How to win an NFT bidding war on OpenSea
Last week I won my first OpenSea bidding war.
I secured the first on-chain neural network, XOR, a masterpiece by Nahiko, but was wholly unprepared for the process.
I thought I lost ETH and the auction. I’ll walk you through what I wish I knew ahead of time.
This isn’t about managing the stress or investment advice — the assumption is you already made a decision to bid on a piece and simply want to know how to execute and what to expect.
1. Auctions on Opensea often use an alternative form of $ETH ($WETH, Polygon $ETH, Fantom $ETH, etc.) — find out what is used for your NFT auction and have it ready in your wallet
Converting can take a while, be costly, or fail.
In my auction, $WETH was the medium. Save yourself the headache and have $WETH ready (or whatever the underlying currency is). You don’t want to be trying to convert with one minute left in the auction.
I had 1.5+ $ETH get “dropped and replaced” mid-transaction.. didn’t know that was a thing but essentially it freezes funds for a prolonged period of time, or until another block picks them up. To remedy, I had to transfer more $ETH to the wallet then convert.. don’t be me.
It is also often cheaper to convert on a 3rd party dex instead of the conversion offered within Opensea. 1Inch, Uniswap, and Sushiswap are good options.
2. The time when the auction ends is actually when it starts
OpenSea has a feature where the auction can be extended if any bid comes in within 10 minutes of an auction ending.. so if it is 11:55am, the auction is set to end at noon, and a new bid comes in, the auction end-time will be pushed back 10 minutes from the prior end-time (from 12:00 to 12:10pm). If another bid comes in at 12:02pm, it will be pushed back another 10 minutes (from 12:10 to 12:20pm), etc. etc.
This means the piece will sell to the person who wants to pay the most, not the person who sneaks in a bid 1 second before it ends.
3. To gain competitive intel, look at the wallets of the people bidding against you to see how much $ETH/$WETH they have
They can always add more, but it can help you structure bids.. on that note, each bid has to be 5% higher than the previous one.
So if the high-bid is at 1 ETH, and that person has 1.11 ETH in their wallet, you might want to bid 1.058 instead of the minimum 1.05.
1.058 [potential bid]* 105% [minimum required bid after 1.058] = 1.1109
In order for them to hit that bid, they’d have to transfer more $WETH into their wallet.
Easy way to calculated this is take the amount of $WETH they have and divide by 1.05. Anything above that number means they’ll have to add more to their wallet.
4. Bidding costs gas.. plan accordingly
Once you win:
- Consider securing your piece by connecting your Metamask to a hardware wallet.
- Get involved in the community. DM the artist and/or join their Discord/Telegram.. the more people you make aware of the artist, the more popular they become, and the more valuable your new piece.
- FWIW, listing the piece for sale will also require some gas.
