# Learn NFTs & Web3 — Free In-Depth Guides | NFT Academy > Ten free, in-depth guides covering NFTs, Web3, smart contracts, custody, scams, royalties and tax. Plain English, no sign-up, no hype. Source: https://thenftacademy.com/learn Site: The NFT Academy (https://thenftacademy.com) --- 13 guides · 151 minutes ## Everything, explained *properly*. Read in order and you’ll have covered more ground than most paid beginner courses. No account, no email, no upsell at the end. Start with the basics, or jump to whatever you came here for. 5guides ### NFT basics What the technology is, what you own, and where the activity actually went after the speculative phase ended. - [What does NFT mean? 12 min NFT stands for non-fungible token. It’s a unique entry in a public database saying a particular address controls a particular item. That’s the whole idea. Everything else, the art, the prices, the community, sits on top of that one fact, and most confusion comes from mistaking the layers for the foundation. Start here](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/what-are-nfts) - [Are NFTs dead? 9 min Dollar volume collapsed. Unit sales hit records. Both are true, which is why this question usually gets answered badly. NFT trading fell 37% in 2025 to about $5.5 billion while the number of NFTs sold rose to a record, so the market didn’t empty out so much as get cheap.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/are-nfts-dead) - [The famous NFT collections, explained 11 min When people say NFT they usually picture one of about a dozen collections. The monkey ones are Bored Ape Yacht Club, and they’re apes rather than monkeys. The pixel faces are CryptoPunks. Here’s what each collection is, who made it, and what happened to it after 2021.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/famous-nft-collections) - [The most expensive NFTs ever sold 10 min The record is $91.8 million, for a Pak piece called The Merge, though nearly 29,000 people bought it between them. Below that sit Beeple’s $69.3 million Everydays and a run of CryptoPunks. Every one of these headlines carries a caveat, and most of the caveats went unreported.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/most-expensive-nfts) - [Where NFT activity actually went 11 min Speculative NFT interest collapsed, but searches for NFT utility and gaming rose. The activity that survived is narrower and less glamorous: tickets, in-game items, credentials and authenticated goods — cases where the token does a job rather than being the product.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/nft-utility-and-gaming) 2guides ### Doing it yourself The mechanics. Buying, creating and minting, with the steps where money is lost marked clearly. - [How to buy an NFT without expensive mistakes 14 min Buying an NFT takes about forty-five minutes the first time, and roughly two of those minutes carry all the risk. This walks through the whole process, wallet, funding, verification, purchase, with particular attention to the handful of steps where people actually lose money.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/how-to-buy-nfts) - [How to create and mint an NFT 15 min Minting your own NFT costs a few cents on a modern network and takes about an hour the first time. This covers preparing the work, choosing a chain and a minting route, getting the metadata and storage right so the piece survives, and what actually happens after it exists.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/how-to-create-an-nft) 2guides ### Safety & custody Custody and scams. The highest-value reading on this site, and the part most guides compress into a paragraph. - [Storing NFTs so you can’t be phished out of them 11 min Almost nobody loses NFTs to hacking. They lose them by signing something, or by putting their recovery phrase somewhere it could be read. This covers what you’re actually protecting, the wallet setup that makes theft hard, and the approval audit almost nobody performs.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/how-to-store-nfts-safely) - [The scams, and how each one actually works 13 min Knowing that scams exist doesn’t protect you. Knowing the mechanism does. This walks through the main ways people lose NFTs and money — what the attacker is actually doing at each step, and the specific signal that gives it away before you sign anything.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/nft-scams-and-red-flags) 2guides ### Money & tax Royalties and tax. The unglamorous half that decides what you actually keep. - [How NFT royalties actually work 9 min Creator royalties were the most compelling promise NFTs made to artists: a cut of every future resale, automatically. The mechanism was never enforced by the blockchain, marketplaces made it optional, and a large share of secondary volume now pays creators nothing. Here is what happened and what remains.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/nft-royalties-explained) - [NFT taxes, explained without the hand-waving 14 min Most NFT tax confusion comes from one under-appreciated fact: paying for something with cryptocurrency is itself a disposal of that cryptocurrency. This covers what triggers tax, how cost basis works, why holding period is the biggest lever you control, and the records to keep from day one.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/nft-taxes-guide) 2guides ### Web3 & blockchain The layer underneath — what Web3 means once the marketing is removed, and what a smart contract can and can’t do. - [What Web3 means once you remove the marketing 10 min Web3 names an idea: applications built on shared infrastructure nobody owns, where users hold their own accounts and assets. Some of that shipped. A lot of it didn’t. This separates the mechanism that works from the promises that were oversold, without doing either side’s public relations. Start here](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/web3-explained) - [What a smart contract actually is 12 min A smart contract is a program that lives on a blockchain and runs identically for everyone, with results nobody can alter afterwards. That’s useful and dangerous in equal measure, because a bug is permanent, and the code can’t know anything about the world outside the chain.](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/smart-contracts-explained) Not sure where to start? ### Follow the *roadmap*. A sequenced path from knowing nothing to being competent, using only free material. Roughly four weeks at an hour or two a week. [Open the roadmap](https://thenftacademy.com/roadmap) ### Starting out ##### Where should I start if I know nothing about NFTs? Read [what an NFT actually is](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/what-are-nfts) first, then [how the scams work](https://thenftacademy.com/learn/nft-scams-and-red-flags). That order matters. Most people lose money in their first month because they learned how to buy before they learned what a malicious signature request looks like. [The roadmap sequences all ten guides](https://thenftacademy.com/roadmap). ##### How long does it take to understand NFTs properly? About four weeks at an hour or two a week to go from knowing nothing to being competent, using only free material. The ten guides here run 1,300 to 2,000 words each, roughly eight to twelve minutes of reading. The slow part isn’t reading, it’s practising with small amounts until signing a transaction stops feeling opaque. ##### Do I need to spend money to follow these guides? No. Every guide is free and nothing here is gated. You need a small amount of a network token for gas only if you want to actually mint or buy something, and on a layer 2 such as Base or Polygon that’s cents rather than dollars. [The gas estimator shows the real numbers](https://thenftacademy.com/tools/gas-fee-estimator). ##### Are these guides kept up to date? Each guide shows the date it was last updated at the top, and lists its sources at the bottom so you can check the underlying claims yourself. Marketplace fees and tax rules move, so if you find something stale, [corrections are welcome](https://thenftacademy.com/contact). ##### Is any of this investment advice? No. This site publishes no price predictions and no investment advice, and it holds the view that the technology is worth understanding while the investment case was oversold. NFT trading volume fell roughly 37% in 2025 to about $5.5 billion. The guides explain mechanics, not markets.