Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
Get in early, and learn to tell a project from a trap
Selynna Payne's case for entering crypto and NFTs before the market fills up, and the checks she says you must run first.
Scroll to begin ↓
01 The premise
The book's promise is early access, and its own fine print
Payne's argument is simple. Crypto and NFTs are new enough that an ordinary person can still learn the ground rules and act before the market fills with people who already know them. Everything else in the book serves that one claim.
It is worth knowing when this was written. The book was published in 2022, so its market view, its named platforms and every price it quotes belong to that year. Treat them as a snapshot, not a current reading.
Enter the game and maximize your profits before technology settles in and you have to share your gains with other investors.Selynna Payne, Introduction
The same book is careful about what it is not. Its disclaimer says the material is "solely for educational and entertainment purposes" and "is not intended to replace expert psychological, legal, financial, or other guidance." It also lists what can go wrong: price volatility, transaction speeds that fall behind Visa and Mastercard, hacked exchanges and hot wallets, and rules that change from one country to the next.
02 First decision
Choosing a wallet is choosing who can lose your assets
Before any purchase, Payne says you need an exchange account and a wallet. The wallet choice matters more than the exchange, because it decides who holds the key.
A hosted wallet is the easiest. The exchange or app holds your assets, so if you forget your keys you can still get in. The trade is that your security is only as good as theirs. A self-custody wallet asks for no personal information at all and gives you a twelve-word phrase instead. Write it down and keep it safe: it is the key, and losing it means losing access. A hardware wallet, from a maker such as Trezor or Ledger, is a physical device that only goes online when you use it. It costs more and takes more effort, and it is the most secure of the three.
The book reduces the choice to two questions: how secure do you need to be, and how much friction will you tolerate. The answer moves as the amount you hold moves.
Decide your wallet before you decide your first purchase. If you pick self-custody, write the twelve-word phrase on paper and store it somewhere you will still have it in five years. Payne's warning is plain: forget the phrase and the assets are gone.
03 What you are buying
An NFT's value has little to do with the picture
Payne's central point about NFTs is that the file and the ownership are two different things. Anyone can download the image. Only one entry on the blockchain says who owns it, and that entry is the asset.
That separation is what makes a digital market possible at all. Before you can sell apples, you need the right to sell them, and you transfer that right when you sell. NFTs supply the same right for something digital, so things that could not be traded before now can be.
From there, the book lists what the record can carry. Membership, as with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, where the token is the entry card to a private community. Identity, since many people present themselves online through the group they hold. Scarcity and rare traits, which the book says add more value than good looks. Influence, as when a well-known figure mentions a collection and its price moves the next day. A royalty written into the token, so the creator takes a percentage of every later sale. And utility: event tickets that cannot be counterfeited, blockchain diplomas, a stake in a decentralised organisation.
Name what the token gives you beyond the image: a community you would actually join, a ticket you would use, a royalty, a function in a game. Payne argues that utility makes a token harder to hold purely for resale, which is a different reason to own it.
04 The three checks
Team, traction and sales, in that order
Payne gives three parameters for judging any NFT project, and they run as a sequence rather than a scorecard. A project that fails the first one never needs the other two.
The team means the creators, the early investors, everyone involved. What you are looking for is transparency, because you are investing in those people and their capacity to make the project worth something. Traction means the Discord channel, the social accounts, the people actually talking about it. Sales means not just how many, but how the price has moved recently.
Two cautions sit under all three. A roadmap is not legally binding, so a promise of live events, games and future collections costs the founders nothing to make. And a project that has already sold a great deal may have its price set already, which leaves little for a new buyer. The book is blunt that none of this guarantees a profit: it only, in its words, mitigates much of the risk.
Open the project's Twitter and compare the account creation date against the follower count. A page two weeks old with thousands of followers is a warning sign, and the book suggests running it through Twitter Audit to see how many of those followers are real.
