Supercharge Your NFT Trading With These Four Tools

Authors Note: I have no affiliation with any of these products. They just kick ass.

Starting off in NFTs, my naivety knew no bounds. I fumbled expensively through dutch auctions and was ignorant to the mechanics of gas wars. While I innocently perused the pages of penguins and primates on OpenSea, I was clueless to the army of sophisticated traders and bots lurking just under the surface.

Competing against traders fueled with algorithms, scrapers, and big bankrolls can seem like you’re facing an insurmountable foe. Fear not, this article will give you four tools (free, and paid) to help even the playing field.

Tool 1 — Gas estimator, recommendation: Block Native (Free)

Why is it important? During ANY major mint, there will almost certainly be a gas war. Understanding the ever-changing gas price, and the timing of the blocks is paramount to a successful mint.

Every fourteen seconds a miner selects which transactions will be added to the Ethereum blockchain. If you want your mint transactions to go through, you will need to tip the miner.

“the thing to remember during a mint, is that gas is a market and in order to be successful, you have to “beat” the market”- Bahgley69

Your serious competitors are tipping miners anywhere from 1.5–3 times Blocknatives 99% recommendation. To do this, you may need to adjust your wallet settings to allow a manual gas entry. In MetaMask for example, head to settings > advanced and toggle on advanced gas controls. When submitting transactions, the number you’ll usually want to increase is the miner fee. For more info on gas wars, this article does a deep dive worth your time.

Bonus: BlockNative can also help time you time transactions during a low gas period. The chart below shows the cheapest times historically to transact. This is great if your doing a wallet reorg or for any transaction that isn’t time sensitive.

Tool 2 - SuperSea (Paid)

SuperSea is so good it feels like you’re cheating. This little chrome extension overlays a variety of tools on top of OpenSea that will make you not only more competitive, but sometimes unbeatable. Some of my favorite features are:

Schedule automated buys based on rarity or traits, within a specific price range. This simple, powerful tool allows you to automate your buys as soon as new NFTs are listed without refreshing. Personally, this alone is worth the price of the app.

View rarity and buy in-line on newly listed items. This feature is lethal during reveals. It will show you rarity in line before the images are revealed, giving you the opportunity to snipe rare NFTs left at floor price in a single click.

Calculate your total collection value, and see floor prices at a glance. Head to your profile and it will show you floor prices on your items, as well as a total collection value at floor. Far superior to clicking into each collection individually to gather floor data.

SuperSea has a monthly plan at .1 ETH per month, and a lifetime membership which can be bought here on OpenSea. (For transparency, I do own this NFT)

One disclaimer, chrome extensions are a little sketchy when it comes to crypto. They have access to, and can edit all sorts of things, which is worrisome when dealing with the irreversible nature of cryptocurrencies. You may want to use this with your non-primary wallet and in an isolated browser profile.

Note: I us about a half dozen chrome profiles for work, various wallets, and personal life. I highly recommend you look into them as it’s an easy way to compartmentalize your online identities and wallets.

Tool 3 - Dominate Dutch Auctions with Etherscan (Free)

For the uninitiated, a dutch auction sets a buy price for an NFT. The price is then periodically reduced at set time intervals until the NFT, or NFT collection has sold. Example: the recent Azuki mint was set to start at 1 ETH and reduce .05 ETH every 20 minutes until the 8,700 piece collection sold out.

This can be difficult for novices to navigate without overpaying, or missing the inevitable landslide of sales once the auction drop to a low enough price.

My first dutch auction was a dumpster fire. I overpaid by minting immediately and then watched in horror as the price dropped 5x before the collection sold out. Thinking I’d learned something, my second time at bat I missed out entirely (Azuki) as the entire 8,700 piece collection sold out in minutes while I was fumbling to connect my wallet.

I interviewed a couple traders on this and the consensus and strategy was surprisingly simple. You almost never pull the trigger at the open of the auction. You wait and watch. You don’t watch the auction numbers on the minting website though. These numbers are delayed, displaying only successful mints, not pending transactions. This is a HUGE differentiator. This data can also be delayed, or incorrect, depending on where the website is getting the contract data from.

Enter Etherscan. Pull up the contract on Etherscan and you will notice a handy metric, transactions pending. Selecting this link will display a filtered list of pending transactions.

This displays with minimal latency how many transactions are pending, more importantly, it gives you a fairly precise readout of how many people presently sent their request to mint at the dutch auction. This figure will be significantly ahead of the minting website, as that website will only show who has successfully minted. With pending transactions, you can now get advanced notice of the landslide, far ahead of the crowd. Remember, these transactions are not technically ahead of yours, you can cut this line if you’re quick enough and tip enough. Use your new found gas skills from Tool 2 to ensure you are in the next block! Pair Etherscan’s pending transaction metric with an automated refresh extension, like Easy Chrome Refresh, and you will be in business.

Tool 4 - Etherscan, Again (Cut out the middleman, and mint straight on the contract)

When you interact with a project’s mint site, you are adding a layer between you and the contract. That layer being the project website. This added layer can be the difference between minting and missing out. A project’s website can have a myriad of issues. The site can crash from a huge wave of mint traffic, or in the case of the Under Armour/Steph Curry drop, only allow those in the Eastern time zone to mint. 🤦‍♂️

All of these issues can be mitigated from minting directly on the contract. This can seem like a scary topic, but fear not. Etherscan lays the contract functions out for you. This topic is a bit dense for an article but can be quickly learned in this 6 minutes Youtube video by NFTeams.

Honorable Mention: wmgi.io - The only tool you need to track your portfolio (Paid)

There’s a saying “what’s measured is managed.” If you’re taking NFT collecting and trading seriously, a transparent dashboard into your portfolio is a must have. wgmi.io is that, and much more. The app features a stacked suite of NFT collection data, including one of my favorites, floor price by trait.

While this article focused mainly on tools for buying, selling is the other half of the equation. Your buy price/date, along with current floor and collection volume data allows you to time your exit with precision. The site membership allows you to add multiple wallets by their ETH or ENS addresses. After chatting with the wgmi.io founder, he has now turned this project into his full time job and is actively hiring staff to start rolling out upgrades and enhanced functionality. Very excited to see what these guys deliver next!

If you enjoyed this article, please follow me on twitter @asimplenoochie, I post content like this regularly and will be releasing podcasts to discuss exciting NFT projects in the future. Don’t take financial advice from me or any other stranger on the internet.

Good luck out there!

Noochie

Credits: Thank you Serpin Taxt, who runs the fabulous niftystonks.io/ and the amazing Proof Collective moderator Bahgley69. Their patience, time, and information alone have made the Proof Collective a worthwhile investment.

Thank you to my editors @wanderlunging, who is a wonderful writer, find their short stories here, and Dave Schatz, who is working on a secret project that I cannot wait to break to all of you!