If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.

Keeping up with the speed of the NFT space is by far the biggest challenge of any trader or investor.

With dozens of NFT projects launching daily, existing projects announcing news and the macro economy heavily affecting the price of Ethereum and the conditions of crypto; it can be extremely hard to keep up, without getting burned out.

The Web3 space is vastly different to Web2 in that there is a heavy focus on community - Bringing people together with mutual goals and ambitions to elevate and help one another. This is what makes the Web3 movement special in its own way.

The only way it's possible to consistently catch the many opportunities that are presented daily is to surround yourself with other like-minded people who are hungry for success. People that are diligent in their research, show up daily, contribute to helping each other and want to see everyone succeed.

This is a big reason why our community continues to succeed even in current market conditions. Diverse members with unique expertise & skill sets across every time zone and our community discord active 24/7 - rarely does information and opportunities ever get missed.

Whatever your goal within the NFT space, the number 1 way to get ahead is to surround yourself with like-minded people.


Regardless which community to join, find one that aligns with your goals and vision and you’ll soon find yourself getting to where you want to be. Your community should make NFTs overall more exciting and fun for you.


Want to gain access to our private, members-only collective of talented NFT traders and investors? 

The Value of Community

Trading and investing in NFTs during a bear market is one of the hardest times to manage your emotions and psychology.

However, with the right strategy you can thrive.


This is a fundamental rule trading in any asset market, and even more important during a bear market when you have a higher chance of loss given the reduction in liquidity.

Therefore, calculating your risk tolerance - an amount of ETH you’re comfortable with the possibility of losing is key before investing in any project.For example, one of your “rules” could be to never invest more than 5% of your available liquid into a mint.

Giving a higher % risk to highly anticipated, high-conviction drops (~4-5%) and a lower % to more “degen” type drops (~1-2%).

Running these calculations before any trade will help prevent you from over leveraging (investing too heavily) into any single project and manage your liquidity to continue being able to stay in the market while protecting your downside.

Most of the time we get emotional when we feel loss, and in the context of buying NFTs - when we lose our hard earned ETH.


The fastest way to get rekt is to have zero risk management (see #1 above).Playing the game “risk free” will allow you to stay in the game and remove most of the negative emotions that can influence your trades.Selling NFTs to reach “break even” within a new collection can be a great relief, especially as the market is yet to determine its value.


For example, if you mint 10 NFTs at 0.05e with a total cost basis of 0.5e and sell half (5) for 0.1e, you have just removed your risk by 100% and can hold your remaining 5 NFTs risk-free.

This of course is dependent on your liquidity position - the more liquid and lower “risk”, the less of a need to sell for break even as fast as possible.

Whether your remaining NFTs turn in multiple times more value or the market deems them less valuable and the price retraces below your mint price, it won’t affect you nearly as much because the “loss” is negligible.

Taking it one step further from #2, it can be a healthy habit to turn your ETH profits into realized gains by cashing out a % into stable coins.This of course depends on your trading strategy:

A) If you’re a short-term trader that relies on trading NFTs for your everyday living, then it would be advantageous to cash out some of your ETH gains into stable coins.

B) On the other hand, if you’re a long-term investor of NFTs with less need to rely on your investments for short-term, day-to-day living, then this strategy might not be relevant.That being said, if you find yourself making negatively emotional trades/ investments or feeling tilted then cashing out even a small % of your liquid could be the reset you need mentally.

Sustaining yourself through a bear market is the key to success in a bull market.

Use these tips to help keep your mindset healthy and ready for when the tables turn.

Want to gain access to our private, members-only collective of talented NFT traders and investors? 

Trading and investing in NFTs during a bear market is one of the hardest times to manage your emotions and psychology. Here are 3 tips to manage your mindset.

Managing Your Mindset

Whether you've held a NFT until reveal or looking to buy post-reveal on secondary, understanding the value of rare NFTs in a collection is crucial as an investment thesis.

NFTs are assigned rarity ranks determined by a combination of traits.


Collections often have a limited number of 1-of-1 NFTs, followed by a small number of highly sought after “rare” traits.


Just because your rarity rank is bad it doesn't necessarily mean your NFT is valued at the floor. Your rank determines how common or uncommon your NFT is, but does not tell you the demand of your traits.


For example, take a look at these few Moonbirds sales a few weeks ago. 

A rank 3,300 Moonbird sold for 10.45e, while a rank 6,500 Moonbird sold for 13e through an offer.

