You might have heard a lot about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, recently, which are fast becoming something quite sensational in today's ever-evolving world of digital media, with one NFT art from Beeple selling for $69 million to total sales volumes of NFTs surging to $10.7B in the third quarter of 2021.
Because of the eyewatering prices that some NFT art has fetched, and the huge market that NFT has attracted in the past two years, it is obvious that many creative minds are wondering if this technology offers them a chance to make some money from their own creative work. Well, you don’t need extensive knowledge of crypto or blockchain technology to create them. In this article, we will see step by step how can you have a beginner’s set up to minting NFTs with just a smartphone.
But, What is an NFT?
Non-fungible token simply refers to a unique or rare digital asset. "Non-fungible" is an economic term that can be used to describe things like your furniture, a painting, a song file, your first computer, and collectibles. These things are not interchangeable with other items as they have unique properties. On the other hand, fungible items can be exchanged because their value defines them rather than their unique properties. For example, a $1 note can be exchanged with two 50 cents coins because the value is the same.
A non-fungible token is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain. There are many use cases of NFT. We can use a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data to represent ownership of unique items. This is especially helpful with digital files because they can easily be copied. NFT allows you to set ownership of digital files like Gifs, text files, songs, memes, images, videos, etc.
So, NFT can be defined as a piece of data on a blockchain that describes ownership of digitally scarce goods such as paintings, a video stream, or collectibles. You can think of it as the certificate of authenticity that comes with a work of art purchased at an auction, affirming that the work is original and not an imitation or a mere copy. NFTs help in creating a dynamic market to utilize the tech for the creation and sale of digital art. Adding this "certificate of authenticity" or simply the ownership details to an item is called NFT minting, which we will see below, later.
A final point to note is that digital art, with its ownership details(i.e NFT) on a blockchain, itself is also commonly dubbed as NFT art or simply NFT. Also, ownership of the NFT token is mostly associated with a license to use the underlying digital asset but principally does not confer the copyright to the buyer. Some agreements may grant a license for personal, non-commercial use, while other may also allow commercial use of the underlying digital asset.
