Amateur’s Guide to Aping NFTs – Part Two

Minting on Matic (Polygon) a Layer Two (L2) solution for scaling Ethereum; tips and tricks for aping into NFTs

Hi, folks. ShitcoinSherpa here with the continuation of our series on fundamentals, tips, and tricks for aping into NFTs. Today we’re going to discuss a couple of very important tools. First, let’s check out Polygon; if you missed my previous article on bridging to Polygon, you can find it here. It’s really quite simple, but I’m going to assume you already have some funds on Matic/Polygon for the next part.

Minting on Matic (Polygon/L2)

First, a quick clarification: I may use the terms “Matic”, “Polygon”, or “L2” interchangeably throughout this series. This is a little convoluted, but the Polygon Network used to be called Matic – and it is a Layer Two (L2) solution for scaling Ethereum. There are other L2s on Ethereum, and “rollups”, but Matic has been in production the longest (to my knowledge), and seems to be the most refined out of the bunch. Additionally, Coinbase and other major exchanges are rolling out deposits & withdrawals directly to Matic, which paints a fairly pretty picture of what the future is going to look like for this particular L2.

Now, on to the fun! Minting on Matic is fairly straightforward, if you’ve ever tried minting on Ethereum. There are a few projects that let you mint NFTs on Matic, but the most obvious is OpenSea, because that’s where most of the L1 action is. First off, you’ll want to confirm that you have some Matic and some Ethereum in your L2 wallet – note that this can be the same metamask wallet & address that you use for normal Ethereum mainnet transactions, it just has different balances depending on what has been bridged over & what hasn’t. Be sure to confirm that you have the “Polygon Network” selected in Metamask, near the top.

Now that you’re on Matic, go ahead and visit OpenSea as normal, and click “Create” up near the top. It will probably have you sign a message confirming your account, and then you’ll be on the same basic page for creating a new NFT, with a drop-down menu allowing you to mint on the Polygon Network.

Finish up, as per the usual, and congratulations – you’ve just done what 95% of NFT projects should be doing & minted on Layer 2! Go ahead & play around with your new-found ability to mint NFTs for next to nothing, and when you’re ready move on to…

RaritySniper: Getting an early-edge

RaritySniper is a discord-based tool for slightly more advanced users. If you aren’t familiar with discord, it can be a little daunting, but I’m going to assume that you at least have a basic understanding of how things work. It’s pinned in their channel under “collections”, but if you can’t find it there is a full list of collections on their pastebin. What you’ll need to do is find the shortname in parenthesis for the collection you want to search, and then find the NFT you want to check’s # on OpenSea. This is usually listed alongside the name with most NFTs.

Now we take this handy-dandy information back to RaritySniper’s discord, and go to one of the “rarity-check” channels near the bottom.

In the channel, you’ll want to send a message with !rarity followed by the collection’s shortname and the #. It will look something like this…

!rarity pandadynasty id 6215

…and should return a result in the chat, immediately, that will look similar to this…

…which will tell you most everything that you need to know about the rarity. It will also fill you in on how much some traits weigh into the rarity, which ought help you narrow down the search back at OpenSea. When you are able to combine RaritySniper along with RarityTools, as I showed you in Part One, you can really sort out a project’s rarest gems in no time at all. As always, DYOR & only play with what you can afford to lose. Until next time, this has been Shitcoin Sherpa for Wendy’s Whitepaper – have fungible.

Related: ENS Domains: What’s In A Name?