How to bid on NFTs with your friends
Dear Bankless Nation,
NFTs can get expensive.
The floor price for a CryptoPunk is 86 ETH. Bored Apes are going for 47 ETH. Projects like Nouns are upwards of 100+ ETH. A lot of people are priced out of collecting these rare jpegs.
Luckily, Ethereum fixes this.
PartyBid is a new application that allows people to group bid on NFTs. Everyone puts in any amount of ETH, and if it meets the reserve price, the application places the bid.
If you win?
PartyBid fractionalizes the NFT and distributes shares proportionally in the form of an ERC20 based on the amount contributed.
And people love it. We’ve seen PartyBid’s for CryptoPunks. There’s one currently live to purchase one of Justin Aversano’s Twin Flame portraits. There was even one on our legendary Andrew Yang NFT.
Interested in getting in on the action?
Here’s how to bid and collect NFTs with your friends.
- RSA
PartyBid is a decentralized application for collectively bidding on NFTs. The project makes it easy to form a “PartyBid” so friends and beyond can pool funds together for bidding on any NFT.
This tactic will show you how to start your own NFT bidding party or how to join an already existing one!
- Goal: Learn how to bid on NFTs with a group
- Skill: Easy
- Effort: 30 minutes of research
- ROI: Fun + the possibility of collectively owning choice NFTs!
The rise of PartyBid
“PartyBid is a product that lets groups of people combine their capital and bid on NFT auctions together. Anyone can create or join a PartyBid, contribute ETH, and place bids as part of a collective.”
— PartyDAO
Back in the spring of 2021, a group of talented builders joined forces to create PartyDAO. The organization’s focus? To build and ship amazing crypto products.
Toward that lodestar, PartyDAO launched out of the gate with a two-pronged attack, namely positioning itself to become a sustainable “long-lasting organization” while also shipping its first flagship product PartyBid, a dApp for collective bidding on NFTs.
With PartyBid, the vision was to build a permissionless service that would make it simple for friends (and even many individuals mixed among multiple groups) to coordinate and bid on NFTs together in a streamlined fashion.
In other words, PartyBid is “group bidding made easy” for NFTs. The protocol supports any NFTs available on Foundation and Zora, and its V1 publicly launched in August.
Since Zora recently became an “ecosystem-wide aggregator of ERC-721 NFTs,” it’s now possible to group bid on the vast majority of NFTs in existence through PartyBid!
PartyBid explained: The “Noun 11” case study
One of the more obvious use cases for PartyBid is to facilitate group bidding on expensive NFTs that price out most individuals. We saw a textbook example of this back in August during the auction of Noun 11.
Nouns is an experimental on-chain NFT project that auctions one “Noun” avatar a day forever. There are 100+ Nouns in existence now, and most have gone for +100 ETH at auction. Why? A growing number of whales and DAOs see them as poised to be celebrated in the years ahead.
That said, proper Nouns (pun intended, though by “proper” I simply mean there are many Noun-inspired derivative projects now) have become quite desirable. But obviously, most folks can’t afford the triple-digit ETH prices in these early days.
This is where PartyBid comes in for Noun 11.
Not long after the birth of Noun 11 in late August, someone started a PartyBid for the NFT. Over the course of the next day, 150 bidders pooled together ETH — some bids as small as 0.005 ETH — using the dApp. As the auction concluded, the partiers won the auction with a collective bid of 118.99 ETH, beating out the next-highest bid of 111.11 ETH from individual bidder xaix.eth!
Without PartyBid, it seems likely xaix.eth would’ve ended up owning Noun 11. Instead, a group of 150 individuals owns it as PartyBid divides and distributes NFTs won via Fractional, an NFT fractionalization platform. As such, the Noun 11 auction illustrates how the PartyBid dapp can be used to democratize access to interesting NFTs.
👉 Disclosure: I’m a fan of the Nouns project and participated in the Noun 11 PartyBid. I currently hold NOUN11 tokens and plan to hold them permanently as cultural artifacts if my fellow partiers permit so.
How to start your own NFT party
Starting a party for group bidding is straightforward on PartyBid.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Go to partybid.app and connect your wallet.
- Now click on the “Start a Party” button.
- In the provided interface, input or randomize your party name and do the same for your token name. Then provide a Foundation or Zora URL to an NFT that’s currently on auction. Lastly and optionally, choose if you want to add a Party Split.
- Please “Preview” to proceed, and then read through the provided info and warnings. Click “I understand” and then “Start the party!”
- Your wallet will be prompted with a transaction. Complete it to publish the party! You’ll then get a party URL that you can share with your friends or anyone else to get the group bidding going!
A few extra points worth keeping in mind:
- If a PartyBid reaches its target NFT’s reserve price, a 24-hour auction kicks off. People can contribute further across this period, which may become necessary if the party gets outbid one or more times.
- If a PartyBid is unsuccessful, contributors can claim their ETH back through the party page post-auction. As for winning PartyBids, participants receive fractions proportional to the ETH they contributed. Learn more about how to manage your fractions on Fractional.
- Beware: partiers’ ETH can become locked if they can’t “raise enough ETH to cross the auction reserve price AND the auction is never started by another bidder or the creator never de-lists it.”
How to join an NFT party
If you’re interested in joining an already existing PartyBid auction, you can follow these steps:
- Again, go to partybid.app and connect your wallet.
- Next, press the “Join a Party” button. You’ll be brought to the Parties gallery where you can browse through the available parties.
- Find and click on an option you like, at which point you’ll be taken to that particular NFT’s bespoke dashboard.
- In the PartyBid above, you can see bidders are still trying to pool enough ETH to trigger the reserve price. If you find such an opportunity and decide you want to chip in, click on “Add Funds” to proceed.
- Now, input how much ETH you propose to supply to the group bid. It can be whatever amount you want, e.g. 0.01 ETH, and you can add more later if you want, too.
- Read through the provided info and warnings, then press “I understand” and “Add ETH.” Your wallet will prompt you with a deposit transaction; finish that to submit your contribution!
- At this point all the extra points I cautioned about earlier come into play, like what happens if your PartyBid wins or loses or how your funds can potentially become locked. Keep these points in mind if you decide to experiment with this dapp.
💫 Other PartyBid resources 💫
Zooming out
PartyBid makes collecting NFTs funner and more social. That’s really amazing I think.
Yet as cool as PartyBid is, it’s important to remember it’s still in its V1 system. Ultimately, the project’s a young experiment that may have bugs no one knows about yet. Tread cautiously if you do decide to test out the dapp, then!
Conversely, PartyDAO’s work on PartyBid is only just getting started. Expect the project to evolve considerably going forward for the betterment of creators and collectors alike!
Action steps
- 🥳 Review the Parties that are currently live on the PartyBid app
- 🎙️ Listen to Overpriced Jpegs: NFTs that will survive the bear market