If you happen to follow me on Twitter. You have noticed my several tweets per day about PFP NFTs. As a result, I’ve been getting several DM’s every 24 hours, with questions about trading NFTs. Questions about which on how to get started or what projects are hot.
So in this blog, I’ll walk you through some of my experiences and guide you on what to look out for and how you can start earning by flipping PFP NFTs.
Before I jump into it. I want to do a special shout-out to Madelon Vos. She shared my previous blog on “bear market mistakes” with her community, and I got a huge spike in traffic. While her audience is mostly Dutch, like myself, I’d like to welcome all the new readers. Hopefully, you’ll stick around and enjoy my content.
What Are PFP NFTs?
PFP stands for profile picture, also known as an avatar. Since early this year, NFT collectors starting rocking their Crypto Punks, or Bored Apes as their PFP on Twitter. Which started this whole craze about PFP NFTs.
Crypto Punk # 6046 refusing a $9,494,224 bid. Is this world going nuts?
In my blog from September, I explained that it’s a combination of factors why this holds value, which includes:
Scarcity – Limited SupplyMetaverse – They have utility in the MetaverseDigital flexing – Showing off how rich you areHype – Follow the moneyCommunity – Be part of a groupCommercial rights
My Rare Mutant Ape Listed For 41 ETH
To get a full walk-through on the above, head to my article about it. If you haven’t read that yet, def have a quick read. As it contains a lot of useful information you’re going to need while you continue reading this.
Now, since my last guide, two major things happened in the NFT landscape.
1] Twitter Verification For PFP NFTs
You probably know the blue checkmark for verified celebrities and influencers on social media. Well, Twitter is adding a small ETH logo on profiles which means they verified ownership of the NFT that they display as their avatar.
A few Twitter developers already shared sneak peek videos on how it will work. As of now, there is no release date yet. But I assume it will be rolled out this year.
It will take digital flexing to another level as you can now legitimately show off your expensive NFT.
2] Coinbase NFT Marketplace
The biggest US-based crypto exchange Coinbase will launch its NFT marketplace by the end of this year. With over 60 Million accounts on Coinbase, this will expose the NFT market to a whole new audience.
In comparison, the largest NFT marketplace Opensea has about 400k active users as we speak.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Can you imagine how this could blow up the NFT community while subsequently push the value up for precious PFP NFTs?
You can whitelist for early access to the Coinbase NFT marketplace by using my link.
Flipping NFTs
So how can you get started trading PFPs?
Firstly, you need to buy an NFT at a good price to be able to make a profitable flip.
There are a few ways to go about purchasing NFTs. And don’t worry, I’ll walk you through the several options in this section. Therefore I create a small list of 5 ways to get your hands on a PFP and start flipping.
Let’s start with the one that everybody is talking about, minting.
1] Minting NFTs
To mint, an NFT, means you buy it at creation. Basically, the NFT isn’t on the blockchain yet, and to start that process is called minting.
PFP collections often have a public sale to mint. The majority of these collections have 10,000 unique NFTs in them, also known as 10k PFPs.
When you mint one, you do not know which one of the collections you are assigned. You can get a super rare one, or often you get a pretty common one. Most of the time, the “reveal” of your NFT after mint, is a few days after the public sale has sold out. Very exciting times to wait for the reveal, I can vouch for that.
To find upcoming mints, check this page of Rarity.Tools, or for Solana go to Solanalysis.
Common mint prices are between 0.05 and 0.2 ETH. Although, the gas prices can get out of control if you’re looking to mint.
2] Sniping PFP NFTs
To snipe an NFT means that you find a good NFT for a great price. Similar to bargain hunting in the NFT industry.
How do you know if an NFT is rare?
Well, you have tools for that. My personal favorite is Rarity.Tools and I will use that tool in my examples for this section.
There are two ways to snipe NFTs, you can bid on NFTs or market buy them. Let me start with the latter.
2a] Market Buying
If you’re on Rarity Tools, you can find your PFP collection in the bar at the top. Yesterday I purchased another Lazy Lion while I used this tool.
After you selected the collection you are searching for, the next step is to add filters in the left sidebar.
Using Rarity Tools for Lazy Lions
I added 3 filters while I’m searching for a Lazy Lion right now. The Lion has to be under 7000 rarity rank, wearing lederhosen, with a price below 4 ETH.
The sharp reader has already noticed, that the rarest of these 5 Lions is also priced the lowest at 2.49 ETH. That’s a great snipe!
Once you find a Lion you like, the next step is to simply click on the NFT and you can find the link directing you to Opensea to purchase it on the marketplace.
With this strategy, I tend to look for rarity, esthetics, and price gaps within a specific trait. A combination of that helps me form a decision.
