Understanding, Buying, and Using NFTs for Beginners
Understanding, Buying, and Using NFTs for Beginners
The easiest guide to buying and using Ludo Labs NFTs (or any NFTs for that matter)
Greetings from the Lab 🧪👾⚽
In this post, we will guide you through the process of buying and using NFTs. Our goal is to make this super simple so that everyone can start enjoying this exciting and important new evolution of the Internet.
The topics we will cover here:
What is an NFT?
What are the different ways I can buy NFTs (credit card, bank transfers, crypto)?
How can I begin using and enjoying my NFTs?
Let’s jump in!
What is an NFT?
An NFT is a new kind of digital asset. Unlike the digital assets we are used to from the traditional Internet such as video-game items, NFTs represent a new way for users to actually own things in the online world.
Let’s take an example: Fortnite skins. People pay lots of money to own rare Fortnite skins and show them off in-game. Users are rightfully proud of their item collections in these kinds of games, but there is a problem.
That rare item you have paid so much money for and take so much pride in doesn’t really belong to you. It can be lost if Fortnite shuts down, if they stop supporting the item, or if they decide to confiscate it from you for any reason. It is also impossible to take your in-game items from Fortnite to other platforms so that you can use them elsewhere.
In contrast, an NFT can never be taken away from a user. Thats because NFTs don’t live on any one particular platform such as a Fortnite account - they exist inside a user’s very own digital wallet (more on this later) which can be used across any number of platforms.
The only person who has control over that digital wallet is the user, meaning nobody can destroy, confiscate, or alter any of that user’s assets. The user is also free to do with the asset whatever they please: they could sell it, trade it, or even take a loan against it!
Most importantly, the user can take the NFT across platforms. Imagine a special Whatsapp group or Discord server which is only accessible to owners of a LeBron James skin.
It would be impossible to make such a thing without custom code from Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite. In contrast, anybody could build the same product around a group of LeBron James NFTs with ease! Thats because NFTs aren’t tied or owned by any one platform - you can build ecosystems, apps, and websites around a group of NFTs without asking anybody’s permission. There are no barriers to innovation, so anybody with creativity and an idea can make something awesome for a community of NFT owners.
There are many other benefits to NFTs, but we’ll end this section by highlighting just one of them: scarcity. Lets go back to the example of LeBron in Fortnite. Picture a situation in which Epic Games said they were only releasing a limited set of 100 LeBron skins for a price of $10,000 each. While this sounds like a very high amount of money to pay for a video-game item, there are probably hundreds of people who would pay that sum for a special item, especially if it was perceived to be exclusive and rare.
Remember, people are spending more and more time online on platforms like Fortnite, so spending money to spruce up your Fortnite avatar is not so dissimilar to spending money to decorate your home. The fact that there are only 100 copies of this skin would also add to the desirability of the item, since ownership of this rare item would mean you are part of a small and exclusive group.
The problem you face in this scenario is this: how do you know Fortnite has only made 100 skins? What if they never reveal how many skins they sold? In such a situation, the only way to know for sure how many LBJ skins there are would be to manually count all the LeBrons you encountered in-game, or try to get all LBJ owners to make themselves known somehow. In a game with over 350 million players, this kind of task would be pretty hard 😅
The bottom line is, in a closed platform like Fortnite which uses traditional digital assets, there is limited transparency. On the other hand, NFTs exist inside a user’s wallet on a blockchain, which is a completely open and transparent system. It is impossible for a game developer to lie or hide something about an NFT - all the stats are out there in the open, making sure that an NFT’s authenticity and rarity can always be trusted.
