NFT Vocabulary For Beginners – The 21 Basic Terms you Need to Know
Hey noob! There’s a bunch of stuff to learn in the NFT space to get you started, don’t let the vernacular be one that slows you down or gets you lost. There are also a ton of terms that get shortened or turned into acronyms, I’ll try to include as many as I can here but this isn’t all inclusive. Here’s a quick and dirty vocabulary guide as part of our NFTs for Beginners series, in no particular order of importance:
Mint
The process of buying or creating an NFT as opposed to buying one that’s already created. You are literally ‘minting’ a token in a collection or one of your own making.
Mint Price (MP)
The cost to mint an NFT before gas fees.
Dutch Auction (DA)
A different type of pricing mechanic for a mint. There are several variations but the price starts high and slowly lowers until the collection sells out.
Whitelist (WL)
Gives you the opportunity to buy an NFT before the general public, giving you the advantage to get yours before it sells out and avoid potentially high gas fees in a public sale.
Presale
Sometimes holding another NFT, or being a part of a specific group will grant you early access to an NFT sale. Similar to a whitelist spot, but some projects will do both.
Secondary
You didn’t mint this NFT yourself, you’re buying it on the secondary market.
OpenSea (OS)
This is the leading secondary market for NFTs. Every time an NFT is Minted on the Ethereum blockchain, it shows up here as an NFT.
Looks Rare (LR)
Another secondary market for NFTs, probably the #1 competitor to OpenSea and had a built-in rewards system for listing, selling, and buying NFT’s on their platform.
X2Y2
The last NFT marketplace I’ll mention, super user friendly, and many times free, or close to free to sell or buy.
1-of-1
There’s only one NFT like yours, the traits are all original to that piece. It can be part of a larger collection or a true 1-of-1 piece.
Smart Contract
Every NFT is minted on an Ethereum Contract creating a non-fungible token (NFT) that can’t be modified or duplicated and shows proof of ownership by the minter as long as they hold it.
Swap
Some projects give you the ability to earn a token that can then be swapped in an Ethereum wallet for Ethereum or other tokens.
Discord
Damn near every project is run through a Discord channel, learn it, join a bunch and close your direct messages for hell’s sake.
Premint
This is a process used to gain access to a sale via whitelist or presale. It sometimes requires that you are part of another group, follow the project on Twitter and/or be in their Discord.
Floor Price (FP)
The lowest price of an NFT in a collection. There can also be floor prices tied to certain traits or rarities as well.
Airdrop (Free Money)
There have been several airdrops NFT buyers and sellers have had access to. Be connected in the community to watch for these, vet them out and make sure they are legit and not a scam token looking to get connected to your wallet. There are some great Twitter follows that vet these out pretty quickly when they pop up.
Rug
A project that has no intention of building anything and they take the funds earned from a mint and/or secondary sales and bail…in most cases sending a project to zero.
Gas Fee
Every transaction on Ethereum when buying or minting NFTs generates a gas fee sent to miners to process the trasaction. This could be a whole separate article, just know that if the network is busy, you’re going to pay higher fees that need to be calculated into your cost basis.
Gas War
Super hyped up mints will generally pull a premium in gas fees, such as the Otherdeed mint of a few weeks ago. Lots of buyers can quickly run fees up and the war starts by buyers being willing to pay a higher fee to get their transaction through first.
Trading Tools
Also could be an entirely separate article. But some good cheap ones to start with are ones like icy.tools or moby.gg. There are dozens of others, but probably best to master a cheap one before spending too much on them.
MetaMask / Ethereum Wallet
MetaMask is the most common and most widely used Ethereum Wallet, but there are several others. Coinbase Wallet is a popular one as well. You generally don’t want to buy Ethereum directly on the MetaMask or other wallet, as the fees are typically higher. You’ll want to buy on a centralized exchanges such as a Coinbase or Gemini (in the US) and transfer to your wallet.Private Keys or Key Phrase – This is the passphrase to unlock your wallet, never give it to anyone. No one will ever ask for it or need it.
This is a short list, there are a ton more that will likely come up. Get yourself into some good communities and follow helpful folks on Twitter and any time you have a question you should be able to get the help you need pretty quickly.
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