To start with, I will divide NFT Whitelists customer base into 2 — rich and poor individuals. (just this once, I will break my rule and name-drop NFT projects so you can visualise the magnitude of my potential investments)
If you are part of the rich clan, you basically either:
had money to purchase pre-requisite NFTs from a previous collection to qualify for the most recent and exciting NFT project.
just found out about xx project today and were notified by discord that holding previous collections would give you higher chances to get whitelisted. So, you go onto OpenSea and short previous NFT projects thus securing a WL spot for yourself.
pay people who have no money but are time rich. These individuals will grind day and night in discord and when they are awarded with a WL, they will sell it to you for a sum of money. (This makes sense because these individuals love these NFT projects and can genuinely contribute to the discord community but would never in this lifetime possess enough money for the WL mint price which are sometimes exorbitant such as those higher than 0.1 ETH)
Let’s put this into numbers because I was too broke and missed out on these. (But let’s not stay in the past too much and lament about what could have been :) )
To mint Invisible Friends, you needed to have Mood Rollers and Slimhoods (their previous NFT collections) in your wallets for WL. I only had money for Invisible Friends mint which was 0.25 ETH. This one purchase of 0.25 ETH would have given me a profit of 44x profit as at its peak, its floor price rose to 11 ETH. (In Feb 2022, 1 ETH was $2600)
I also knew about World of Women when it was priced at 2 ETH but of course, the state of my financial situation did not allow me purchase it. Suddenly, one day, the NFT project with a respectable origin announced its signing with veteran music executive Guy Oseary and soared to 8 ETH. Of course, if you knew about it at an earlier time you could have purchased it for 0.07 Solana.
*All mentioned NFT projects do not reflect this value currently because of the crypto winter that we are experiencing. From my short experience in NFTs, I have learnt that one needs luck, timing, perseverance, and most of all money.
My final parting words are please do not stop engaging with a NFT project’s discord because it shows you were never here for the right reasons and also don’t beat yourself up if you:
missed out on a NFT project
could successfully pick out high potential NFT projects but there was no public mint so you did not have a chance to buy it at mint price
had no money to mint at that time or it was a dutch auction and you were a little light on the funds
I felt depressed over missing out on projects that grew 10x in value and more. However, 6 months later, I have noticed that they have since dropped in value to below mint price. You literally never know what’s going to happen. The current NFTs that you have in your wallet could be worth 1 million in a year if a major athlete or celebrity picks up the project. On the other hand, you could have stayed active in the discord community despite having not a single NFT but were noticed by the founders and got an airdrop of a limited edition collection for OG fans (happened to me and I was pleasantly surprised).
People who are here to make a quick buck would often be loud in the discord chats right up until the project launches. Once they have sold the NFT for a profit or even if they are keeping it in their wallet for future collections, their involvement in the discord dies. I’ve been in Discords where the day after minting was filled with either good vibes or complains about the founders behaviour and developers mistakes. One week after minting, actual crickets in the general chat. People who were extremely friendly before mint day and regularly replied to their “friends” in the discord dropped off and killed these relationships because they needed nothing else from these discords.
Lastly, do not “invest” in NFTs because you would only be faced with disappointment and cardiac arrests whenever its floor price dips. Do not put money in crypto that you do not have by banking on future profits that no one, not even experts, could accurately predict. I used to think holding BAYC in my wallet was like owning Kylie Jenner’s collection of Birkins or a fully fuelled Aston Martin Valkyrie in my garage but even their price has dipped and people who bought it at 80 ETH during its hype lost the chance to sell it at 120 ETH.
It hurts my heart to see stuff like this:
But, I also can’t recommend to you to NOT sell during a crypto winter because its floor price MIGHT just never go back to being above mint price so sell it at 0.015 ETH if you have to. Personally, I am holding my NFTs despite their declining value as we speak because I believe in the projects as a whole but I understand some of us have to sell to get back any profit that we can salvage to make ends meet.
It hurts me also to know I’ll never get to own a BAYC (partially because I can’t justify spending that sum of money on a jpeg despite my love for NFTs and NFT projects):
I know its disheartening to read (not to mention experiencing it first-hand) news about LUNA and CELSIUS. Fortunately, I did not have funds to invest in that stablecoin but I hope everyone who lost their live savings or homes due to crypto losses are blessed with good fortune within crypto in the very near future. I see articles of how a bear market doesn’t affect billionaire but it significantly affects people who listen to their advice and my heart goes out to all of us who just want to change our family’s financial circumstances. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pay to just have a kind soul, good intentions, and a humble passion for crypto. As we have seen with the pandemic and with crypto currency’s rise to popularity, you need money to make money. Once having breached the glass ceiling and successfully being welcomed into the tax bracket of the top 1 of the world, your pockets will only get deeper as the world crumbles due to inflation.
I know some people reading this are in the same boat as me. We see a NFT project that gets us hyped but we lack funds or privilege to buy it so we sit here and wallow in FOMO. Nevertheless, I do believe that our time will come and sometimes the grass ain’t even green on the other side. We were simply viewing those lucky bastards through rose-colored lenses. I am still a believer in Web3 and crypto currencies and I will even if BTC takes a decade or a century to go back to 60 k. Keep your head up, keep HODLing (if it’s financially feasible for you) and WAGMI!
Another example of you never know what the future holds so hold off on the FOMO, if you are like me and live nowhere near NYC, you also couldn’t attend NFT.NYC 2021 that was hyped up to be the best thing since sliced bread. Now, all over LinkedIn, people are deploring their experiences at NFT.NYC 2022 with posts expressing how the wrong people were given a platform to spout views about their cash grab projects.
As I always try to facilitate discussion, please do comment below if you have any advice or NFT experiences to share because I am still learning and recognise that there are many people reading this that have been in the crypto industry for longer than a decade. I also acknowledge that trying to understand trends in crypto is not only a steep learning curve but also an absurdly unpredictable one that no one understands in its entirety.
Thank you so much for reading this far and I promise that future articles won’t be so long!
Glossary
HODLing : refusing to sell and holding on to crypto
WAGMI : we all gonna make it
crypto winter : refers to a poorly performing cryptocurrency market
FOMO : Fear Of Missing Out