How To Spot A ‘Fake’ NFT Mint
Written by TheNFTer
As the NFT market continues to heat up and buyers seek to gain that extra ‘edge’ to buy into projects EARLY before the masses pile in, there has been more and more focus on tracking whale wallets to see what they are doing and just blindly following.
One popular tool is Nansen.ai, where ETH wallet addresses can be tracked and alerts can be sent in real-time to various channels on Telegram and Discord.
This has led to many projects ‘faking a mint’ by simply sending the NFT to prominent wallets, and causing many unsuspecting new people to blindly follow without doing their due diligence first.
This article aims to show how to identify between a genuine mint, versus having the NFT minted to them without their knowledge.
HOW A FAKE MINT LOOKS LIKE
Example from my OpenSea activity page
Even though it shows as Minted, there is an easy way to see if it’s a real mint or a ‘fake’ mint. Let’s find out.
This is what it looks like for me — owned by you. For a 3rd party, it would show as Owned by ____ (insert name here).
Scroll further down, and let’s click into the Etherscan transaction to see what it looks like there:
The From address that interacted with the Contract isn’t my ETH address, which means that this is not a genuine mint.
You can also see that in a single transaction block, there were 222 NFTs transferred to various people.
(If you’re part of the MekaCats team, sorry!)
HOW A GENUINE MINT LOOKS LIKE
So here is how a real mint looks like.
Example from my OpenSea activity page
(Ooohh.. so many sexy High Tops by 10KTF. But I digress..)
Again you’ll see that it shows Minted, but let’s do the same process to see what are the main differences.
Let’s go into the Etherscan transaction to see what it shows:
You can now see the From field has the correct ETH address — mine) which means that this was a genuine mint initiated by the person involved who paid the Value indicated.
(Now if only I can wear these sexy NFT shoes irl…)
CONCLUSION
I hope that this simple article and guide shows you how to properly spot and follow the smart money.
In our community The Prometheus Project, one of our goal is to educate those who are newer in this space how to properly navigate the fast moving NFT space. We also actively track whale activities and have a full section dedicated to explaining why we track certain whales.
On top of that, we have a rather ambitious plan to back all our future NFTs with real world products. Do read more about us in the resources links below.
Once again, remember to always do your due diligence, and stay safe out there!
RESOURCES:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/heybentan
Twitter: http://twitter.com/PrometheusNFT
Discord: http://discord.gg/PrometheusProject
Website: http://theprometheusproject.io
OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/theprometheusproject
