If you’re like me, any form of social media is an extrasensory experience, to which I try to limit. Discord is like a normal social media platform on cocaine doing a triple backflip over a dozen school buses. But as Discord seems to be the preferred method of communication, I am jumping in with the intention of learning.

Within one discord channel, there are dozens of different chats, classified by the topic of discussion. I jumped onto one NFT project’s discord at a time to gather more information and keep up with the daily announcements and changes in a project’s deliverables. Admittedly, once you join a few Discord channels, you realize they are structured similarly and gathering information on a new project is relatively simple. Almost all Discords will have a handful of truly useful chats:

• Official links: find the official social media accounts, website, secondary marketplace, and blockchain contract address

• Roadmap: A guide for project deliverables and timelines

• FAQs: information regarding the mint (number of units to be sold, price, whitelist requirements etc.)

• General chat: gather sentiment from other project followers

A mint can be thought of as the Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the world of business. The contract owner receives a large portion of the mint proceeds and the purchasers receive the asset at a fixed price.

Project minting can be accomplished a number of different ways, with the most common being the whitelist presale at a fixed price. Another common method is the Dutch Auction.

A whitelist is like a nightclub guestlist. Only here, the whitelist is able to gather the NFT at a presale price, often with lots of time to mint to prevent FOMO and gas price surges (aka Gas Wars - when the demand on the blockchain exceeds the supply of miners/validators to authenticate the transactions).

How does one get on a whitelist? Depending on the project, a certain number of non-bot invites is the most common method. Being active in the general chat, producing media for the project to use, and raffling systems are other methods. In general, if you give the project what it wants (invites = popularity through word of mouth, general chat grinding = sense of community, media = relatively cheap marketing material, etc.) it gives you what you want (the option to get in early).

I will start to monitor a number of projects and their Discords in an Excel spreadsheet, tracking a number of metrics, including social media followers, assets to be released, mint price, celebrities involved, and doxxing. This should give me an idea of how to predict the success of future projects.