This is because token #7149 has the grail headwear trait. The trophy atop the Moonbirds head has always been a sought after trait, but became even more valuable after the team announced the ability to mint Grails Part II if you had a Moonbird with the grail trait.

While “grail” trait Moonbirds commanded a premium due to their utility, CloneX is a great example of a collection that has low rank NFTs that go well over floor.


With nearly 3,000 out of the 19,400 CloneX’s having Murakami Drip, this actually makes it the most common trait in the collection. Despite being the most common trait in the collection, Murakami Drip sells for more than a 4e premium!


All this being said, a collection in itself must have strong secondary demand for low rank NFTs and rare traits to be desirable. Make sure to pay attention to the demand for all your traits so you don’t underprice your NFT! Have you sniped a rare NFT? 

NFT Rarity Distributions

What decides if a project gains the attention of the entire market or gets lost in the shadows? Here’s a simple 5-step checklist to identify high potential projects early.

More often than not the anticipation of a project comes down to the quality and effort of the art.After all, that is the foundation of what decides most NFTs initial value.


Is there a famous artist behind the project? Does the art resemble another project that has been successful? Is the art unique and different to anything you’ve seen before?

Market participants usually speculate on the art and reveal which is why it's one of the key components of assessing the potential short-term success of a project. While projects rarely share the full art collection prior to mint, you can usually find sneak peeks to assess the quality, detail and possible traits.


Have they previously built a successful web2 or web3 company or have relevant web2 experience that can be translated to web3?The founders are at the helm of a project's success and ultimately what most retail investors are investing in - their vision.

Founders that have prior experience give investors confidence that they have the competency to deliver on their promises.

Investors may also speculate on their network within the web2 or web3 space that can support the long-term success of the project or lead to newsworthy collaborations.


It is becoming increasingly harder for NFT projects to stand out amongst the noise across the dozens of new projects minting each day.

That is why having a high-quality “shop window” can help attract the attention of investors and allow projects to shine through.

Beautifully designed and smooth functioning websites are becoming more prevalent in new projects to separate them from others.


Websites that have a “wow” factor create instant curiosity to the lore behind the project and demonstrate they most likely have a long-term vision and pay attention to detail - something the market is craving more now than ever.

This conversation can be happening within the project's discord, NFT communities or on Twitter. Understanding if people are genuinely excited for a project's mint and reveal is a great metric to determine their success potential.Are renowned NFT investors and social media influencers talking about the project genuinely and organically or is the project being shilled in a way that comes across disingenuous?


Searching the project's name on Twitter and in communities can give you a feel of the anticipation by the market to determine if the project is being spoken about positively, and therefore able to gain the interest needed to succeed.

Looking ahead to when a project is minting, considering their minting mechanics can give you an insight as to whether they have a chance at capturing the attention of investors.The key components are: price, supply, whitelist and public sale allocations. It goes without saying that competitive pricing to the lower end has a higher chance of getting more investors interested. The same can be said for lower supply projects where they have a higher potential of more demand.Projects that structure their mint to create higher true unique ownership % typically perform the best on secondary and up to their reveal if all the other 4 steps above are met.

There are many layers you can explore within each of these 4 points but each serve as a great base metric to assess the potential of a project ahead of their mint.

Bookmark and save this 5-step checklist the next time you’re analyzing if a project is potentially worth investing in!

What decides if a project gains the attention of the entire market or gets lost in the shadows?

5-Step Checklist To Find New NFT Projects

Reading contracts and minting through Etherscan is a skill that most experienced minters have mastered. Here are 6 tips for reading your standard NFT smart contract.

Before you start reading our tips below, please note that there are sometimes contracts that are structured differently and may name their functions based on their project theme. You may also find unverified contracts, where you cannot easily view the functions on Etherscan.

Once you've located the contract you want to analyze, head over to the “contract” tab, then click “read contract”.

Here, you'll usually be able to find important variable information such as max supply, number of tokens minted, cost per token and max per transaction/wallet.


The totalSupply typically indicates the total number of tokens minted, while maximum supply is usually called either: maxSupply, maxTokens, collectionSize, or something similar.


You can also usually spot the “max per wallet/transaction”, which are typically named appropriately.

The price per token is labeled as price or cost. Etherscan returns this number in wei, which is 10^-18.

However, you can click this number in Etherscan to see the conversion to Ether, the unit you need. In the example below, you can see that 160000000000000000 converts to 0.16E.

