Understanding Mystery Box NFT: The Complete Guide

There are various ways NFT creators are using to drive up the values of their NFTs, namely with NFT utility, physical items, auctions – and arguably the most effective method, NFT mystery boxes. Popular NFT mystery boxes are being sold with trading volumes upwards of millions of dollars, and it’s showing itself to be the new way to sell NFTs.

In this article, we’ll help you learn more about what this new phenomenon in the NFT space really means, and how you can best take advantage of this.

What Are Mystery Boxes In NFT?

Like its name suggests, an NFT mystery box is a box filled with NFTs; and similar to loot boxes that you see in games, with mystery boxes, you can get one NFT upon opening.

What makes opening mystery boxes fun is that the whole thing has an element of surprise – some might even argue it’s similar to gambling since there’s a chance that you can get rare drops instead of the common ones.

What’s in the NFT Mystery box

So the buyers have no guarantee that they can get the NFTs they want – why would they buy it then? Turns out the content of the box is what’s attractive to the buyers, especially when there’s a difference in drop rate between them.

In most white label NFT marketplaces, NFTs in mystery boxes are ranked in terms of rarity. The rarest NFT in the box, for example, might come with a more unique NFT, with more utilities behind it such as the right to join an exclusive club.

And as for the type of NFT that can be found in the mystery box, there’s really no restriction here. You can find artworks, tickets, NFT cards or even rare in-game items as NFTs in mystery boxes. Once obtained, NFTs from mystery boxes can still be traded or resold, and this means collectors can try their luck by getting the rare NFTs and put them for sale later on to interested buyers.

Examples:

One of the popular NFT mystery boxes is Nike x RTFKT “MNLTH” NFT, which is Nike’s first official NFT.

The mystery box was airdropped last February, among token holders of the CloneX project tokens and other RTFKT collections. 

It was only until a few months later that holders of MNLTH (pronounced Monolith) mystery boxes were allowed to open their boxes and reveal the content inside. 

From user reports, it looks like that inside these mystery boxes was a pair of RTFKT x Nike Dunk Genesis CRYPTOKICKS, a Skin Vial digital item needed to modify the NFT and free MNLTH mint passes.

The addictive nature of NFT mystery boxes

For creators, NFT mystery boxes are the new best way to drive more sales to their NFTs, and there’s a reason for this – people are wired to love gambling. Psychologists call this ‘variable rate reinforcement’, which means unpredictably distributed rewards.

With the same reward, our dopamine system responds more to one that comes with more uncertainty, compared to the same reward delivered on a predictable basis. Applying this to mystery boxes (and similarly, gacha boxes and loot boxes in games), you can see how it works so well in the NFT space where NFTs are already so unique and flexible to begin with.

Take for example, the game Duelist King with their NFT mystery box drops. Last December, Duelist King managed to sell out a 20,000 mystery boxes drop, all thanks to the fact that the addictive trading card nature of their game works so seamlessly well with NFTs and mystery boxes.

Buying mystery boxed, where to buy?

Similarly to how you buy NFTs, you can find mystery boxes on aggregated NFT marketplaces (e.g., OpenSea, Rarible, Binance NFT), game NFT Marketplace, or self-owned NFT marketplaces (e.g., NFTify-powered NFT marketplaces).

When buying a mystery box, you’ll notice that under Series Content, it’ll list the NFTs included in the box, along with the probabilities for each NFT like so:

Before heading to an NFT marketplace to buy mystery boxes, you should note that you need a crypto wallet such as MetaMask in order to buy items. Purchasing mystery boxes usually require payment in a specific cryptocurrency (e.g., ETH, BNB, MATIC) or a specific stablecoin (e.g., BUSD).

4 Steps to create an NFT mystery box?

If you’re an NFT creator looking to launch your own version of mystery boxes, the process is rather effortless with the help of NFTify. This is a feature offered for free on the NFTify platform, without any upfront costs.

The detailed steps to launch your mystery box on NFTify are as follows:

Step 1: In NFTify Admin Panel, go to NFT > NFT Box > click on Create Box

Step 2: Fill in the necessary information such as choosing the box cover, token interface, box name, and so on.

Step 3: Add the Series Content for this mystery box

Step 4: List your mystery box for sale

Once listed for sale, your mystery box will be in its own Mystery Box over on your NFT marketplace:

Closing thoughts

NFT Mystery boxes are without a doubt becoming the new way for brands to do NFTs. 

It’s addictive, fun, and with virtually no downsides to speak of. If you’re looking to launch your own series of mystery boxes, don’t hesitate to try out NFTify for free and see for yourself how effective mystery boxes are at boosting your NFT sales.

📌 Watch more: NFTify Master Class 18: How to Create NFT Mystery Boxes

⭐️  Creating NFT Mystery Boxes for FREE with NFTify now