Is your favourite NFT influencer scamming you?

No matter where you go, be it in NFTs or in real life, influencers are a very strong force for marketing or even information gathering. More so in the NFT space where there is less main stream information.

The influencers in NFTs are dominated with people who decided to learn more about this at the early stages. Meaning that they had interest in it and perhaps risked some money to get some early things which ended blowing up to the proportions we see today. While some of them may have had systems in place to get to where they are, there are many in fact, who pride themselves on not knowing what they’re doing.

The main reason the NFT space is so dependent on influencers is because this space is more EQ than it is IQ. Things don’t go up and down based on wedge shaped patterns like in the stock market. You don’t have the same type of indicators you’d use when you choose to invest in a company. One founder is enough to either make a project a success or tank the entire project. A great community can make a bad project good and vice versa, a bad community and wreck a good project.

Behind the cute cartoon profile picture on everyone’s NFT twitter profile, it’s easy to forget that these are still human beings. And with all human beings, you have some that are good and some that are questionable. Reports of many influencers pumping a project and dumping on their followers are rampant. Recently, we’ve seen a rise of people calling out these bad actors, which is great. But there will always be people like these. Many will be new to enter the space.

So how do you know what to do with the influencers that you follow? Here are my tips:

1. Use them for Alphas. Once you find out about a project, ALWAYS do your own research. Don’t follow blindly just because an influencer talks about it. If you’re early and are in it to flip, don’t be left holding the bag. If you are late, it’s better not to chase the rocket.
2. Look at their actions. These people have been in the space longer than you and just have more info. Knowing what they’re doing can open up big things for you. For example, if you’d have gotten a .eth domain before the $ENS airdrop, you could have gotten a pretty handsome reward (if you have no idea what that means, basically they sometimes get into promising new services that offer up attractive tokens/prizes for being early adopters).
3. Watch their tweets. While a lot of the tweets are indeed not entirely useful, stick around long enough and you will have some gold mine tweets. Tweets that show you how they’re doing certain things, services that they use, etc.
4. Build relationships. If you have a question, just ask. If they don’t respond, someone else might. And at the end of the day, it’s no big deal if you don’t get a reply. If you do though, it could make things a lot easier for you. If you intend to get involved with web3 things, this is also the way to go. It might take awhile but as I said, stick around.

This last piece of advice is not really in relation to influencers, but, don’t FOMO. Into anything in NFTs / web3. Yeah you could miss out on the holy grail, but if we’ve seen anything, there are multiple grails. And there are grails that turn to ash. Opportunities are abundant and so are the risks.

Stay safe out there fam I’ll catch you in the next one.