Key Takeaways:
- Whitelisting reserves your minting spot for an NFT presale.
- Whitelisting is the primary path to huge gains because the initial mint price is the lowest possible.
- Scammers can use whitelisting FOMO (fear of missing out) to drain wallets and leave investors with a dead project.
In the world of blockchain projects, acquiring tokens via ICO (initial coin offering) pre-sale has a huge potential advantage.
If the project pans out as outlined in its roadmap, the investor gets returns from the lowest token price. The profits then often range between 10x to even 10,000x from the initial ICO stake.
One only has to take a look at Ethereum with its $0.31 per ETH ICO price. Compared to ETH’s present price, that is over 6,000x gain from the initial investment.
The same principle applies to NFT launches as well. Except, instead of ICOs, getting in the action early on is done through NFT whitelisting.
RELATED TOPIC: ICO Drops | Just how Unique are IDOs and IGOs From It?
What Is NFT Whitelisting?
You have likely heard that some Hollywood celebrities get on banned because they did something naughty. That means they no longer get big roles in movies, at least for a while.
By the same token, when someone is whitelisted, they are prioritized for getting roles above others.
In the IT sector, whitelisting also means that a website is safe to use. Meaning, that it doesn’t contain any harmful scripts that invade a person’s computer.
NFT whitelisting is a bit different from that safety label and more in line with celebrity whitelisting.
Therefore, NFT whitelisting means that your wallet address is pre-approved for an NFT launch, typically at its initial minting price. For this reason, getting whitelisted is enormously advantageous.
To illustrate, BAYC mint price was at Ξ0.08 at launch on April 23, 2021. Presently, the average BAYC floor price is Ξ94.
In other words, those who were whitelisted for a BAYC drop at Ξ0.08, could have made 1,175x in profits. Imagine that a $141 initial seed turns into an enormous $166k fruit. This is why whitelisting is the name of the NFT game.
What Are Other Benefits to NFT Whitelisting?
Alongside the obvious one, getting whitelisted also means avoiding prohibitive gas fees, given that most NFT drops happen on Ethereum. As this smart contract platform gets congested with high traffic, transfer fees increase, which can even go beyond $100.
However, because whitelisted NFT investors receive the drop before the hype, they get to avoid gas wars. Likewise, many NFT collections have a cheaper NFT minting price for the whitelisted, compared to the public one.
Of course, the greatest benefit is that whitelisting secures a minting spot in the first place, as opposed to public minting, which may be sold out before you can react.
On the other side of the equation — for NFT developers — they benefit from whitelisting because it captures public spotlight. There are dozens of websites with the sole purpose of aggregating upcoming NFT mints.
Therefore, whitelisting brings developers much-needed exposure, especially now with an overcrowded NFT market in which there are more sellers than buyers. Lastly, whitelisted investors are themselves incentivized to promote their project as a free and organic marketing force.
Necessary Steps to Getting Whitelisted for Early NFT Drops
With benefits and clarifications out of the way, how does one get that coveted whitelisted status? As with any craft, one has to arm themselves with proper tools.
Find dedicated whitelist-sleuthing websites — these are not only established sites like rarity.tools, which list upcoming projects, but social media as well — Twitter, Discord, Instagram, Facebook.
For this reason, Omnimint.xyz has a social media section for each project. Namely, Twitter and Discord, which are the most used platforms for whitelisting entries.
Furthermore, Omnimint has a powerful filtering tool under its calendar section, with which you can see what kind of mint is ahead and when.
Given the importance of social media, Omnimint also keeps a track of membership and provides links to each one available. When clicking on an NFT project, these links are readily available.
What Happens After You Land on the Project’s Page?
Although Twitter is the main platform for testing user interest for a new project, Discord is by far the most popular whitelisting arena due to its interactivity and customization. When you get into the project’s Discord server, the first section to look for is — announcements.
Under announcements, NFT developers typically post whitelisting details. Sometimes, they even have dedicated “allowlist” or even “whitelist” channels, which makes it easy to keep track.
Others may use different names, but it is common practice to have a dedicated Discord channel to provide whitelist instructions. Allowlist, announcements, and whitelist are the most common ones.
If there is a whitelisting opportunity, each team handles it differently. Some may have additional requirements to get on it.
For instance, if the Discord server is organized in such a way as to have chat leveling, you may have to level up fast by chatting.
Other whitelisting requirements may revolve around invites to the same Discord server. Like chat leveling, this gives you the prestige to make it more likely to be whitelisted.
After all, as a free marketing force with a huge return potential, developers can afford to give such microtasks.
What About Rug Pulls?
Rugpulls happen when investors get whitelisted, spend money for presale minting, and then the developers abandon the project, leaving investors with dead NFTs. Therefore, it bears keeping in mind that whitelisting is not a profit guarantee.
There are always two sides to every equation, so one should think of the ways everything can be exploited by scammers. This is also a good reason to vet the project beforehand, regardless if you get on a whitelist or not.
Here are some of the key pointers for both vetting the project and evaluating its long-term value:
- Does it have a sizable community? This may be catch 22. If it has tens of thousands of Twitter/Discord members, it is very likely the project is legitimate, as some of them have done vetting of their own. On the other hand, the bigger the size, the less likely it is to get whitelisted.
- What is the project’s roadmap? Do their NFTs have utility beyond PFPs (profile pictures)? Even if the project is legit and you get whitelisted, it would go a long way for its rise in value if there is utility value on the horizon.
- Try to differentiate between your personal taste and how the market at large would perceive it. This is easy to do by going over the list of existing projects by market cap. An aggregator like cryptoslam.io is the proper tool in this case.
- Are you asked to buy a whitelist spot? In that scenario, you are almost certainly dealing with a scammer.
Lastly, check if the project is too derivative. Scammers and lazy projects alike tend to just copy-paste existing successes with a few tweaks. This has happened to BAYC hundreds of times, as the most derivative-spawning NFT collection.
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