• Whitelists are put in place to reward loyal members of the community and control the traffic
• There are no set instructions as to how you can get whitelisted everywhere
• There are different scams associated with whitelists

With such a huge growing market, NFT projects started to utilize something called “whitelisting”. This is the list of active community members and their personal wallets, who get first dibs on new NFT drops before they go on sale to the public.

Lately, almost all of the big projects started to whitelist their community members, which started to incentivize more community members to become active and contribute to the community, in order to receive the best NFTs from their projects.

"Whitelisting allows NFT projects to reward early supporters with guaranteed slots for them to mint an NFT or multiple NFTs depending on the whitelisting/project rules as it help keep a guaranteed spot for the members" - Zeeno

Well, there are no set instructions as to how you can get whitelisted, as most of the projects have their own criteria when it comes to choosing who deserves whitelisting and who does not. These criteria can range from being an active community member to already owning an NFT associated with the project.

But there are also some common criteria that most NFT projects use which help people to get on the whitelist.

Finding a project that is yet to be released

Finding a new project can be both a good and bad way to get into the NFT project through a whitelist. On the good side, it is relatively easy to get whitelisted on these types of projects. You could be asked to invite a few friends on their discord server in order to get whitelisted. 

But it could also be really risky since this is a new project and you don’t know how successful it will be. Most new projects fail as the market is really competitive, so be careful if taking this route.

Join a Discord server or other social platform

Once you find a project you like, be it a new one or already existing, joining its Discord server or other social platforms where they have a big community is a good step towards getting whitelisted. 

Discord servers have active communities where you can learn even more about the project and especially how to get whitelisted. Some projects might ask you to just chat on a daily basis and raise your server level in order to be eligible for the whitelist, some might ask you to invite friends to the server, and so on. In the end, it all comes down to each project. You can also find whitelist windows, as whitelisting is not run consistently and usually is used before new collections are dropped.

Apply for Whitelist

The last step we need to take is to apply for a whitelist. Usually, you won’t be just invited to a whitelist by the project team, except in some cases where the criteria for selection are very different. Applying for a whitelist differs from project to project. You might be asked to fill out some forms, show proof of you completing certain tasks or something else entirely. 

Whitelisting can be used for many different reasons. It can be used to reward active and early community members, and prevent network floods or gas price spikes.

Rewarding active members

When we buy an NFT we enter into a huge community of people that share our passion. Because of this, projects usually reward active members by adding them to the whitelist, in order to increase community engagement and activity. If you communicate with other members, help them out if possible and make a name for yourself among the community members, it is very likely that you would receive an invitation to the whitelist; or at the very least guarantee that your application for whitelist gets noticed.

Also, it is a great way to reward those who have been there from the beginning. When projects release new collections of NFTs, they sometimes run lotteries and select a few members, who already own an NFT of this project, and give them spots on the whitelist to show their appreciation for believing in them.

Combating spam

Spam is a huge problem when new NFTs are released, as large numbers of wallets are flooding the market in order to mint new NFTs. Some create bots and use them to buy big quantities of NFTs in different wallets, just to resell them for a marked-up price. There are also users who do not intend to buy anything and join the minting process in order to just look around, this also puts a toll on the servers as there are usually more of those people who are there not to buy, but to just check things out.

Stopping gas fees from skyrocketing

Gas fees are fees that are paid when doing a transaction using the Ethereum blockchain. Because Ethereum was using a proof-of-work protocol before ETH staking, gas fees are high and tend to jump really high when the network gets overloaded with orders. This happens when people start bidding wars, so their transactions get approved faster.

But when using a whitelist, traffic to the website is controlled. People join the minting process in different timeframes, whitelisted people first and then the general public. Because of this, gas prices usually don’t spike as much, because there are fewer people trying to do transactions at the same time.

A great example of this happening was in early May when the Bored Ape Yacht Club public mint caused the Ethereum blockchain to overload and because of this gas fees were close to $3000 or around 1 ETH.

Scammers are the people we can not avoid, if there is money involved and demand is high, scammers are always looking to profit from those that don’t have enough experience or don’t pay attention.

One of the most well-known scams, when it comes to whitelisting, is fake whitelists.

Fake whitelists are everywhere. When there is a much-anticipated release of an NFT collection, Discord members of those projects always receive messages from scammers, congratulating them that they have been selected for a white list and sending them links, and telling them to follow those links in order to access the whitelist. After this, there are two common possibilities as to where these links will take you and what they will tell you.

One is where you are taken on to a fake website that looks just like the one where the mint is taking place. You will then be shown a fake NFT drop and if you buy them, you will just be sending crypto to the scammers while receiving nothing.

Another common place you will be taken to is where you will be asked to deposit some funds that you will use to mint the NFT when the drop happens. Just like in the previous case, you will be transferring money to the scammers and receiving nothing in return.

One of the best steps we can take to avoid being victims of these kinds of scams is to close Discord and other social media messages from non-friends. With this, scammers will not be able to send us messages, and it will be impossible for us to fall victim to these scams.

As we mentioned before, whitelists are not run constantly as they have set timeframes for users to apply. Because of this, there are different platforms that offer NFT whitelist tracking.

There are different Twitter accounts dedicated to tracking whitelisting dates for different projects. Some of these accounts track only a single project, while there are some that share information about different projects and whitelist dates.

There are also whitelist trackers integrated into some NFT or crypto-associated websites, which inform their users about upcoming releases, when the whitelist periods begin and end, how to get whitelisted for each drop, and other relevant information.

So we suggest checking out these accounts and websites to get more information about upcoming drops.

• Whitelisting criteria differ from project to project
• We need to be active in the community to raise our chances of getting whitelisted
• Social media platforms are the best place to look for whitelisting information
• Scammers are always trying to scam people who are trying to get on the whitelist

NFT whitelisting is a mechanism that controls the flow of traffic and guarantees that people who are more engaged in the project get rewarded, decrease spam, and don’t let gas fees get out of control.

Each project has its own way of determining which users get on a whitelist. These criteria can be something trivial or something that needs a lot of dedication to the project. 

So when dealing with a whitelist, approach each project individually and don’t expect that if you managed to get on a whitelist of one project, you will be able to do the same thing to get on the whitelist of other projects.