How to buy an NFT from OpenSea
Since we launched the landing page for our course (Master NFTs in 7 days) on Nas Academy, we have been getting many questions about how to buy a Curious Addy NFT (which gives you free access to the normally $499 course!) from a secondary market like OpenSea.
In this article, I will show you how to do this step-by-step. This will be the same process as if you want to buy any other NFT from the secondary market on OpenSea after mint is sold out.
If you want to see this flow via video, watch the walkthrough from here.
Below, you’ll find the 5 steps you will need to take. I wrote a section for each step, so feel free to skip a step if you’re already familiar with it.
- Setup your crypto wallet
- Get some ETH
- Send ETH to your wallet
- Buy the NFT on OpenSea
- See your NFT on OpenSea
1. Setup your wallet
The first thing you will need to do is set up a crypto wallet. A crypto wallet allows you to interact with blockchain applications such as OpenSea, which is a marketplace where you can buy NFTs from other people. A wallet also allows you to send and receive NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
Why do you need a wallet?
In order to buy an NFT, you will need to interact with blockchain applications and a crypto wallet allows you to interact with them and store the assets. In the world of Web3, you can own things like money and digital assets by yourself. If you have crypto in exchanges like Coinbase, you still don’t own it because it’s owned and governed by Coinbase, just like with a bank. With your own crypto wallet, you can store all the assets you purchased, just like you can store and own your cash in your physical wallet.
What wallet should I get?
There are many wallets out there — here are some of the most popular:
- Metamask: Compatible with most Ethereum-compatible blockchain applications. Recommended for both beginners and advanced users.
- Rainbow Wallet: UI/UX is really well done here and it’s a great starting point for first-time users. They have a good resource page on their site to educate newcomers to the space. Unfortunately, the app is only available for iOS at this time.
- Coinbase Wallet: Created by Coinbase. Easier to link with Coinbase.
In this article, I am going to show you how to set up Metamask, as I find it most universally compatible to the most Web3 applications, and it works on both iOS and Android.
How can I install Metamask?
- Go to the Metamask download page and install
(Mobile) Install the mobile app
(Desktop) Install the Chrome or Firefox extension. On Chrome, after you install, pin MetaMask by clicking the puzzle piece icon on top of the browser bar, then clicking the pin.
Once you do that, you will see that Metamask icon shows up permanently on the browser bar.
2. Set up Metamask
Once you install Metamask, follow the instructions to setup a new wallet that Metamask shows you.
Most of the setup should be straightforward, but I will highlight two things that are important here.
Like mentioned earlier, with a wallet, you can actually own things yourself, but that means that you are the only person who can be responsible for all of your assets. No one, even Metamask can help you if you lose your Seed Recovery Phrase. So please make sure to keep your Seed Recovery Phrase in a very secure place where no one else can find it, but you also won’t lose it.
What is a Seed Recovery Phrase?
A Seed Recovery Phrase is used to generate a private key, which can sign transactions associated with a given cryptocurrency address when you interact with blockchain applications and prove that the transaction is approved by you. If that’s the case, if you share this with other people, what is going to happen? That person can get access to all your assets in your wallet and can sign the transaction on your behalf.
That is why, in this space, there are so many scammers who are trying to steal your Seed Recovery Phrase by guiding you to fake websites and asking you to input your Seed Recovery Phrase, or impersonating others and reaching out to you to get your Seed Recovery Phrase. So please make sure to:
- Never, ever share your Seed Recovery Phrase or private key with anyone.
- Store your Seed Recovery Phrase in a secure place where only you can access it (ideally, write it down on a piece of paper and store it in a physical location, not on your computer) and never lose it.
If you are new to the space, I highly recommend you read how not to be scammed in NFTs to learn about common scam techniques and protect yourself. Almost everyone we know in this space has been scammed — don’t let that be you too!
2. Get some ETH
Once you got setup your wallet, the next step is to get some ETH. ETH is a cryptocurrency that is used on Ethereum blockchain. As most NFTs, including Curious Addys, are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, we will need ETH to buy NFTs.
