How to Buy NFTs on Solana Blockchain?
2021 was without any doubt the year of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Almost every day, you can find new press articles about the hype or about artists, athletes or brands who state they bought NFTs. But this it only the tip of the iceberg. In 2021, NFT sales reached 13 billions dollars and according to Finder’s recent NFT Adoption Report, approximatively 11.6% in the world had NFT in 2021, and 9.4% are planning to buy some in 2022.
The mainstream interest for this technology has been growing exponentially in the last two years and was highly correlated with the adoption of cryptocurrency. In 2021, according to the World Economic Forum, crypto sector’s total market cap grew by 187.5% and Solana came out to be one of the top performer, with nearly 11,000% return.
While Ethereum remains the major NFT market leader today, Solana came seriously in the limelight thanks to attractive features like lower gas fees, high scalability and the launch of several NFT marketplaces. For instance, early October 2021, an NFT from the Solana Monkey Business collection was bought for $2 million, which remains the record today.
In this article, we will see how to buy and sell a NFT with Phantom, fund the wallet, and which platforms would be the best fit for you.
Why buying NFTs on Solana
Before going through the process of buying a NFT, let’s start by explaining why Solana is currently one of the best blockchain and is a credible alternative to Ethereum (ETH).
One of the biggest investor’s complaints about using Ethereum are the very high gas fees. Computing power is indeed necessary to validate every transaction on the ETH blockchain. As a consequence, users have to pay a small amount of ETH to the miners so they can make the network functional. In other words, making transaction is very expensive unless you do a large one, whether you buy a token or a NFT. Also, ETH can process only 15 transactions per second (TPS) and since the blockchain’s popularity exceeds far more than 15 TPS, it creates slow transactions and high gas fees.
In that context, Solana appears to be a true challenger because NFTs can be bought with low transaction fee and high execution. The question is, how exactly can you buy Solana NFTs safely, effectively, and without any unnecessary stress?
How to buy NFT on Solana blockchain?
Stick to your limits
As you know, the market can be very volatile and a NFT can quickly loose its value. The key to avoid any concerns is to only spend what you can afford to lose. In other words, you may not want to spend cash that you might need desperately in a near future. By doing so, you will not have to look every second at the value of your NFT, and just have to wait until it rises back again.
Create your Solana wallet
To buy a NFT on Solana, you will need to create a wallet based on the same blockchain to stock your cryptocurrencies and use them to make the purchase. It is crucial to choose a secure wallet to prevent any potential hack that could make your capital vanish. Here are our recommendation, with tutorial to set up your wallet:
· Phantom: One of the most compatible wallet with the Solana Ecoystem, and probably the most used. It is compatible with most of the new apps on Solana. You can stock your NFT as well.
Website: https://phantom.app/
Tutorial: https://help.phantom.app/hc/en-us/sections/4406292675731-The-Basics
· Solfare: Solflare is a pure web-wallet, which means it does not have any extension for browser. However, one of its advantage is to propose a SOL staking function, without going through a tierce app. In addition, you can stock your NFT and make swap directly in the app.
Website: https://solflare.com/
Tutorial: https://academy.solflare.com/guides/how-to-get-started-with-solflare/
· Slope: Slope wallet is a leading non-custodial crypto wallet emerging from the Solana ecosystem, functions including wallet, DeFi, NFT, cross-chain(ETH), Swap. Slope wallet is also a private wallet for the users of the leading blockchains, which allows users to manage their crypto and NFT assets freely.
Website: https://slope.finance
Tutorial: https://support.slope.finance/en/46099-the-basics
Buy your SOL and transfer them to your wallet
At the moment of buying your NFT, the marketplace will ask you to use SOL for the transaction. To do so, you will have to buy some on one of the various exchanges existing online. The most known cryptocurrency exchanges are Binance, Coinbase, crypto.com and Kraken but there are also many others.
Once you have bought your SOL amount, then send it to your wallet address. You can find many online tutorials showing how to withdraw your SOL and send them to your wallet. At first, we recommend that you withdraw just a little bit of SOL to make sure everything is fine and that the amount arrive on the right address.
