Introduction
There is too much noise in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market. Every day gives birth to countless new NFT projects with the potential to shape the future of the industry or destroy your portfolio. Meanwhile, the projects on the market – including giants like BAYC and Doodles – keep constantly upping their games to get a bigger pie in the attention economy.
These all create an environment where it can be too hard for an investor to separate the wheat from the chaff and find the right projects to invest in. To alleviate the burden of excess information, we prepared a list filled with a complimentary stack of NFT data analytics tools.
We encourage those who are new to the NFT space or want to refresh their memory to start their journey with our introductory article to NFTs, a comprehensive article on what to look out for when investing in NFTs, and our guide on how to buy their first NFT. And after that, we hope that this complete toolbox will be enough for an investor to have an eagle-eyed focus on the NFT market.
Nansen
Nansen can be best described as an ever-evolving Swiss army knife equipped with a highly versatile set of analytics tools. Not only does it provide fundamental data on NFTs (i.e. average price, market volume, hodlers breakdown), it allows cross-referencing portfolios and collections through wallet-based analysis and market tracking through customizable smart alerts.
NFT Paradise is Nansen’s primary window to the NFT market, giving exclusive insights into the general state of the market and marketplaces. It contains a profit leaderboard that introduces users to the most profitable investors in the space and lets them analyze their prior investment decisions. And through the wallet profiler, users can see the transaction history of profitable wallet addresses, learn what blue chips or underdog NFT collections they currently hold, and observe how they strike a balance between realizing gains to fight market cyclicality and having conviction through their long-term investments.
Meanwhile, the Mint Master feature is well-suited for discovering the newest projects on the market. The dashboard showcases the hottest mints in real-time, accompanied with information on how highly profitable minters (smart minters) are positioned in these new projects. While the profit leaderboard doesn’t separate the profits originating from second-market buying and minting, the minting leaderboard ranks only the most profitable minters, thus showing those who are good at finding freshest market opportunities. It’s highly convenient for fast-paced trading activities, especially when combined with the Smart Money Tracker to see when successful investors buy and sell.
Want to track what top-performing Smart Money wallets are doing with their NFTs? Sign up for Nansen today!
Once you lay eyes on an interesting NFT project, Nansen’s NFT God Mode is the go-to solution for a detailed investigation at the project level. It complements historical collection data with extensive analyses on hodler behavior. With dashboards showing smart money's involvement with the project, hodlers’ conviction, whale behaviors, and listing details, it enables users to conduct rigorous research on project participants and performance metrics. To get more meaningful insights on participants, users can refer to the related collections tab and see what other NFT projects hodlers are financially affiliated with.
These tools reach their fullest potential when combined with Nansen’s Smart Alerts, allowing users to create custom alerts for their favorite collections or a wallet address and get notified in real-time. Instant notifications for smart money mints, buys, and sells can be quite valuable in navigating the tumultuous market conditions.
To learn more about how an investor can use Nansen efficiently, here is the recent episode of Nansen Office Hours, where our Alpha team shows how to use Nansen to find alpha in the NFT market.
Subscribe to Nansen today and see how it can bring your NFT investment to the next level!
Etherscan
A block explorer is the closest friend of an on-chain dweller. Etherscan is the primary tool for analyzing activity on the Ethereum blockchain with its unfiltered access to blockchain data. It lays out the Ethereum transaction history in extensive detail and showcases the verified smart contract codes for anyone’s access. You can find all the chain activities for any ERC-20 token, ERC-721 token (NFT collection), and wallet using the website, making it a helpful tool for a well-prepped investigation. It dissects every transaction to show its properties, whether they are for a simple transfer, loaning activity, trade, or another type of activity. The website even works as a rough front-end where investors can interact with verified smart contracts and send, stake, or get information on their NFT from the chain.
Getting familiar with Etherscan and dealing with a vast sea of data might initially seem overwhelming. And frankly, that's why we say it's quite useful for structured research. Yet as an NFT investor, it's rudimentary to get used to Etherscan as it is not only used for making an informed investment decision but for doing anything on-chain.
Rarity Sniper
Rarity scores are for image NFTs, colloquially referred to as JPGs, and more specifically for large NFT collections. Although the rarity score of an item doesn’t necessarily translate into a higher price on the market, it impacts the expected financial returns as it adds to the artificial scarcity of the NFT and occasionally involves certain traits with special perks for the holders. All in all, it is used by the market participants as it introduces a more quantifiable and objective valuation tool, and that’s why it is a valuable metric when evaluating the possible financial return on an NFT investment.
Rarity Sniper is a great resource for finding out how uncommon your NFTs are and seeing how they are ranked within their entire collection. The rarity tool includes more than 1500 projects from 18 blockchains, from which the overwhelming majority are based on Ethereum, followed by Solana and Polygon. Ranks are shown both at the cumulative and the trait level, allowing users to have a nuanced approach to rarities and find rare pieces conforming to their desired aesthetics.
The application also provides the latest news in the space and an NFT calendar for upcoming projects' mints, helping users stay informed with the market and keep up with the future mints.
As the trait metadata for NFT collections doesn’t conform to a general standard, listings on Rarity Sniper are not currently automated and are conducted through a manual application. Therefore, it is possible that a collection is not listed on Rarity Sniper but can be accessed on another analytical tool for rarity. If you cannot find the rarities for your holdings, you may also want to check the following rarity tools: Rarity Sniffer, Rarity Tools, Trait Sniper, and Howrare.is (for Solana) to see if your NFT is listed there.
Dune
Most NFT analytics platforms are built as generalized tools that offer the same features to every collection. Dune, on the other hand, has a different approach to providing chain data and is designed as a sandbox for creating custom dashboards. Anyone can create a dashboard with a specialized use case and fill it with charts that track metrics not available on other platforms by default. Either by getting project-specific data or combining standard metrics in specific ways, every new dashboard can lead the way to novel analysis mediums
These all make Dune well-suited for doing project research at a much deeper level and seeing if their unique offerings were able to build a robust ecosystem. Although creating dashboards on Dune requires a certain level of technical knowledge, an investor can always use the platform to search for dashboards created by other members.
NFT Bank
An NFT investor benefits from having a personalized tool for managing their digital art collection and analyzing the profitability of their investment strategy. NFT Bank is a free and powerful portfolio tracker that allows users to keep up with their investments. Its user-friendly platform provides access to detailed information on your purchase and sale history, a showcase for the digital assets accompanied by personalized details for the wallet, and an ROI analysis tool both at the NFT and the wallet levels.
NFT Bank complements these services with a follower curation tool and their own price estimation tool for users to discover pieces diverging from price trends that are possibly at a discounted price. It even provides a tax facilitator to help users handle tax filings for their assets.
Bonus: NFT Evening
Although it's not an analytics platform, NFT Evening can be seen as a valuable resource for staying up to date with the industry. The website covers the newest projects on the market, provides the latest news from different NFT verticals, and offers an NFT calendar for mints and conferences. Despite lacking the curative quality of Twitter, NFT evening can be seen as a complementary information tool for the social media app.
Conclusion
As crypto combines the freedom of participation with financial incentives, the result is an industry ripe with experimentation. Yet the analytics platforms provided in this article will hopefully sum up to a complete kit for navigating the wavy waters of the NFT space.
Sign up for Nansen today and level up your NFT investment game!
