Sounds too good to be true? Look at my stats:
What can I say, crypto is crazy! There are many ways to get your hands on free NFTs and while most of these are trash, some of them are gems that sell for anywhere from 1-15 WAX. But first things first, how do you get free NFTs in the first place? Obviously, as we are operating on the WAX blockchain here, you’ll need a Wax Account.
Do not run out of RAM!
I am putting this before diving into the stuff you want to read (where Nifties?!) on purpose to prevent new Wax users from running into a dead end where their account becomes unusable.
Transacting on the Wax blockchain consumes resources. These resources are CPU, NET and RAM. How much CPU and NET you can use depends on how much WAX you have staked. Once you’re at 50 CPU and 5 NET (educated guess), you should be able to use your account without worrying about those. But as your allotted CPU and NET recover over time, there’s no need to worry about these too much. Once they recovered you can unstake your WAX and sell them should you wish to do so.
Staking also entitles you to staking rewards that you can earn by voting for block producers (similar to HIVE witnesses), so I stake all of my liquid WAX and claim those regulary. Unstaking only takes 3 days by the way.
You can check your resources, stake, unstake and claim WAX at Bloks.io.
With over 2,000 WAX staked for CPU and more than 200 WAX staked for NET, my resource consumption lies at 0% despite mining on Alien Worlds the whole day. So, even if you plan on being active in the WAX dApps, staying below 100% is manageable.
Now let’s look at RAM. RAM is a different story in that you need to buy RAM for WAX. RAM is needed to permanently store data on the blockchain and therefore does not recover, once it has been consumed. Certain activities, like claiming NFTs and putting NFTs up for sale, consume RAM and you will see your percentage of used RAM increase on Bloks.io. Some claim that burning NFTs releases RAM, but I have tried that and it did not, which kind of makes sense because the information that the NFT existed at one point in time should not vanish from the blockchain. The only reason to get more RAM is to buy it for WAX. It is therefore advisable that you put some of your first WAX earned into RAM. If you run out of both RAM and WAX, you’ll need to get some WAX from KuCoin or find a user who is willing to donate a little bit of WAX to you (no begging in the comments, please).
Now that you are prepared and know about the setting we navigate in, let’s get some NFTs!
Alien Worlds
Signing up on Alien Worlds will get you a free shovel and avatar NFT to start playing the game. I wouldn’t sell these. You need them to play the game. But when you use them to go mining in the game you have a chance to find other NFTs while stacking the game’s TLM token.
Unfortunately, drops per user have plummeted since TLM was listed on Binance. Before that I used to find 2-4 NFTs per day. Now that is the amount I’m getting over the course of a month.
There are more ways to earn NFTs from playing Alien Worlds. For instance by paying attention to which plot of land you are mining on. The most popular project seems to be Banano which is distributing Cryptomonkeys NFTs to their most active miners.
Note however, that their fee for mining on their land is 9% of TLM earned which is a lot compared to other plots. Ultrahorrors runs similar promotions from time to time but they require you to hold one of their cards to qualify for the drops in addition to mining on their lands.
Splinterlands
Splinterlands assets can be bridged to WAX, meaning that you can convert your free reward cards to WAX NFTs and sell them for the WAX token. I don’t see much of a point in doing so, as you could just as well stay on the HIVE blockchain and sell them for HIVE. So, this is not why I’m including Splinterlands in the post.
The reason is, that there is a really cool fan initiative by @davemccoy. He created a set of collectibles that are native WAX NFTs and resemble Splinterlands cards. He is handing them out for free to participants of his weekly Spring Training tournaments.
He seems to have quite a fan base around his collection and the packs he is handing out as rewards sell for around 10 WAX each currently.
But not only that. He also formed the WAX Marketing Alliance with some other WAX NFT projects from which I have received airdrops for just holding associated NFTs.
DYGYCON
DYGYCON is a bi-monthly event hosted by the Splinterlands team and bringing together different blockchain projects and developers in one virtual conference. I joined them for the 2nd and 3rd instance of the event (wrote a short review about DYGYCON 2.0 here).
Honestly, I think the 3rd one was being hosted too soon. It didn’t have enough updates/changes since 2.0. Keynote speakers were doing smalltalk instead of talking about their projects and they just recycled the whole event but without the Splinterlands Pro Challenge, without new tasks for the convention quest and without the auction house.
However, I would still recommend going to the 4th because of free stuff. They have a SWAG booth there where you can drop your wallet address to receive free NFTs from the DYGYCON collection and their sponsors. There are also some links to special drops from sponsors in their specific booths.
Drops on AtomicHub
When NFT creators sell their pieces on AtomicHub, they can do that as drops which start at a given point in time and end when the deadline is reached or they reach the defined maximum supply.
Among many paid drops, there are several free ones popping up each day. Of course there is a lot of trash among these and most of them will never surpass a value of 0.05 WAX which hardly is worth the RAM you need to claim and sell them. I don’t bother with these and let them rest in my account. Over time you will get a feeling for what are quality drops and what are sh*tdrops and can refrain from claiming the latter. In the beginning it might be easier to just claim everything (while keeping an eye on your RAM usage).
The easiest way to hunt these free NFTs is to go to https://wax.atomichub.io/drops/ and use STRG+F to search for ‘free’. Drops are announced in advance and may disappear from this page before they are claimable. When I find a new free drop, I copy the link to the Reminders app on my phone and set the timer a minute or two before the start time. This way, I can open the drop a little before it becomes available and am able to claim most low-mint drops before they run out of supply.
There also are some Telegram groups where links to free drops are shared, if you prefer that. https://t.me/freenftdrops is one of them (I am not affiliated with them!).
Note that recently many creators have activated whitelisting to prevent bots from claiming their drops. Most will get you whitelisted by dropping your WAX account in their Discord or a whitelist link will be provided in their Telegram channel.
I already told you that most of these drops are worthless, but there are some that gain in value as the chance to claim them for free becomes a memory of the past. Wait a couple of days or weeks before listing your NFTs for sale, you may be surprised at some of them. Often, we also find promotional drops of new unknown project that look like trash in the beginning but release official sales a couple of weeks later and become verified collections.
Even if the individual pieces of a collection are worth just scraps, you may be able to accumulate several different ones and might be able to sell them in a bundle for 1 WAX or more.
Drops on Neftyblocks
Neftyblocks is taking after AtomicHub and recently launched a drop feature as well.
It works the same way as AtomicHub’s but I did not yet find a comfortable way of searching through all the ongoing and upcoming drops for free ones.
Go to Neftyblocks and just start scrolling down. Or be notified by one of those Telegram groups, I mentioned.
Get Hunting!
This should be enough to keep you busy over the upcoming days. Join the growing group of WAX NFT hunters and we may soon meet at DYGYCON or in a Telegram channel. And remember: Don’t run out of RAM!
Disclaimer: No financial advice included in this article. Just sharing my personal experience. Do your own research!
Some links in the article might be referral links, feel free to use other sign-up methods.
Images courtesy of Unsplash.com / screenshots taken myself.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
excellent post @handtalk5 ... you do a good job of showing people how they can earn in many ways. And of course I really enjoyed hearing you liked the Spring Training tourneys! :)
RAM is released if you are the owner + creator of NFT , being owner only do not release RAM by burning it.
Nice read.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Oh, learned something new. Thanks for the explanation!