For more advanced users, you can also use the read contract tab and write contract tab to see the current mint phase/stage and the owner of the contract.

This can be used to detect when a project flips their project from whitelist mint to public mint so you can mint ASAP.

Some contracts also flip their public mint stage via timestamps, which you can convert to your local time using: 

Once you know the number of tokens you can mint, you can head over to the “Write Contract” tab and find your mint function, usually labeled as mint, publicMint, purchase, buy, or something similar. Multiply the number of tokens you'd like to mint by your cost and plug it in!

Sometimes you'll see a parameter called "merkleProof" or "signature" in the mint function. This typically means you need to mint through the project's website, and cannot mint through contract unless you know how to generate your proof/signature using the site’s API.


Getting comfortable reading and writing Etherscan smart contracts is one of the most productive skills you can acquire in the bear market. Bookmark this article so you can get an edge when it comes to minting NFTs.

Reading contracts and minting through Etherscan is a skill that most experienced minters have mastered.

Reading Contracts

As a team, we are expanding our core competencies into an area that we are confident in delivering a high level of value and expertise; parallel to how we’ve developed one of the most sought after NFT communities in the space.

The NFT space has dramatically changed throughout 2022 and 95% of projects continue to struggle and gain traction to achieve long term success.

2020-2022: Our core team at Underground profitably invested 9,000+ ETH across major projects; including thousands of projects in 2022.

This has given us an eye for success and true understanding of the difference between projects that succeed and those that fail.

Our mission has always been to define NFT culture which has led us to expand the Underground brand with our NFT Consulting service.

The Objective: Curate and empower visionary founders and forthcoming projects we believe are creating something meaningful for our space.

We believe that our combined experience of successful traders, investors, marketers, developers and analysts, have given us the optics to align projects with their vision and guide them to success.

Rapid changes in market conditions require NFT projects to adapt quickly to the sentiment in order to gain the attention of market participants. 

Our unique 3-pillar implementation method has been carefully crafted to deliver value to projects by leveraging: specialist knowledge, market experience and diverse skill sets that establish a better standard in Web3.

If you are a founder or working closely with a project and would like to explore the possibility of having our team assist you, complete our short application form and our NFT Consulting team will get in touch to discuss your project if there is a good fit:

Underground NFT Consulting

One of the most underrated topics of NFT trading is tracking buys and sells of projects each day, week and month.

But why consider making this a part of your daily routine?

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

Tracking your results from each trade/project enables you to consistently review and adapt in a market that changes frequently.


What are the recent projects that have done well for you? What hasn’t? Take some time to understand the commonalities across each group.

This will help you recognize the current meta and assess the buying strategies that work or do not work for you.


You can take this a step further and ‘tag’ each of these projects/trades with additional metadata. A simple example of this is tagging whether you purchased a project via “mint” or “secondary”.

You now later analyze how you perform between the two strategies.

With enough data, you will eventually be able to zoom out to your weekly and monthly P/L to understand the bigger picture of how much ETH you’re compounding each week and month.

If your ETH balance is going up steadily then you know, regardless of what feels like a big loss, you are still moving in the right direction and can remove the emotions out of your subsequent trades.

There are several ways to track your trades, free tools such as flips.watch can track multiple wallets, including all mints, buys and sells. Checking this each week can keep you accountable to your wins and losses.

 have access to our exclusive custom profit bot that tracks multiple wallets and consolidates all buys, sells and fees (including ETH/WETH transactions) for each project into one, easy to view profit tracker.

We suggest tracking this information in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets so you have the flexibility to customize and track the data you feel is most beneficial for you.

One of the most underrated topics of NFT trading is tracking buys and sells of projects each day, week and month. But why consider making this a part of your daily routine?

Tracking Trades

Taking a macro look at the NFT market we can see that we are going through short (4-7 day) periods of increased trading volume, followed by retracements across top and mid tier projects, but most notably with new mints.

What we can learn from this increase in volume is that there are trends that lead to these movements and it differs from how the NFT market would previously gain volume during the bull run.

Typically we saw NFT volume increase when the price of ETH decreased.

This was cyclical and for every big red candle on ETH, NFT price and volume took on a life of its own and moved in the opposite direction.

We can put this down to traders and investors possibly wanting to maintain the USD value of their NFT and therefore price accordingly - regardless of ETH as a value in itself.

This rising movement in NFT volume came to an end when the overall risk asset markets (stocks and crypto) were deemed “high risk” as fears of a recession loomed over investors.

