NFT Guide: How To Read Metadata To Snipe Rare Traits
This article will show you how to read data from NFT contracts and reveals how NFT experts can snipe your NFT's valuable traits before a project is revealed on OpenSea.
✋ What Do You Mean Snipe Traits?
Most NFT collectibles are minted and created with a random image generator via Python’s ‘Random’ library which achieves ‘weighted randomness’. This means that each NFT is procedurally generated with variable traits and more specifically, specified rarities. At the reveal of most projects, the team updates the metadata and OpenSea refreshes to load the images/attributes for users to view their own token (NFT) they’ve minted. This process is extremely slow, sometimes taking from a couple of hours to 48 hours for the collection to load onto OpenSea. Keep in mind, this can be normal and is in no way the team or developer’s fault. Sometimes the public can access the contract directly if the team has released the verified contract address to snipe valuable traits off the market before they are revealed on OpenSea.
🤔 How Do You Read The NFT Metadata?
Under an item in OpenSea, click on ‘Details’ and make sure to copy the ‘Token ID’. Next is you need to click on the ‘Contract Address’ link for the particular token. Remember that NFTs are tokens (Non-Fungible-Tokens), as some people confuse tokens with normal cryptocurrency coins.
After clicking on the contract, you should be taken to your token’s native chain scan. These are the standard methods in ERC-731 contracts: Click on ‘Read Contract'.
Next, you will need to scroll down the list of functions until you find the ‘tokenURI’. Now write down or paste the ‘Token ID’ from before and click on ‘Query’. This will generate a string URL for your token, copy and paste this URL into a search engine.
The following text is from after copying the generated URL into the search engine and pressing enter. All the metadata of the particular token (NFT) will be here even if OpenSea has not updated the visuals on their end. The rarity traits of the token can be used by people who are competent at reading NFT contracts in order to find very rare traits at a below fair value.
If you are flipping unrevealed items of a particular collection, you may possibly trade away a token with rare attributes. You can either keep holding until after the reveal or checking the metadata yourself so this doesn’t happen to you. Many new people in the NFT space are easily manipulated with a slightly higher than mint price as an offer while the actual mint is ongoing. In their mind, they think they can easily sell their current holding for a brand new mint with a few extra ETH dust profits. They would then later realize their loss when the metadata is loaded onto OpenSea.
⌛ Conclusion
Please keep everything fair for everyone, taking away the gamification of minting makes the whole purpose of weighted randomness and the game of chance obsolete for the public.
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