How to Find and Evaluate NFT Projects

Jan 12, 2022

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Dear subscribers,

So everyone keeps talking about NFTs but you don’t actually know HOW to find and evaluate an NFT project. That’s what this post is about.

A word of warning: Finding and evaluating NFT projects is a lot of work.

It’s certainly too much work for this dad with 2 kids to do all the time. Instead, I’ve partnered with Jake and Eric to share how you can do it in four steps:

Know your goal
Look for a project
Do your research
Buy an NFT

None of this is investment advice - let’s dive in.

1. Know your goal

Before you buy an NFT, think about why you want one:

If you want to learn, consider buying an NFT on chains like Polygon or Solana to save on gas. See my gas guide for details.
If you want to support a creator or like the art, then you probably have a project in mind already.
If you want to invest, remember that NFTs are high risk. Many “blue clip” projects are expensive, and many new projects fail. NFT investors need to spend a lot of time chasing alpha (e.g., getting the latest intel on hot projects).

Regardless of your goal, the advice below is worth reading.

2. Find a project

Here’s how you can find an interesting NFT project:

Look for trending projects. You can find NFT projects by volume on OpenSea, CryptoSlam, and NonFungible. You can also use paid tools like Icy.tools, Nansen, and Moby.gg to find popular projects up to the last minute.
Icy.tools let you see trending NFT projects
Follow NFT collectors. Top NFT collectors trade a large volume of NFTs and are often the first to find new projects. Tools like Moby.gg let you see recent transactions from collectors. You can also follow collectors on Twitter (follow the NFT topic to start).
Join NFT communities. You can join NFT communities to get the latest alpha on projects. The Odyssey community is a good (and free) place to learn about NFTs. The most desired NFT communities usually have a paywall (e.g., Metaverse, FWB, and CPG Club).

One thing is for sure - if someone sends you a Discord DM about an NFT project, ignore it. That person is likely a scammer looking to get your wallet’s seed phrase. Turn off Discord DMs when you join new servers and read our How to avoid scams guide.

3. Do your research

After you find a project, visit its website, social handle, and community to understand:

Mission: What’s the project trying to achieve? Do you care about the mission?
Team: Who’s the core team behind the project? Do you like their previous work? Do they have the right skill set to execute (e.g., designer, developer, community manager)?
Roadmap: Does the project have a plan to deliver clear utility over time? For example, are there going to be new NFT drops?
Community: Is the core team active in the community? Are members excited about the project’s roadmap or only speculating on prices? How many people are active in the community?
Social: Are NFT collectors talking about the project? What activity do you find if you search for the project’s name on Twitter?

If the project has already been minted, you can visit its profile on an NFT marketplace (e.g., Wanderers on OpenSea) to look for additional signals:

Verification: Is the project verified? Sometimes scammers will make fake projects with the same name.
Owners: How many items are there per owner? 2-3 items per owner (divide items by owners) is a good sign that the project isn’t concentrated in the hands of a few collectors.
Floor price: Is the floor price holding? If there are a lot of floor listings, that’s a sign that people are trying to dump the project.
Rarity: Rarity is a sign of how valuable an NFT is. Collectors often (but not always) seek the rarest NFTs from a project. Use rarity.tools and howrare.is to look up NFT rarity for Ethereum and Solana NFTs respectively.

4. Buy an NFT (or not)

Once you find a project that interests you and do your own research, you’re ready to buy the NFT by:

Minting (creating) the NFT for the first time
Buying the NFT on a secondary market

I’ll save the above for a future guide.

Want to learn more?

Visit Odyssey’s NFT learning path. I’ll be writing more web3 guides and lessons from building the Odyssey community in this blog as well.

If you have feedback on what I should write more about, let me know in the comments.

Creator Economy by Peter Yang