For these reasons, NFTs are causing a huge revolution in the way we think about the online world. For the first time, we have digital assets that be owned and enjoyed by users across ALL platforms, without any concerns over confiscation, deletion, or forgery. Imagine if you could own a Pokemon card as an NFT! Here are the problems with buying and selling rare Pokemon cards today:
a) they are made of paper so they can easily get damaged or destroyed
b) they are physical items so selling them to somebody on the other side of the world takes a lot of time and physical effort
c) it is hard to verify whether that cool Charizard is an original or a fake
d) the marketplaces to buy and sell Pokemon cards online are often shady, and users can’t verify whether they will actually receive their card after paying money
Due to their digital, transparent, and verifiable nature, NFTs remove all of these problems! We expect to see lots and lots more uses of NFTs in the future, spanning digital art, digital collectibles like trading cards, and even video-game items. Long story short, NFTs are a really powerful new technology that will change the way we use the Internet by building a whole new type of digital asset! There is no better time to jump in than today, you’re still very early to the party!
How can I start buying NFTs?
There are many ways you can buy NFTs: with cryptocurrency, with debit cards, with credit cards, or with bank transfers. All of these different methods have a common starting point: setting up your digital wallet.
There are a bunch of good digital wallets out there, but we recommend Metamask. Metamask is a safe, easy-to-use, and versatile digital wallet that supports nearly all of the main blockchains where NFTs are used today. More than 10 million people use Metamask every single month, making it the most popular digital wallet in the world! Users can download Metamask for their phone or laptop, but we strongly advise getting the laptop version from https://metamask.io/download.
It is very easy to add Metamask to your favourite browser (Chrome, Firefox etc) as an extension, after which you begin using your wallet with a number of different websites such as NFT marketplaces, NFT-based games, and of course Ludo Labs!
To get set up with your Metamask wallet, simply follow the instructions on their page. Take care to write down your seed phrase and keep it safe - the seed phrase is basically a password you can use to restore your wallet in case you ever lose or damage your computer. Thats why you should not share it with anyone or post it somewhere on the Internet where it could be accessed by others.
Once you have completed setting up your Metamask wallet in the browser, you will see a screen like this.
Do you see that thing beneath ‘Tutorial Wallet’ that says ‘0x2877…6c92’? Thats your wallet address. It is kind of like your email address. You can give it to anybody and they can use it to send you NFTs, crypto, and other digital goodies!
You just need to click it to copy the full thing and then you can paste it anywhere. It is also very easy to get yourself a custom address such as darkmagician.eth or ilovezidane.eth, but we’ll leave that out of this article. Note: Hit us up on Twitter or Discord if you want help doing this, or just search for ENS domain set up guides on Youtube.
So now that you have a digital wallet (exciting!), the first thing you need to do before you start buying NFTs is get yourself some ether (also called ETH). Ether is the name of the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain where most NFTs (including Ludo Labs) live. Here are a few easy ways to get ether, starting with the easiest:
Hit the ‘buy’ button you see on Metamask in the screenshot above. This will open up a screen that allows you to either buy ether with a debit card or via bank transfer.
Visit OpenSea, the world’s largest marketplace for NFTs. Once you get there, you can click the wallet icon on the top right (pictures below). After you select your wallet, the site will ask you to sign in using Metamask. You just need to click ‘Sign’ on the pop up that comes up and you are logged in. This is another benefit of having a digital wallet like Metamask - you can log in to many sites using just your wallet, no need to remember a username or password again! Anyway, once you’ve logged in, on your wallet page there will be a button that says ‘Add Funds’ (pictures below). You can press this button and instantly load up your wallet via credit card!
Get your friend or family member to send you some crypto to your address (you can pay them in normal currency or you know, just bully them into it 🤪)
If you have an account with any cryptocurrency exchange, you can purchase ether on that exchange and then withdraw it to your Metamask address
As you can see, it is super simple to set up a digital wallet and fund it with ether so that you can enter the awesome world of NFTs. Here are some pictures showing the credit card purchase flow on OpenSea.