How can I buy ETH?
The easiest and cheapest way is buying from exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, or Crypto.com. Most of the people who are reading this article should be able to use one of those exchanges, but if your country isn’t covered by those options, you can find what exchanges are available in your country here). Here, we’ll walk through buying ETH on Coinbase, but the process should be fairly similar on most major exchanges.
How can I set up a Coinbase account?
Creating an account on Coinbase takes just a few steps:
- Create an account: Go to Coinbase and sign up for an account.
- Verify your account: You will need to submit your personal information along with a government-issued ID to prove your identity.
- Connect your bank with Coinbase: Use Plaid to log in to your bank account and connect your bank account.
- (Optional) Set 2FA authentication: In order to make your account more secure (so that even if your username/password get stolen, no one can log in to your account without access to your 2FA code), I highly recommend you set up 2FA authentication. Go to Setting > Security > 2 step verification and choose Google Authenticator, and follow the instructions there.
How can I buy ETH?
Click Buy / Sell and click the Buy column and choose Ethereum.
How much should I buy?
If you are planning to buy just one NFT, the best amount to buy is the price of NFTs you are going to buy + the estimated gas price, with a little extra margin for error (I will explain gas in a moment). Let’s see one example with Curious Addys (incidentally, the first educational NFT project that teaches you everything about crypto — like this!). Go to Curious Addys’ OpenSea page and find an Addy you like that is for sale and click on it! You can click the Buy Now filter on the left hand side to see every NFT that’s for sale in a collection.
After you click on an NFT, you’ll see the detail page for it. As you can see here, the price for this Addy is 0.085 ETH ($335.07 at the time of writing), so that is part of how we calculate how much you’ll need to buy in ETH.
What is gas?
Gas is what you need to pay to make a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Think of it like gasoline for a car — if you want to drive from NY to Dallas, you will need to buy gasoline. Same with the Ethereum blockchain — in order to make a transaction (such as buying NFTs), you will consume computing resources on the blockchain, and buyers like you will need to pay blockchain ‘miners’ to consume these computing resources. If you would like to understand more about gas, read the first section of my other article.
How much does gas cost?
Just like gasoline, gas prices on Ethereum fluctuate based on demand and supply. If many people are trying to use the Ethereum blockchain at once, the gas price will be higher.
Typically, buying an NFT on OpenSea will cost between $50 — $150 based on how busy the blockchain is. (Yes it’s pretty high — but I’m going to show you how to save on gas fees in just a moment).
The best way to check the current estimated gas fee for a given transaction is via Metamask.
Click the “Buy now” button, connect your Metamask account following the prompts, and click “Confirm checkout”. (Don’t worry, you won’t be paying anything yet even if you click this button)
Once you do so, Metamask will pop up and show you Estimated gas fee and Total price like below (Make sure NOT to click “Confirm” here yet, because if you click “Confirm”, you are going to approve the transaction and will actually purchase the NFT, and the transaction is not reversible).
So if you want to buy this right now, this is approximately the cost you are going to pay (OpenSea adds a ~20% margin of error when estimating gas limits, so in reality the fee will be ~20% lower).
But — gas prices fluctuate a lot even minute to minute, so to answer the initial question of “how much ETH do I need to buy?” I would highly recommend you send at least the price of the NFT + 0.025 ETH (~$100 right now) just in case. Don’t worry — if it doesn’t end up costing that much, you’ll keep all the ETH you didn’t spend.
Once you check the estimated gas price, make sure to “Reject” your test transaction on Metamask so that you can cancel this transaction and buy for real later on.
OK, so going back to how to buy on Coinbase, now that we know how much to send ($335.7 (price) + ~$100 (gas fee)), let’s buy ETH on Coinbase!
Click Buy/sell button at the top, make sure you are choosing “Ethereum”, and choose “Custom”. In the next screen, input the amount you want to buy and click “Preview Buy”. After that, you can check how much you are buying and then click “Buy now”.
