How to Mint Invisible Friends NFT

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been exploding in popularity as of late; however, many new projects have been risky, prone to value stagnation, low effort or worse yet, outright scams. In this sense, reputation, integrity and transparency are incredibly important (and increasingly rare) in the space, and one of the bastions of these tenets is the Random Character Collective. The Random Character Collective has organically amassed a community of creators (artists in both physical and digital mediums) and consumers spanning multiple successful projects, having coined the “walking” category of animated NFTs. The Random Character Collective’s latest, and arguably most hyped, project is the Invisible Friends collection, which is a set of 5,000 animated NFTs designed by Markus Magnusson. The Invisible Friends collection currently is in a pre-mint stage, where the initial holders of the NFTs have yet to be determined.

How to Mint Invisible Friends

As the Invisible Friends project hasn’t yet begun its public minting phase, the biggest value proposition at present comes from being able to secure a mint slot by entering the public mint’s whitelist. If you can manage to enter the whitelist, the price to mint an Invisible Friend on its website is 0.15 ETH, in addition to gas fees, which needs to be paid using an extension-based cryptocurrency wallet such as MetaMask.

How to Get Whitelisted for Invisible Friends NFT Collection

As with many other NFT projects, the whitelist to mint is intended to incentivize community engagement, so ways to get on the public whitelist include holding other Random Character Collective tokens, winning Twitter sweepstakes for people who make Invisible Friends fan art, purchasing some of the limited Invisible Friends merchandise or winning giveaways on its Twitter.

What Are Invisible Friends NFTs?

Invisible Friends are a set of 5,000 animated NFTs that depict walking avatars with invisible skin. The NFTs have a wide range of traits which determine their rarity and market value. The Random Character Collective has already announced a 3D collaboration with Nguyen Nhut, showing the potential to tie future (airdroppable) projects into Invisible Friends in the same vein as the Bored Ape Yacht Club with the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, which is a potential value add in the long term.

Who Created Invisible Friends?

Markus Magnusson created the Invisible Friends project after showcasing a wide range of walk cycles on his social media, joining the established Random Character Collective. Magnusson has put out NFTs before, which have empirically fetched a significant floor price, and the Random Character Collective has successfully put out multiple popular “walking” NFT collections in the past. In this sense, the creators of Invisible Friends are reputable and experienced and have additionally proven themselves to be transparent throughout the process of creating this collection.

How to Buy Invisible Friends on OpenSea

Invisible Friends can be bought on OpenSea once the mint process is completed, and doing so will have the advantage of removing the randomness of the minting process, though the floor price of the collection will almost certainly be substantially higher than the 0.15 ETH mint price. 

Buying Invisible Friends on OpenSea will realistically be the same as purchasing from any other NFT collection in the sense that you will need an extension-based wallet with sufficient Ether to cover the price of a listed NFT and the associated gas fee. 

Keep Your NFTs Safe

To keep your Invisible Friends (and other Ethereum-based NFTs) safe, a hardware wallet is the best long-term solution, by virtue of the wallet being fully isolated from the internet. In this sense, NFTs and other assets stored on hardware wallets are safe from phishing attacks caused by malicious links. Ledger’s Nano X and Nano S are some of the most ubiquitous of these hardware wallets, boasting support for most blockchains and full support for NFTs on both the Ledger hardware wallets and Ledger Live. 

All this being said, hardware wallets can’t protect against social engineering exploits, so the 24-word recovery phrase associated with your hardware wallet is the path of least resistance to the funds in a hardware wallet and must be protected as such. Hardware-based attacks are also possible but are generally regarded as being less of a concern for most people than social engineering attacks.

Where to Buy Ethereum For NFTs

In order to purchase or mint an Invisible Friend or any other Ethereum-based NFT, you need Ether, both to cover the gas fees on the Ethereum Network and also to compensate the artists and distributors behind the project, in this case Markus Magnusson and the Random Characters Collective. 

In order to buy Ether, you use a cryptocurrency exchange, much like a foreign currency exchange. In the cryptocurrency space, you’ll find two broad categories of these exchanges: centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs). CEXs are arguably easier to use and are better for going between fiat currencies and digital assets, while DEXs boast lower fees and offer more obscure token trading pairs for trades between different digital tokens.

Some of the best CEXs include Gemini, eToro, Coinbase Global Inc. (NASDAQ: COIN) and Voyager, all of which offer desktop and mobile clients that can be connected to debit cards and credit cards, as well as bank accounts.

Is it Worth Minting an Invisible Friend NFT?

As a whole, minting an Invisible Friend has a pretty minimal downside (assuming that getting onto the whitelist is taken as a given), considering the realistic roadmap and reputation of the project as well as the demand in the NFT space right now. The upside is fairly high as well, looking at the current prices of the other Random Character Collective projects and the fervor in the community surrounding fan art and the mint whitelist. This being said, long-term value of Invisible Friends (and any other NFT project for that matter) is very speculative by nature and shouldn’t be held without diversification and hedging.