And that my friends, is how easy it is to set up a digital wallet with some crypto in it! Using that wallet, you can now buy and use NFTs! There are two ways to buy an NFT:
Buy it directly from the creators (also called a ‘mint’)
Buy it from another collector in the secondary market on OpenSea
When you are buying it directly from the producer on their website, such as when you buy a Ludo Labs NFT directly from us, you will see a screen like this:
When you hit that green button, your Metamask wallet will pop up. If you haven’t already signed in to the site with your wallet, you will have to sign in first. That looks something like this (we’re using another website now to illustrate that Metamask works with almost all NFT and crypto sites the same way).
After signing in, you can mint your NFT! In the Ludo Labs example from above, the mint button said ‘Mint Fresh Drops’. In this latest example from Artblocks.io, the ‘Purchase’ button serves the same purpose. In both cases, clicking the button will trigger another pop up like this, which is pre-loaded with the information you need to make the purchase.
Once you hit confirm, the transaction will go through and you will be the proud owner of a new NFT!
Lets now look at the second way of buying NFTs - on the secondary market. Most NFT projects, including Ludo Labs, have a fixed number of NFTs that they release during the mint. After all these NFTs have been minted, the only way to buy them is on the secondary market! You can do this by going to opensea.io and searching for the NFT you want to buy.
When you find the NFT you want to buy, you can simply hit the ‘buy now’ button to make the purchase.
If the NFT you wish to buy is not listed for sale, or you wish to negotiate with the seller, you can still put in a custom offer by clicking the ‘Make offer’ button you see above. When putting in these kind of offers, you might need to convert your ether (or ETH) to a special currency called WETH (or ‘wrapped’ ether). If you don’t have any WETH in your wallet, OpenSea allows you to convert your ETH with the click of a button like below.
Once you have converted your ETH, you are all set to make offers on the NFTs you want to buy using your WETH. And there you have it! That is how you buy NFTs quickly and easily using your new digital wallet!
How can I enjoy and use my NFTs?
Great, we’ve come to the fun part! The first thing you need to know is that NFTs, although they live inside your digital wallet, are not displayed on your Metamask. This is because Metamask doesn’t yet have an interface for viewing NFTs. This means that in order to view our NFTs, we need to go back to OpenSea.
On the top right corner of the OpenSea navbar, you will see a little circular icon. If you click on this, it will take you to your profile where you can view all of your NFTs. Even if there is an NFT in your wallet that wasn’t bought on OpenSea (eg. if you bought it on a website during a mint or on another marketplace), it will still show up in your collection on OpenSea. This is one example of the versatility and interoperability of NFTs - you can take them with you from platform to platform, it doesn’t matter where you first got them. If they are in your wallet, they are yours!
If you click on an NFT on OpenSea, you will be able to view it and inspect its properties and features. If the NFT is in your collection, there will also be an option on OpenSea to transfer it to somebody else, along with options for listing it for sale.
When it comes to using your NFTs, be aware that most NFTs don’t have much utility outside of their brand and community of owners - they mainly exist as digital art that you can flex on your online profile or on your wall. There is nothing wrong with this… in fact we love digital art and the community around it!
But at Ludo Labs, we believe NFTs can do more. That is why we like to bake real-world utility directly into our NFTs. This means that the owner of a Ludo Labs NFT can ‘redeem’ it like a voucher to claim some awesome experiences with footballers!
On our website, there will be a page where you can redeem your Ludo Labs NFTs. On this page, you simply have to sign in to the site with Metamask, select the NFT you want to redeem from your collection, and then hit the Redeem button. Once you complete that action, our team will reach out to you to deliver the awesome experience you have in store from one of our football partners!
And there you have it - how to understand, buy, and enjoy NFTs for beginners! We know this is only a basic guide and that you probably have some questions, but in our experience the best way to learn is to jump straight in and begin using this awesome new technology.
For any lingering doubts, never hesitate to reach out to us on Instagram, Twitter, or our main community headquarters - Discord. We hope to see you take part in our mint in the first week of November, and look forward to seeing you in the wild world of NFTs and Ludo Labs!
Until then, take care.
- Team Ludo Labs 🧪👾⚽