Once you do that, your Ethereum will show up in your assets like below:
Great! Now you have some ETH to buy an NFT :). Keep in mind — if you have a new account on Coinbase, it may not let you withdraw your ETH to buy the NFT for up to 7 days, while it confirms that the ACH transfer from your bank account has fully cleared.
You can get around this by buying with a credit card or debit card on other exchanges like Crypto.com, but be aware that the fees for doing so can be much higher.
Send ETH to your wallet
Once you have some ETH, let’s go ahead and send itto your wallet. In order to do so, you will need your wallet address.
What is a wallet address?
A crypto wallet address is just like an email address. You can give your email address to anyone and they can use it to identify you and send email to you. With a wallet address, you can give your wallet address to people and they can use it to send you NFTs or ETH. So in this case, we need to determine the address of the Metamask wallet you just set up as we are sending ETH from your Coinbase account to your own Metamask wallet address.
How can I get my wallet address?
Click the Metamask icon in your browser bar and click “Account 1”. By doing so, your wallet address will be copied to the clipboard.
Once you copy that, go to Coinbase and click Send/Receive at the top of the page. The default option is always Bitcoin, so make sure to change that to Ethereum. Then, enter the amount you want to send (it will be a bit less than you paid earlier as Coinbase charges a bit in fees). Then paste your address in the “To” column.
Whenever you send money to another address, make sure the following two things are correct:
- Did you choose the right currency?: Make sure to choose ETH in this case
- Is the address you are sending to correct?: Check the first and last 4 digits (in this case, 0x7A and dE71)
And then you should be ready to send!
Once you send, check your Metamask to confirm you received your ETH. This should take only a few minutes when sending from Coinbase at most, but on other exchanges, can take longer.
Buy on OpenSea
Now you are finally ready to buy an NFT on OpenSea!
Go to the collection page of the NFT you want to buy (like Curious Addys’ OpenSea page), choose the one you like, and click Buy now.
Confirm checkout by checking that you agree to the terms of service and clicking “Confirm checkout”.
Once you do so, Metamask pops up and shows you the confirmation screen you saw earlier while checking gas prices. The easiest way to complete this transaction is just clicking “confirm”. That’s it, you’re done!
But if you are not in a hurry to buy this NFT and can wait a few hours or even a day, and you’re pretty confident no one else will buy this NFT in that time period, you can save a lot on gas fees by manually setting your own gas prices lower to the amount you are willing to pay.
If you do change the gas price to be lower, Metamask will warn you that the gas price is too low for current network conditions. This is okay — what this means is that your transaction won’t go through right now, but if you click Confirm, the transaction will be sent to a pending queue where it will wait until the gas price falls to below the maximum price you set that you were willing to pay.
When gas falls to the price you’re willing to pay, the transaction will go through at that point in time in the future (for example, if you set gas to be 50 gwei and the gas price hits 50 gwei three hours later, the transaction will go through then). If you want to learn more about how to do this, check out this article on “how to manually set your own gas prices”.
Either way, once you confirm the transaction on Metamask, it will take some time for the transaction to go through, so wait until the state changes on Metamask. Once the transaction is completely processed, you will see this type of record on the “Activity” tab:
Congratulations, you did it! Now let’s go look on OpenSea and make sure you did in fact successfully purchase your NFT!
See your NFT on OpenSea
Go to OpenSea and click the person icon in the top right corner of the page, then click Profile in the dropdown menu, and you will be directed to your account page. There, you should now see your NFT!
Hope all this makes sense! If you have any questions, come to the Curious Addys Discord channel (https://discord.gg/catc) and feel free to ask anything, and we’ll be sure to answer!
Interested in making your own NFT collection? Check out the link below:
- Heymint Launchpad (https://join.heymint.xyz/): A free no-code platform that allows you to launch an NFT collection without any programming skills (NFT art generator, smart contract builder, create mint website)
- HeyMint Allowlist manager (https://heymint.xyz/): A biggest free allowlist manager for launching your NFT collection.
Curious Addys Trading Club
- Website : https://www.curiousaddys.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CuriousAddys
- Discord: https://discord.gg/curiousaddys
