Sort & Narrow Upcoming NFT Drops with Data: How I Developed NFT Sorter

Art seems interesting enough; let me check out their Twitter. Click. New tab. Hmm, this NFT project has 10,000 followers. Worth looking into. Odd, their posts rarely garner more than three likes. Seems like there's very little comment engagement. I'll table this project for now, back to the drop calendar. Click. New tab. Interesting art, but it seems like there's no community. Click. New tab.

My process repeats for hours as I try and vet upcoming NFT drops for community engagement. Will investing in this project pay off? I believe that only data can answer that question. Unfortunately, that data was cumbersome to find. This is a story of how I became so fed up with how inefficient existing NFT drop calendars were that I programmed my own.

My Motivation

Time and energy. Utilizing existing tools, determining whether an upcoming NFT mint was promising felt inefficient. For traditional investments, like stocks, there were concrete metrics about a company to assess its potential, like revenue and cash flow. There were numerical measurements all aggregated in one place (stock screeners). For NFTs, I felt like I was throwing darts in the dark. I learned to utilize metrics like community engagement on the NFT project's Discord and Twitter. Still, I'd have to click through multiple links on existing drop calendars to do so. Why couldn't that data be shown in a table format on one page to avoid scrolling, eyeballing, and clicking?

The Development

At first, it started with a personal Python project utilizing the Twitter API to create a program that would output the average likes, retweets, and comments an account has per tweet. I realized over time that community engagement on an NFT Twitter account is far more revealing than raw followers. Previously, I'd have to guesstimate engagement, but now I had a tool to objectively measure it. Slowly, the metrics I measured increased and as my access to data grew, so did my ability to make good judgments about upcoming projects.

The thought had been in my mind for a while - if this tool helped me, couldn't it help others? That's when I began developing a database of upcoming NFT projects. I created a front-end utilizing Node.js, used the Twitter API to collect engagement data, utilized MongoDB queries to create sorting functionality, and jQuery to create a search bar. Thus, NFT Sorter, the drop calendar most comprehensive in features, was born.

The End Result

• At any given time, NFT Sorter lists over 150+ projects sorted by engagement.
• The database is updated daily, adding the newest announced drops and archiving projects after their drop date.
• Clicking project titles link to the collection's Discord, Twitter, and website.
• Sort by Twitter followers, number of tweets, average likes, replies, retweets, and drop date.
• Search by specific terms.
• Narrow results according to your requirements.

The greatest lesson I learned in creating NFT Sorter was how interdisciplinary tech ideas can be. My project was inspired by stock screeners in the financial industry, something I wouldn't expect would be the basis of my next project. If you're a developer looking for their next big project, I'd recommend looking toward other fields around you for inspiration.