05 The loss scenario
The rug pull is the failure the book warns about most
Payne describes it as a sequence, not an accident. A team promotes a project, gathers a community, gets it excited, takes the money from the mint, and leaves. The roadmap is simply abandoned.
What makes it dangerous is the part most readers do not expect.
However, there's no illegality in rug pulling.Selynna Payne, Chapter 8
Most NFT projects promise to donate some of the money they raise. Choosing to keep it instead breaks no law, so there is nobody to appeal to afterwards. The book's red flags are the ordinary signs read the other way: creators whose identity you cannot confirm, a brand new account with thousands of followers, a mint price out of line with established projects, a roadmap that promises live events and video games nobody could build, or no roadmap at all, and a community whose managers ban anyone who lists below the floor. Payne also notes that endorsements from celebrities and well-known people are not proof, because popular figures have promoted projects that turned out to be fake.
If you cannot verify who the creators are, stop and move on. The book treats an unverifiable team as a major red flag rather than a detail to work around, and it says so before it says anything about the art.
06 The arithmetic
A flip has to clear its own costs before it earns anything
Flipping is the book's main strategy: buy an NFT you judge to be underpriced, then sell it. What Payne insists on is that the gap between the two prices is not the profit, because fees sit in between.
Two costs matter. Gas, the fee for putting a transaction on the chain, which the book puts at anything between twenty five and eighty five dollars as reasonable at the time of writing. And the marketplace commission, which on the platforms it names runs to a small percentage of the sale. Payne's advice is to keep spare funds in the wallet for both, and to aim for a small profit and sell fast rather than wait for a large one.
The metrics she uses to judge a price are concrete. Follow the collection's floor price for at least a week and work out the seven day average, because a single day tells you nothing. Look at trading volume: high volume means buyers, but also more sellers ready to undercut your listing, while low volume can mean you cannot sell at all. And she puts the ideal ratio of items to owners at about three to one, enough interest to matter with enough supply left to buy into.
You should aim for a small profit and sell fast.Selynna Payne, Chapter 9
Write down the buy price, the gas estimate and the marketplace commission, and add them up. That total is the number the sale has to beat. If you cannot see how the collection's recent sales clear it, the flip has no room in it.
07 The window
Too early and too late both cost you
This is where the book's whole premise lands. Being early is the advantage it sells, but Payne is careful that early has a floor as well as a ceiling.
Come too late and there is little profit left. Come too early and the project may not yet have the base it needs to grow at all. The window she describes sits between the two: a project that has already fully launched, has come down in price since the launch, still has a high sales volume, is active in secondary markets, has a real community and a team you could check.
The exit matters just as much as the entry, because the book states plainly that most NFT projects tend to lose value once they peak. That is why the advice is a small profit taken quickly rather than a position held in hope. Payne is honest that the judgment does not come free: as you analyse more projects you get better at reading them, and until then you are learning with your own money.
Before buying, confirm three things: the project has already launched, its price has dipped from the launch price, and it still has sales in the past week. If any one of those is missing, the book says you are either too early or too late.
08 The whole book
A fast market, answered with slow homework
Payne's case for moving early does not end in speed. Every chapter after the explainers is about checks you run before you spend, and about the costs and losses that sit between a good idea and a profit.
Decide who holds the key
Hosted, self-custody or hardware. The book's two tests are security and ease of use. A self-custody wallet hands you a twelve word phrase, and losing it means losing the assets.
Know your break-even
Gas and commission sit between what you pay and what you get back. Track the floor price for a week, work out the seven day average, and aim for a small profit sold fast.
Team, traction, sales
Three checks in order, before any purchase. A team whose identity you cannot verify is the one red flag the book says should end your interest in a project outright.
The book asks for patience in a market that rewards the look of speed. Do the checking, know what a loss would cost you, and accept that no amount of homework makes the outcome certain.
Adapted from Cryptos and NFTs for the Stealth Investor
Selynna Payne · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 44 cited sources in the source edition