I have immersed myself with both feet into the NFT community. For the most part, it is a very supportive and fun group full of hard-working, ambitious, and passionate people. I have several projects on which I am working, including the Freaky Frogs project that is partnering with The Nature Conservancy to preserve natural amphibian habitat.

People are making lots of money with NFTs, although one might argue that the market is over-saturated with more supply than demand. If you want success, you have to work harder than those around you, or join up with hard-working creators early in a project before it takes off. A bit of good luck doesn't hurt either.

In order to have success as an NFT creator, you really need to have a vibrant community that you build through social media. The two most powerful platforms for NFT creators are Twitter and Discord. I have personally been finding Twitter easier to build than Discord. Sometimes its good to pay for a little promotion from time to time. There are many established folks that will gladly take your crypto to promote your projects. The essential question is, “Who do you trust?”

As far as Twitter is concerned, there is a healthy amount of accountability. You should never have a new account or small account do a paid promo for you. I had one guy reach out to me that had about 70 followers. At the time I had about 700. He wanted me to pay him to promote me. I asked him via direct message if he was connected to a larger account and he said, “yes.” I said, “Let’s continue the conversation through that account. Otherwise, you should be paying me to promote you.” That was the last I heard from him.

The established and successful Twitter promoters have too much to lose if they scam someone. You could publicly rat them out and ruin their business. They might overcharge you and underperform, but they will do the tweets, pinned posts, and retweets, if you pay them.

Discord is another world. It is more anonymous. You can join people’s servers; you can create your own server. I get a lot of direct messages (DM’s) from people wanting to help me promote my server. I ignore most of them. However, one guy (gal?) reached out. His name was “Syria”. He offered to help me and showed me his prices. He stated that he would give me 500 free DM invites just to show that he was legit. I agreed and sent him the content I wanted promoted. Within minutes I had about 30 people join my server. Great. I have even had a couple of sales with this promo.

Then he offered to do 100,000 DMs via a spam bot for about $550 in crypto. I thought to myself, “If I had success with 500 DM invites, I could really kick this thing off with 100k.” I agreed. I sent him $550 in USDT. I was scammed. For a few days we went back and forth. He kept saying that there were problems with the spamming software. Then the conversation ended. I asked for a refund. Nothing. I sent him a few condemning messages, which of course, he ignored. His account is inactive now. End of that story. The beginning of a wiser, more savvy me.

How could I have known? Well for starters, I might have noticed that we only had one server in common—mine. He created this account just for me. Then he probably shut it down and opened another one for the next chump. He might be running a dozen accounts at a time. I looked up his deposit account on Etherscan and saw that he had about 20k in Ether. That is close to 40 scams at the rate he got me. I would love to scam this scammer, but part of the beauty of the blockchain is its anonymity and security.

That was a very expensive lesson on my end. I could publicly post his crypto deposit account, but he could easily create another. The point is, the burden of responsibility lies with us—those of us that are honest, hardworking folks in the crypto community have to be extremely careful. Moving forward, I have a way to deal with potential Discord scammers. I invite them to a private conversation on Twitter. That way I can see how many people follow them. I can hold them accountable.

Here are a few bits of wisdom that I have learned:

1. Most everyone knows this, but it is worth repeating here: Never, never, never share your wallet security keys (12-word secret passwords) with anyone. Metamask and the others will all tell you that they will never reach out and ask for these keys. If someone does and you oblige, your crypto will disappear faster than I can type the next sentence.
2. If you are on a social media platform that runs on anonymity like Discord, move your conversations with potential promoters to another platform, just to hold them accountable. Ask them for references or offer to pay some up front and the rest after you get the paid service. Many legit promoters will not want to do this, but to me it seems reasonable. That way both of you are taking a risk.
3. Be honest. Whether you want to believe in karma or the message of Jesus, “You reap what you sow,” I do believe that good things happen in the world of NFTs and other crypto communities when you are a good person.
4. I have found several friends in these communities that are very quick to promote my stuff at no cost. This is because I do the same for them. In one case, I bought an NFT from someone for under $10. Why? Because it was great art and I want to support her. Since then, she has tagged me in many tweets and many of her followers have since followed me.

I am about $550 poorer in my crypto account, but I am also much richer in wisdom. Remember that you are in charge of your finances in the world of crypto; therefore, it is up to you to keep your private stuff private and make the right decisions if you ever choose to pay for services on the blockchain.

I am always working on projects and trying to find new gems in the metaverse. Follow me to keep up!

The Lynx

www.cryptolynx.co

https://twitter.com/ArtLynx1

discord.gg/BvK5hrNUU7