How to find your NFT?
On Solana, there are thousands of NFTs available on the marketplace. It can be very hard to pick up one when you have so much choice. There is no “one” approach when you want to invest in NFT, everyone can have his own strategy.
However, what we notice is that people often choose NFTs they can relate to, with an emotional resonance. People like NFTs that connect to their background, personality or life goals. If you do not have any inspiration, you can have a look on the trends of the market. This section is available on every marketplace. By doing so, you will see what the most popular pieces are, and the ones that catch most of attention. That can give you a good starting point.
What you should keep in mind is to always do your own Research (DYOR). It can very very tempting to buy a NFT on a platform just because you like the image and believe it worth a nice amount of money. But always focus on the DYOR because this is the best way to avoid buying a scam. For instance, the Frosties NFT collection shook the entire crypto industry early this year. The founders are accused of launching a digital collection of colorful characters and promising investors many money-making features, such as staking. But the project suddenly shut down few hours after everything sold out. This is called a “Rug Pull”, which type of scam where developers abandon a project and take their investors’ money. The accused transferred $1.1 million in crypto out of the Frosties wallet, and around 40,000 victims were counted. ,
If you want to avoid a rug pull, there is several factors to consider. First, you should gather as many information as you can about the founding team. It would be a significant concern if no one has heard about them. In addition, the scam usually comes out of nowhere, whereas legitimate projects can take a long time to develop. These fake collections often come with a lot of hype, capitalizing on recent cultural event that are already popular. The Squid Game scam is one of them. Also, pay attention to the website, social media, giveaways. They can look weird or fishy, because the guys are trying to make easy money with minimum effort. A simple Google Search can sometimes help you manage risks and give you evidence about the seriousness of the project.
There are many other things to consider in order to avoid a rug pull and you can definitely find many articles on the Internet about that. This one is for instance extremely complete.
How to buy your NFT?
Ethereum is still the world’s most popular blockchain and therefore, most of the NFT marketplaces are created there. However, as indicated at the beginning of this article, user preferences can quickly change because of transaction speed and high gas fees when using Ethereum. In that context Solana NFT marketplaces are becoming more popular.
Also, you should keep in mind that every NFT marketplaces have collections, fees, and terms that you should consider. Knowing that, make sure you do your own research and choice before you engage any money. Here is the most popular marketplaces:
OpenSea: It is a decentralized NFT marketplace, very popular on Ethereum. Recently, they integrated Solana on their platform and now NFT from this blockchain are supported. OpenSea brands itself as the biggest marketplace for digital goods
Magic Eden: It is the most popular NFT platform on Solana. The advantage of the marketplace is that you do not pay any fees to make your NFT listed. They only take 2% on every transaction.
Solanart: This marketplace hosts many popular projects like Degenerate Ape Academy or Solpunks, which are known to be ones of the most expensive collection. Solanart is known to propose a simple and effective interface, making it easier to browse NFT. They have fees of 3% for every transaction.
Solsea: It is the first NFT marketplace that enable creators to set licenses when they mint NFTs (mint = record your digital asset on the blockchain). This is a significant improvement regarding the question of intellectual property attached to NFTs.
Once you find something interesting, you can click on the NFT and have access to information about the piece: owner, price, number of collectibles, for example…
If you wallet is well connected, you will have the possibility to make an offer. Then, the process of buying a NFT is quite simple. You just have to click on the purchase link and approve the transaction through your wallet. Then, a window pops up and shows you the amount spent and the cost of the transaction fee. As soon as the purchase is over, you will be able to check your NFT directly on your wallet. Congratulations ! And if you want to have a complete overview of your collection at a glance, you can use Sonar ;)
Conclusion
Once you have bought your first NFT, you will be normally able to make it again much easily. The process is quite simple to understand and straightforward, even though one of the big challenge of NFT marketplaces is to make it even more mainstream for everyone. Keep in mind that the NFT revolution is only at its beginning, and in that context Solana has proven to be a real key player in the sector thanks to many competitive advantages.
It can be tempting to keep adding NFTs to your collection over time but do not forget to stick to your limits!