Currently the NFT market usually gets an uptick in volume when ETH price stays constant and consolidates at various ranges.

This could be due to investors feeling “comfortable” holding ETH and looking for ways to compound their ETH holdings.

So what is the best way to interpret this understanding of the general macro?Positive macro sentiment and/or ETH ranging sideways = Increase in NFT volume (more of a short-term “risk on” environment)

During this period, great projects with strong fundamentals and reasonable mint prices perform well. Currently we’re seeing many low-price paid mint projects sell out, and great art projects performing well post-reveal, demonstrating that there is more confidence coming back to NFTs.

When we see ETH price volatility back with aggressive movements up or down, we typically see NFT investors on the sidelines trying to preserve their ETH for either selling, or holding and therefore NFT trading volume starts to decline.

Taking advantage of these periods where new projects are minting out and gaining volume is one of the best ways to capitalise on the market cycles.

We are committed to capturing these opportunities daily. Purchase a pass 


This article is a speculative assumption from recent market observations. None of this is intended as financial advice or true market data but shares some observations our team have speculated having been through the ups and downs of the NFT cycles.

The NFT market is going through mini-cycles in the current bear market. Here’s how to navigate the landscape.

Trading The Cycles

The 6 criteria to assess before minting or buying a NFT project on the secondary market.

The number of projects that do well in the short term is strongly correlated with overall volume at a macro level.

During a bear market, for example, less projects will rise in value as there is less liquidity available to boost projects.

For short-term traders, especially, your threshold for projects should fluctuate constantly depending on the macro volume overall.

Put simply: Strong Macro Volume = Mint/Buy more.  Weak Volume = Tighten up.

Understanding the current ‘meta’ (narrative) succeeding is critical as they tend to generate the most immediate speculative interest.


Ex: The rise of DigiDaigaku arguably pushed other gaming VC / traditional funding projects like Castaways and Lost Realms

Innovative projects born a ‘new’ meta and derivative projects to be created.

Early, decent quality derivatives do well in the short term. This eventually gets saturated over time until the next meta is discovered.


In the early stages, it is difficult to analyze projects because not much is known. We must use what we have to work with:


1. Art: Does it pass the ‘eye test’? Is it easy to tell what is rare?

2. Team: Are they doxxed? What has the team/artist accomplished before?


3. Website: Often overlooked but it is the first opportunity for a team to not only showcase their future plans but also their creativity and attention to detail.


4. Traction: Who is following or talking about the project? What’s the vibe like in discord and on Twitter?

How the drop is structured is critical in determining the true immediate unique owner % distribution.

The higher the %, the better chance it has of succeeding in the short-term.

The less a project can be botted (public or WL), the better.

There are no better advocates than well-respected NFT traders/investors buying and talking about a project. Assess who else is supporting the project.

Example: @OGDfarmer kickstarted the Renga buying frenzy with 

Strong communities result in holders who are invested in the long term. Checking out the vibe in the project’s discord is a great way to analyze this.


Generally, the best time to purchase a project on secondary is directly after mint, after reveal, or sometimes at the start of whitelist minting if a project is extremely bullish. This is typically when flippers are trying to get out as soon as possible.

 to identify the temporary bottom of a project to pinpoint the most optimal spots to buy.

 is the current best tool to use for sweeping collections on secondary.


We hope you found the 6 criteria that we use to assess projects helpful. Bookmark this article for when the market presents the next opportunity.

When it comes to minting or buying NFT projects on secondary, there are 6 criteria checkpoints to ask before pulling the trigger.

6-Step Criteria For NFT Projects

With the popularity of market tools to help users detect popular mints, scam contracts have become even more popular. Here are some tips to help you from losing ETH to scams.


The most common scam is copy and pasting a popular project that has yet to release.

Always check the Opensea for a connected Twitter and compare it to the real project's official Twitter.


For example, you can see that the real Myrai (

) has not yet minted, but has had imitators release fake contracts (

As you can see, the fake Opensea collection above links to the Twitter "MYRAIOFFICIAL" instead of “MyraiCreations”, and the website leads to a wallet drainer that sets approval for your NFTs and siphons them.


If you ever see ANY website ask to "Set Approval for All" in a Metamask popup, or asks for a signature that prompts red text (seen in the image below), immediately reject the transaction/signature and exit the website.

If you think that you may have given the scam your approval, immediately head to https://revoke.cash to remove their approval from the tokens you set. If you've signed a malicious signature, the best course of action is to transfer everything to another wallet immediately.


