How to Find NFT Projects Early - Know Where to Look
Finding NFT projects early can sometimes help you make great investment opportunities. However, it can be tough to discern between promising NFT projects and ones that could be potential rug pulls or scams. Who can you trust on how to find NFT projects early? We’ll find out how and look at some top options today.
What is an NFT?
An NFT, or non-fungible token, these tokens are non-fungible, which means they are unique, and cannot be replaced with just anything. NFTs are built on a blockchain that houses information about each NFT such as the owner, metadata, and more. Non-fungible tokens can be collected by buying and selling the assets on a dedicated NFT marketplace.
Examples
NFTs can be a lot of things from high-quality art, music, 3D images, video moments and even digital land on what’s called a “metaverse”, which is a digital world. Gamers would love to know that sometimes NFTs can even be in-game tokens that have utility. Valuable NFT projects may also have other forms of utility such as building houses in third-world countries. By purchasing a token from these NFT projects, you’d be supporting a worthy cause.
How to Locate NFT Projects Early
Okay, so you’re sold on NFTs and what an NFT project can do, but how do you find decent upcoming NFT projects?
• Research on Minting Projects
The minting stage of an NFT project is when its designs are listed for sale and NFT creators are waiting for their supporters to buy the tokens. When an NFT supporter purchases and receives the NFT, it’s called minting. What you can do to find the best NFT collections out there is to research future minting projects early.
The best place to do this so you don’t miss any undervalued NFTs is on the project’s website, discord servers and Twitter. Make sure you gather relevant information such as the project’s description, roadmap, mission, and the development team behind it.
Other information that should be included would be the member perks, distribution system and community tools. These are the aspects that will differentiate one project from other NFT projects.
• Roadmap
Speaking of the roadmap, it is one of the most important things to consider to find good NFT projects. What is a roadmap? It is what new NFT projects put forward to depict their vision. It would outline the action plan of a successful NFT project and it could outline things such as upcoming releases (second mints), future NFT drops, NFT rarity scale, information on the DAO, and much more. The more detailed the roadmap is, the better.
• Discord
Good projects will have their own Discord. General NFT discord also help because they are a great place for you to go to and check out information such as market trends, the trending collections now, and gain information on new releases, profit potential and upcoming events.
Read more: Best NFT Discords
Twitter and Twitter spaces are the top places to go to gather info on early NFT projects to find ones that are worthy of your investment. So many heavy-hitters in the Twitter space such as web artists trying to gain exposure, emerging project developers showcasing their skill, and of course, creators promoting their NFT collection.
• NFT Calendar
One of the easiest ways to find great NFT projects before they mint or at least during the mint is NFT calendar sites. These sites, including one called NFT Calendar will give badges to verified NFT collections that are much less likely to be rug pulls and scams. These sites do some of the work for you and check the NFT drops for you.
• NFT Marketplaces
There are plenty of NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea that also give great insight on new projects. OpenSea gives so much information on the NFT market and new and existing NFT collections. What to know which trending NFT collections are great investment opportunities? OpenSea displays live sales, info about project owners and floor prices to help you out.
• Rarity.Tools
This site is an NFT rarity tool that helps you to determine the value of digital assets. The higher the value of your digital assets is, the higher the profit you can make from secondary sales. Using Rarity.tools is one of the easiest and best ways to find profitable NFT projects.
• Crypto.com
There is barely anyone in the NFT community that doesn’t know about Crypto.com. Crypto.com has a “drops” tab that offers information about the best new NFT project options and you can explore it for yourself. What’s also amazing about the site is the email list, which keeps the NFT community up to date on the latest drops and news.
• Nansen
Nansen is also a site that has analytics that helps you locate lucrative NFT collections. Nansen is specifically for the Ethereum blockchain, but it is a very useful way to keep your portfolio protected. It traces wallets from notable collectors (the whales), which can help those new to the NFT market decide on their next moves.
• RyzenNFT
If you are looking for Ethereum or Solana projects specifically, then RyzenNFT is our next suggestion for NFT drops and NFT tracking. The site does much more than that and also predicts future gas fees and ceiling prices for a particular project so early adopters can have the best information for future return generation potential.
• Icy Tools
A Discord server is great, but not as good as Icy Tools. This site shows a ton of information from real-time mints, NFT metrics, and more. Like Nansen, Icy Tools also tracks market patterns, prominent wallet funds, and trending collections to give you a better idea of how a project will do in its first few weeks of mint.
• NFT Launchpads
What exactly are crypto/NFT launchpads? They are a place where early stage retail investors and other captive audiences are put in touch with the developers behind projects.
What to Look for in an NFT Project
There are a few things to identify in an NFT project early on to understand it more. Look at the quality of the design. What does the art, video, graphic, etc., look like? Of course, it will depend on various projects but in general, make sure that there isn’t inconsistent quality.
Who is behind the project? Do they make their identities known? What is their track record? The number of followers on the project’s official Discord servers and Twitter accounts could also indicate the legitimacy of the project.
Know that these aspects are a better indication of a project’s validity if you consider them as a whole rather than individually. Other things to make note of are:
- The roadmap
- The floor and current prices
- The rarity
- How engaged the community is
- Who supports the project
Top NFT Projects Today
What are some examples of excellent NFT projects to invest in?

Axie Infinity is an excellent example of in-game utility NFTs. The creatures in the game take after Pokemon and are bought as NFTS as well as other accessories.

If you’re a cat person, then you’ll love CryptoKitties! It’s a collection that allows you to purchase, breed and trade these adorable cat creatures, much like Axie Infinity.

This is a site that centers around sports NFTs. Many big-time athletes have NFTs on the site and each is unique because they are similar to collector’s memorabilia, signed by your favorite athletes.

We mentioned the metaverse, which is a digital world, and Decentraland is by far one of the most famous, largest, and most expensive ones out there. You can do a lot of what you can in the real world within Decentraland and users buy and sell digital land as NFTs.
Read more: How to Buy Decentraland

Lastly, we have VeeFriends, which is the collection created by GaryVee. It is quite a big collection of 10,255 split into rarity categories embodying traits the creator likes.
FAQ
• How can you tell if an NFT project has potential?
You can tell if an NFT project has potential by doing your research. Look at the project’s roadmap, the developers behind the project, the utility/cause it is advocating for and how engaged the creators are within the community.
Conclusion
Nothing is for sure. Just because everything checks out doesn’t mean you are 100% safe. You can find NFT projects early from the creators and developers themselves or the many tools that are available online. You can also check out the prominent projects we mentioned above and search for subsequent collections from those creators.