NFTs are seemingly all the rage, but what if you’ve never purchased one? How do I get in on the action?
Thankfully, ICON’s NFT marketplace Craft makes buying and trading NFTs easy, cheap and fast. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how it’s done.
Craft?
Built by ICX Station (now Lydia Labs) and Staky.io, Craft is ICON’s community-owned NFT market. The platform lets you buy, trade and even mint NFTs. Craft is currently home to 1,800 collections and 95,000 NFTs, and is consistently one of the top NFT marketplaces in the world in terms of 24-hour trading volume.
We’ll put on our artist’s cap — well, a beret, anyway — in a later post when we’ll actually mint our own NFT. For today, though, we’re on the buyer side, so we’ll be focusing on Craft’s marketplace.
Getting Started
First things first. Head to the Craft’s website. You’re going to need to connect your wallet to login. You have three wallet options: ICONex/Hana, Ledger and Bridge.
Craft recommends Bridge for beginners because all you need is an email address to login, but we’ve got Hana, so Hana it is. Make your selection, and your wallet will pop up. Authorize it, and boom, you’re logged in. No complicated registration process. If only all online registrations and logins were so painless…
After you login, you’ll find some important information in the top right corner, namely, how much ICX you’ve got in your wallet, and how much $CFT you’ve earned. $CFT is Craft’s governance token, earned by buying, selling and minting on the platform. We have zero experience using Craft with this wallet, a fact numerically reflected in our $CFT total. We’ll rectify that shortly.
Like so many of ICON’s services, Craft’s front page and overall UI is both intuitive and aesthetically pleasing. There’s a “Collection of the Day” on the front page to help get you started, along with a gallery of the market’s top verified collections.
Looking Around
Today’s collection of the day is PeelGuys, so let’s check it out. Each collection includes a lay-of-the-land at the very top, including the number of collectibles in the collection, the floor price and the highest trade.
The floor price is 400 ICX, or about USD 110. That’s a bit too rich for our blood, but we’ll take a look around the collection anyway. You can filter the collection by lowest price, highest price, recent trade, most likes and newest. Filtering it for highest price, we can see that PeelGuy #10 is currently No. 1 at 12,000 ICX, or just under USD 3,295.
When you click on individual NFTs, you can check all sorts of information about the collectable, including current owners, the NFT’s history, ongoing history, offers and more.
Time to Buy
OK, let’s put our hard-earned ICX to work and buy our first NFT. We’ll click on over to MIRAI # COMMUNITY, basically a collection of badges by Studio Mirai, one of our favorite NFT studios.
The Citizen Badge looks pretty cool, so we click on it. It’s 68 ICX, and there are 25 of this particular badge out of 350 available.
As the buyer, you have two options. You can either buy now at the asking price, or you can make an offer and try to negotiate. We’re good with the 68 ICX, though, so we’ll buy right away.
Click purchase, and Craft will ask you how many of the particular item you want. We enter “1,” and the platform calculates the bill. In our case, the unit price is 68 ICX, which includes a 6.97 ICX royalty to the artist. Craft also tacks on a 2% service fee — in this case, 1.70 ICX. So we’ll be paying 69.70 ICX (not including the gas fee, which we will mention in a moment).
We hit “proceed to payment,” and our Hana wallet asks us to authorize the payment. It also includes the estimated gas fee — 0.00944 ICX. If you’re used to paying exorbitant ETH gas fees on OpenSea, this will come as an extremely welcome shock.
We authorize the payment, and the badge NFT is ours. That’s it.
If we click on our profile (upper right top, where your ICX total is listed), we can check out our collection, such as it is. When we click on our newly acquired badge, you’ll see that we now have the option to put it up for sale. Selling has dynamics of its own, however, so we’ll look at that in a separate tutorial.
Now, since we’ve made a purchase, we will be able to claim some $CFT tokens when they are distributed each Monday around 11 PM CET. You can stake your $CFT tokens for a piece of Craft’s governance, a share of the service fees and other benefits.
