NFT marketplaces out there only accept payments in Ether. So spend some money buying ETH.
Step 3. Get an NFT-enabled crypto wallet
Metamask is the popular choice.
Available as a browser extension and a mobile app, MetaMask equips you with a key vault, secure login, token wallet, and token exchange – everything you need to manage your digital assets. if it’s a gift, you must ensure that not only you have a NFT-enabled wallet but that the person you are giving the present to also has one. And then once you know they have one, all you need is the wallet address.
Step 4: Make sure you have enough gas
if you send assets over the ETH network, then you have to pay gas fees in ETH. It’s the cost of incentivising the network validators…. and guess what, that cost is high because of …. the explosion in NFT projects! So pay the gas fee and you’re ready to go.
Step 5 Take a look at an NFT marketplace
Opensea is a popular choice and lets you browse what NFTs are out there to buy. Alternatively keep looking at information put out by your favourite artists or pop stars as no doubt they’ll have an NFT ready for you.
Then choose your gift.
NFTs are best described as vouchers of authenticity for digital assets, be it art, music, video or anything else.
Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are a good choice, as owning one of the 10,000 digital art apes gives you membership of the club and a chance to meet other owners in real life, like Eminem, who just bought an Eminem lookalike ape, #79.
Or try CryptoPunks. Dating back to June 2017, and one of the inspirations for today’s modern crypto art scene, they are a collection of 24×24, 8-bit-style pixel art images of misfits and eccentrics. There are exactly 10,000 of them, with four of these NFTs ranking among the ten most expensive NFTs ever sold.
As it’s the internet, there’s a lot of cats on offer – like CryptoKitties and CoolCats.
We’re not just talking high art either. Aficionados can purchase a selection of Armie Hammer’s infamous cannibal sex DMs., or a visual poem about Cara Delevingne’s vagina – even an audio-only sex tape made by rapper Azealia Banks – if you’re prepared to pay you can, in theory, get it as an NFT.
There’s also the inevitable crass corporate brand cash-ins, like Pringles selling a a new flavour as an NFT – CryptoCrisp – which, of course, you can’t taste.
Step 6: How to get the NFT into the recipient’s (digital) hands
So, if you want to buy the NFT for yourself, steps 1-5 above should be enough. If it’s for someone else, it gets more complicated, but trust us it will be worth it.
You need to obtain your intended’s Metamask wallet address so you can transfer the NFT to them.
So – if you’ve got your wallet, bought your ETH, paid your gas fee, found someone else you want to give a present to who has a Metamask waller… well then you are good to go!
But before you think there’s someone out there for every idea, no matter how stupid, one man in New Yorkstarted a project to sell farts for a year as a NFT. His NFT, “One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts compiled the recordings of a group of enthusiasts into a 52-minute “Master Collection” audio file.
It still has no buyer, but he did sell a single effort for $85.
