So, you’ve downloaded a crypto exchange, bought some crypto, and have a wallet all set up and loaded, now what? How do you actually purchase an NFT?

One of the ways you can buy an NFT is by “minting” a project when it launches. I’ve written an entire article about exactly what that is and what all it entails. The link to that page can be found on Noob2NFTs What is Minting an NFT?, so I won’t be spending much time with that concept today, but outside of minting an NFT, you can purchase an NFT on what’s called the secondary market.

So, if you think of minting as the purchase origin, like buying directly from the manufacturer, think of the secondary market as an NFT Craigslist. Someone purchases an NFT, and for whatever reason they decide they want to sell it, they then list it on the secondary market for someone like you to buy it.

jpeg of my Skateboard Cat NFT

NFT marketplaces are popping up all over the place now, but at the time of this writing the largest is still OpenSea and it works primarily with ETH blockchain NFTs*. So, let’s say you want to buy an Ethereum NFT like, Skateboard Cat, from OpenSea. The current floor price as of today is .055 ETH, meaning you will need at least this amount PLUS the gas fees to purchase one. I also talk about gas fees in another article, What is NFT Gas? Gwei?. But let’s say gas fees are low on the particular day you want to buy. 35 GWEI can be thought of as a low gas fee, so we’ll use that as an example. To figure out the cost of your NFT in dollars you have to now do a little math. You take the amount of ETH the NFT costs, multiply that by the current price of Ethereum and then add the gas fee. In this case, it looks a little like this (.055 × [ETH PRICE]) + 35 = Total NFT Cost. To keep this hypothetical equation simple, we’ll say ETH is sitting right at $3,000 USD. That would make the total NFT cost around $200 dollars, (165)+35=200. So, you would need at least .067 ETH in your MetaMask wallet to cover the entire cost of the NFT. Once your NFT has been purchased from OpenSea you can go to your profile and under the COLLECTED tab you will see it there.

Skateboard Cat is currently not one of the most popular NFT collections (though I don’t know how, when they’re just so cute!), but let’s say you want to buy something a little more popular and expensive.

Shadowy Super Coder DAO is a very popular Solana collection.

To mix up our examples, and expand our NFT knowledge a little bit, let’s move over to the Solana network and away from Ethereum, OpenSea, and MetaMask. Let’s say you’re interested in buying a Shadowy Super Coder DAO NFT on MagicEden. The current floor price at the time of this writing is 70 SOL. As of now, Solana is much cheaper than Ethereum, and 1 SOL is equal to about $110 USD, so the entry level to buy from this NFT collection is $7,700 US dollars (70×110). The biggest difference between buying ETH NFTs versus SOL NFTs is the fees. The fees on Solana’s network are so minimal, usually a fraction of a SOL, that having just over 70 SOL in this instance will suffice, let’s say 70.05 SOL to ensure the transaction doesn’t fail. So, you would need that total amount in your Phantom wallet before you go to purchase the NFT. You would then head over to the Magic Eden secondary market (like, the link above), connect your wallet, look up the collection, find the floor price NFT you like and click purchase. Magic Eden will then ask you to confirm your purchase of the NFT with a wallet signature approval on the next page, so click APPROVE, and viola, the blockchain will confirm your purchase and the NFT will be in your Phantom wallet in a matter of seconds (sometimes minutes, depending on network congestion).

And, that’s it! An easy breakdown of what it takes to purchase an NFT!

Crypto Loaded Wallet–>Secondary Market–>Connect Wallet–>Purchase NFT–>Approve Gas Fees and/or Transaction–>Own Sick NFT (view on OpenSea or in Wallet). Done.

*As of April 2022 OpenSea has started listing Solana NFTs.