An NFT has begun to be valued as irrefutable proof of authorship in digital art, which has caused pure excitement among thousands of artists worldwide. Thanks to blockchain technology, every artist has a chance now to preserve and protect their creation. And also to sell it faster and even more profitable.
Getting to know how to launch NFT is like your first time riding a bike — you haven’t done anything like that before and you’re scared. There is a belief that to create your NFT you need to be tech-savvy or even know how to code.
But that’s not quite true. The process of creating an NFT is relatively simple and doesn’t require deep knowledge of cryptocurrencies and their underlying technologies. In this article, we will take a detailed look at how to create your first NFT, how much money it can cost, and what obstacles the whole process may have.
Choose your asset
The first step is to choose the art object that you want to tokenize. Theoretically, it can be anything. Any unique file in the form of a video, song, image, GIF, or photo. But the possibilities don’t end there. It can also be a document, an event ticket, or a meme. Yes, some memes are sold as NFTs. That’s the crazy blockchain-powered reality that we all have to accept.Nowadays you can even create NFTs for real items — a collectible figurine or an autographed photo of a celebrity.
Think in advance about what value your token will represent to your potential buyer. For example, a business could create a reward card or discount promo code as an NFT.
We should note that most often crypto-artists create not only one or two NFTs, but a collection of hundreds or even thousands of objects. The most famous collection – CryptoPunks – consists of 10,000 pictures. Each “crypto punk” is unique and slightly different. Such collections are generated through code based on a set of human-designed features. If you’re not good with coding, try using a picture generator, like Waifu Labs, which creates anime characters with the help of AI.
Choose your blockchain
Even before you go to the marketplace, where you will sell your art piece, you should think about the blockchain you’re going to use to mint your NFT. Generally speaking, ‘minting an NFT’ means encrypting your digital item (image, song, video, etc.) on the blockchain, thus enabling the public to buy and resell it through various NFT marketplaces. Usually, your digital file is stored in a database, and the smart contract creates links between your token IDs and database IDs. Here, minting means creating a new block and recording that smart contract (think of it as a digital certificate) into the blockchain.
Most NFTs are minted on Ethereum, but there are other worthwhile and increasingly popular blockchains, such as:
- Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
- Flow
- Tron
- Solana
- Polygon
- EOS
- Polkadot
- Tezos
- Cosmos
- WAX
Each blockchain has its NFT standards, prices, and opportunities to interact with various wallets and marketplaces. For example, a token issued on Binance Smart Chain can only be sold on platforms that support BSC assets (Binance, Treasureland). VIV3 marketplace on Flow blockchain or OpenSea would not be suitable for this purpose. Further, we’ll consider the process of launching an NFT in the context of Ethereum, the largest NFT ecosystem.
Select a marketplace.
Now it’s time to choose the perfect marketplace for your first NFT. There are dozens of marketplaces available for NFT artists today that are intuitive and fairly easy to use. Some of the most popular platforms are OpenSea, Rarible, Binance, and Mintable. There are also some less popular and more niche platforms such as Makersplace or Nifty Gateway.
Depending on your NFT you should decide for yourself, which platform suits your specific project the best.
Set up a digital wallet
Depending on the previous choices, you need to set up your digital wallet to actually own your NFT The most popular Ethereum wallet out there is MetaMask, which has support for ERC-721 tokens. This wallet is recommended for beginners due to its intuitive design and a simple setup process.
You can install it as a browser extension in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or Edge in just a few clicks. After installation, follow the detailed instructions and you’ll be all set in a few minutes.
Upload your file
OpenSea
Let’s take a look at the process of issuing a token on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. This platform allows you to create an NFT token in a few minutes and start making money from it for a relatively modest fee. In the upper right corner of the OpenSea home page, click Create. Next, you have to connect your Ethereum wallet to the platform:
The next step is to select My Collections from the dropdown menu and click on the blue Create button. A pop-up appears allowing you to upload an image for the new collection, and add a name and description to it. Essentially, this step simply creates a directory for your NFTs. After that, you can upload an image, audio, video, or 3D model as the basis for your NFT. (OpenSea supports such formats as SVG, MP4, GLTF, PG, PNG, GIF, WEBM, MP3, WAV, OGG, and GLB.)
The size limitation is 100MB at the moment of writing. At this step you will need to:
- Choose a name (header, title) of your file
- Add a link to your website, social networks profile, and other resources
- Add a description of the asset – here the marketplace doesn’t limit the text length, so you can be fully creative
When everything is set up and the fields are filled in, you need to click the Create button at the bottom and confirm the creation of the NFT through the Ethereum wallet. After that, the NFT will appear in your collection. You’ve done it, congratulations!
Binance
You can create an NFT token and sell it on Binance in a similar way. Here you can also choose whether you want to mint a single token (BEP-721) or a series (BEP-1155). The main difference remains in the format and size of the supported files. You can create an NFT token on Binance by uploading JPEG, PNG, GIF, MP4, MPEG, AVI, WAV, and MP3 files up to 50MB.
Once created, you get a transaction ID associated with the tokenization, which you can copy to BSCScan. You can find your collections in the “List NFT”.
Set up the sales process
Here is the tricky part. When it’s coming to the pricing of your NFTs unfortunately there is no rule of thumb. Some may argue that you should just look at the market and see how much NFTs of the same niche as yours cost. Try to be realistic. On the other hand, sometimes the price itself could be an indicator of the artistic value of an art piece. The price on the secondary market is usually determined by how many people believe in the value and uniqueness of an NFT. Unique tokens with a backstory, a famous author, or high-quality content are worth the most. But for selling right after the minting process, it’s usually pretty hard to evaluate the price externally, so as a creator you should do the first move! For those who can’t decide, some marketplaces also offer the auction option. When the auction is over, the NFT goes to the highest bidder.
Building a community
To succeed with your NFT project it’s essential to put some effort into promotion. One of the best organic strategies to do so is building a strong community. With that, you as a creator learn more about your audience, while the audience connects, learns, and discusses your NFT collections. It is a common practice to first create the marketing channels and build the community and only after that start working on the NFT itself.
In the NFT world, there are 2 social platforms that the majority of the projects use: Twitter and Discord. Why it’s worth looking into? As an artist, you may be still doubtful, whether you need to invest your time and effort into NFTs. Isn’t it just easier the way it was before? Well, not really. One of the most valuable things about art is its exclusivity. For collectors, art lovers, or game enthusiasts, to buy an NFT means to buy an original of an art piece. In addition to that, you get a sense of belonging to a community of like-minded people. And in addition to that, an NFT is proven to be a great investment tool. Recently, an artist from the US took a picture from the Internet, applied some effects on the image, and sold an NFT-gif of a trash can for $250 000. So the demand for NFTs is huge and for you as a creator or business owner, launching NFT can be a turning point in your journey.
Conclusion
We hope this guide helped structure your first NFT launch and answer the most common questions about the NFTs.
If you’ve read until this point, you are probably very serious about launching your tokenized art piece, so we sincerely wish you good luck!
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