2b] Bidding on Opensea
For the patient sniper, bidding is a great option. The two main reasons to start bidding are:
You can’t find a rare NFT at a great price to market buyBuying below Market Value
The first thing you need is wrapped Ethereum (wETH) to bid on PFP NFTs. You can easily swap ETH for wETH on Metamask by clicking the swap function, selecting wETH, and paying a little gas.
Now that you have some wETH. You can start bidding on NFTs. You can bid on NFTs that are listed for sale, to bid at a lower price. Or you can even bid on the ones that are not listed for sale, to see if a collector is interested in letting it go. Both options work.
To bid, just click the button that says “make offer”, which is right next to the “buy now” button. Select the timeframe you want to have your bid open and the amount you want to bid. Placing a bid doesn’t cost you any gas, however, canceling a bid requires gas.
The cool thing about bidding is that you can bid on several NFTs with the same balance. If you have 2 wETH for example, you can place 10 times a 2 wETH bid on different PFP NFTs, and whichever ones click accept first is yours. If you don’t have more crypto in your wallet, other bids can’t be accepted anymore. However, a slight word of caution here, if you’re ETH loaded and several bids get accepted, you end up with a bag of JPEGs.
I bid on approximately 20 Lazy Lions over the past 3 days, and this morning I woke up with a new Lion in my wallet. This one was listed for 2.4 ETH and I got it for 1.9 ETH, which is 26% below the asking price. With the currently cheapest “Lederhosen” trait listed at 2.49 ETH, I’m quite happy with my snipe.
What do you think?
Lazy Lion #2756
3] Buying The Floor
NFT investors refer to the lowest listing prices as “the floor”. When you’re buying several low priced PFP NFTs you’re “sweeping the floor”. As you’re scooping up the cheap ones to add to your collection.
Most of the trading volume of PFP collections is at floor prices. Just because the majority of people collect, trade, and flip the cheapest ones of an NFT series. It makes sense because they are easier to get rid of.
A great site to track floor prices is WGMI (We’re Going to Make it). It’s kinda like a Coingecko for NFTs.
Tracking floor prices of different projects and buying the dip could pay off well when you’re flipping PFPs.
4] Auctions
A less popular feature of Opensea is the auction option. When your scrolling around in a collection, in the left sidebar you can select “on Auction”. Now you have filtered for the PFPs that you can bid on and the highest bid takes it.
You can see former bids and expiration times on the listing. It’s fairly intuitive and works the same as the bidding described above.
On another marketplace called Foundation, you can place a bid on an item that starts an auction for the next 24 hours. I actually bought a pretty cool NFT like that, a 3D derivative of a Crypto Punk cosplaying as a Bored Ape.
Cosplay 3D punks / Bored Ape
I relisted it for 3 ETH, so once somebody bids 3 ETH for my NFT, other NFT investors have 24 hours to put in a higher bid. Usually, it’s quite low key, so odds are good that the first bidder will just snipe this one.
5] Buy In Bulk
Last, but not least. Avid traders can buy NFTs in bulk. Yes, that’s right, you can buy a bulk of PFPs.
When you’re on Opensea at a collectible, right next to the search bar you see a dropdown that says “single items”. After you click it, you can select “bundles”.
PFP collection: Bubblegum Kids
Above you can see, I filtered for bundles in the recently popular PFP collection “Bubblegum kids”.
The advantage of buying in bulk is that you only pay for gas once. On high gas days, this is a blessing. Other than being a huge time saver, often the bundles are matching NFTs for investors who like some similarities in their collection.
I have 1 bundle listed of “6 alt punks”, for collectors who can’t afford a crypto punk and looking for similar series. Check it out here.
PFP NFT Fundamentals
Back in the ICO boom, many of my friends and poker players had a legit system for doing due diligence on projects. It was the wild west, with countless of rug pulls, pump and dumps, and straight-up scams.
So investors had to be sharp and find validation that a project is legit and can outrun the competition.
I notice a similar trend starting in the current PFP NTFs environment. With this enormous increase in volume, the gold rush mentality is growing. Investors are flipping more for profits, sometimes overextending their investments. While subsequently, we see an enormous surge in supply. More and more projects are launching every day, while the overall quality is trending down.
The previous section turned out way longer than intended. While I want to help you get started, I also don’t want to waste your precious time. So I’m going to keep the next section a bit more compact.
There are 7 things I look at with projects in which I invest or plan to flip.
1] Community
The first thing I look at is the community. How many social media followers, discord members, and their activity.
I want to catch a positive vibe in Discord. Many of the communities are kinda toxic at critical concerns, which I consider a red flag.