Another very common scam is when a project claims they've added more supply to their genesis project, or are stealth dropping their new collection. This is almost always fake, do NOT click these links, even if they're posted by the project owner or in the project Discord.

A more recent and advanced scam adds a "signature" to their mint as seen in the picture below. However, the signature is just an epoch timestamp, meaning there is no real purpose for the signature.


The fake signature tricks less educated minters into going to the website instead of minting from the contract. From there, the website will pop up a set approval or malicious signature, just like the earlier scams would.

Our final advanced tip for minters identifying scam projects is to always research the contract deployer. Oftentimes these deployers are serial ruggers who have deployed other scam contracts in the past.


The quickest way to do this is to find the contract's deployer at the top right of the etherscan page, then clicking the 3 dots and clicking "View Contract Creation" as seen in the image below.

The Underground contract embed tool within our discord, not only allows users to easily see a plethora of information about the contract including the deployer, but also warns users if "setMaxSupply" exists in the contract.

Using the setMaxSupply is a common tactic used by ruggers to increase the max supply of the project after OOS to allow more minting and extract more ETH.

Safety always comes first! Share your other Web 3.0 security tips and tag us on 

With the popularity of market tools to help users detect popular mints, scam contracts have become even more popular.

Identifying Scams and Fake NFT Projects

Oftentimes the NFT market presents “momentum trade” opportunities whereby a project has more buyers (demand) than sellers (supply), causing the price to breakout to the upside, giving you an opportunity to profit on the momentum.

There are 4 common momentum trade scenarios:


1. A new project mints out fast, causing high secondary demand aka. FOMO

2. The price of a project has been consolidating (stable), listings (supply) get reduced with demand remaining constant

3. An existing project makes a notable announcement or a notable collectors (influencer / celeb) buys into a project

4. A top trending project loses momentum and falls to a strong area of support (demand)

In all scenarios the best way to determine if a project is breaking out is to observe the amount of sales (volume), on either 1-5 minute time frames for new or top trending projects or a high time frame (30-60 minutes) for established projects that have a price consolidation.

Scenario 1 Example: HasbullaNFT saw extremely fast secondary demand after selling out their whitelist mint instantly at a price of 0.069e.

This snapshot of the 5 minute sales from NFT Nerds shows there were 304 sales, indicating a high secondary demand at ~0.07e.

Due to the high volume of sales, our custom discord utility tool signalled this project was gaining demand and allowed our members to buy in early on the momentum of this trade.

Within 30 minutes, as demand (sales) continued to trend upwards, price continued to climb in tandem due to the limited number of supply (listings).

TLDR; When there are more buyers than sellers, the price goes up.

As you can see from the chart above, volume (sales) trending upwards on the 5 minute time frame is a precursor to the price increase that eventually topped around 0.19e (~2.5x return for minters and early secondary buyers).

Sewer Pass by BAYC has seen consistent sales for almost a week since they dropped and teased what was coming with this curiosity-driven sketch drawing.

The tier 1 floor pass price was stable at 1.8e-1.9e for several days, in addition the higher tiers have been stable in their respective price range.

Signs of a strong breakout (momentum trade opportunity) started to show on 23rd Jan at 16:00 UTC with 63 sales in 30 minutes.

As demand remained constant the floor price for Sewer Passes continued to move higher as listings were trending downwards since 21st Jan.

The chart above from NFTGo shows total listings on a steady decline which eventually caused a supply squeeze.

Tier 1 pass price ascended to ~2.5-2.8e (~0.7-0.9e profit) and tier 4 passes peaked to all-time-high at 7.7e from the 6e consolidation level (~1.7e profit).

Key Consideration: If a catalyst (big announcement or influencer buy in) causes FOMO, oftentimes it is followed by a fast sell off and retracement back to key price levels, if demand is not sustained.

This was evident after Gary Vee swept several MNTG passes, causing FOMO buys from a 0.4e floor price up to 0.67e within minutes but the lack of demand caused price to fall back to 0.4e within 24 hours leaving several people holding the bag on a failed attempt to momentum trade.

As we’ve identified, there are several strategies you can deploy when it comes to momentum trading.

The strategy that best suits you will depend on your liquidity, risk tolerance and preferred time-frame so back test and commit to what gives you the best results.

To gain access to our volume monitor, other custom NFT trading tools and strategies, join our community by purchasing a season 1 pass here:

https://opensea.io/collection/underground-pass