The MekaVerse discord had 200k discord members before they started their mint. It was absurdly hyped, but I’ve also read rumors they botted a large portion of their community. As we’ve learned from the ICO time, at some point projects will add many bots to their communities to boost numbers trying to start a hype.
So, don’t blindly look at numbers only. Spend some time in the community to feel the vibe.
Pro Tip: Do people actually use the NFT as their PFP on Twitter? If yes, a good sign. If no, red flag.
2] Roadmap
A roadmap basically means the future plans and developments of the project. This was a significant key component at ICO’s. It’s slightly less important for NFT collectibles.
However, having developments on the roadmap does mean that the team will stick around and find different ways to add value for their community. This is important to transform NFT traders into holders and part of their community.
We see a lot of development towards gaming and the Play-to-Earn model. Another popular item on a roadmap is creating a token for holders or creating events or having marketing plans.
3] Team
The majority of teams are currently anonymous. However, when the competition gets bigger, I believe we’re going to see more real personas on team pages. Make sure to run some background checks on google and Linkedin on team members.
At some point, when the majority of teams are publicly known, I’ll start to avoid anonymous teams.
4] Airdrops
Right now, airdrops are a huge x-factor with PFP NFTs. Several projects had successful airdrops, like The Doge Pound or Mutant Apes. Basically, the projects airdrops you an NFT if you hold their original PFP NFT. So you get rewarded for holding.
Often you see a price move up before an airdrop event and a slight dump after. So if you’re flipping, these free NFT giveaways are events to keep an eye on.
The trend with NFT airdrops will evolve over time, I believe this will be a legit opportunity for the next few weeks/months.
5] Quality / Design
Do you actually like the PFP?
Personally, if I don’t like the look of an NFT, I’m not buying it. This sometimes costs me a lot of money. But I can’t wrap my mind over buying something I dislike.
That being said, even if it’s not a personal preference. You can evaluate the quality of the design. Is this from a talented artist, or does it look rushed or copied from other projects?
As soon as we’re going to see hundreds of PFP projects per month, I expect the majority to be low-quality designs. Don’t fall into the trap of buying something that’s temporarily hyped but low quality. You can compare that to shitcoins, or in this case shitPFPs. Although, some will have meme-value I guess. So don’t discount them all.
6] Utility
Can you do more with your NFT than buy and hodl?
Several projects are giving more utility to holding one of their avatars in your wallet. The Bored Apes are throwing several parties in New York in November, which you can only join if you hold one of their BAYC NFTs.
Lazy Lions have Roarwards, who give part of the royalties back to the community members who qualify for them.
Other projects have gaming utilities or hand-out merch. There’s a lot of cool things in this space, and utility is something that will increase the value of the PFP over time.
7] Follow the Money
Find out if influencers or celebrities invested in the project or rocking it as their PFP.
Mike Tyson has a Cool Cat PFP, Jay -Z and Snoop Dogg are flexing their Crypto Punk, while Aston Kusher displays his Stoner Cat NFT.
There’s a huge difference between organic or paid promotion. So make sure the person isn’t paid to promote. I mean there is nothing wrong with marketing, however, paid promotions usually lead to short-term buzz.
Another strategy is to follow big wallets. It’s the blockchain, so check the wallet addresses of big collectors to see what they buy. This is called copy-trading.
Start Trading PFP NFTs
Do I still have your attention?
Wow, then you’re pretty dedicated and must be eager to get started. You’re going to need a few things to start investing in avatar collectibles:
A few helpful lists to read through to help you evaluate several different PFP NFTs and more:
Outro
There you have it, my secrets to flipping PFP NFTs. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I am a believer in the long-term value of NFTs especially with the Twitter verification coming up. However, the majority of these series will suffer in a bear market. So my plan is to flip my way to a few blue-chip NFTs that I will hold throughout a bear market. And for the remaining ETH I’m earning with this will be kept as a war chest to buy the dip, if we ever get one.
For the curious reader, here’s a link to my main NFT account. I have a few more accounts, but the majority are stored here. Some of my NFTs are for sale, some I’ll hold longer. However, if you find one you absolutely want, try to bid on it. Who knows, I might let go of it.
Next week I’m headed to San Fransico and Las Vegas to play the main event of the World Series of Poker. Join my journey on Instagram, where I’ll share some travel pics. In addition, I’ll probably give away a few % of my action on my social media accounts, so stay tuned. Logically, my next few blogs will be about my experiences at the WSOP. But don’t worry, I’ll be back with crypto content as soon as I lose all my chips.
I hope you learned something from this blog. If you end up buying an NFT with my help, please share this blog on your Twitter. Not only will you help me grow, but you’ll also let your friends and followers know what you’re doing and what got you started. Sharing is caring.
Lastly, when you join the PFP game, don’t forget to have some fun. Now let’s play.
WAGMI
