How To Create And List Your First NFT

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Digital assets along with their ownership details, NFT, on the blockchain, can be sold from anywhere and the creator gets access to a global market while retaining creator- rights over their work and if wanted their claim on resale royalties. So, artists/creators can easily establish the status of being the original creator of a work, determine the scarcity of the work and conduct the sale via peer-to-peer or an NFT marketplace, without the need of any intermediate.

 

 

 

The first thing you need to do is to pick the artwork you want to mint as a Non-fungible token. NFT can represent any digital file. You can create an NFT of a digital painting, a piece of music, a text, a video, or anything that can be reproduced as a multimedia file. So give your best to make a piece of innovative and appealing artwork.

 

Creating(minting) an NFT from scratch would require you to have access to a blockchain and an NFT Marketplace. As most of NFT activity by independent creators/artists is taking place on the Ethereum blockchain we will use the same in our example.

 

 

Minting NFT costs some money. You will need an Ethereum wallet with some Ether (the cryptocurrency based on Ethereum) on it, to buy, sell and create NFTs. One of the most popular and easy to use is “MetaMask”. MetaMask comes as a free app on your iPhone or Android smartphone as well as a browser extension.

 

Once you have a digital wallet set up, you will need to buy a small amount of Ethereum to cover the cost of minting NFT, as most NFT marketplaces have fees associated with converting content to NFTs. If you choose to mint your NFT on OpenSea, the minting process is free, but you will still need to have a wallet to connect to the marketplace.

 

 

Digital wallets can be easily and securely connected to marketplaces via QR code. Currently, the most famous ones are Mintable, Rarible, or OpenSea. For example, if you want to mint using OpenSea, go to the website In the right-hand corner of the screen, you will find a button that reads ‘Connect wallet’. Click on that button, which will take you to the next screen, where you'll be asked to select your wallet provider from the list.

 

 

 

 

Once you’ve connected your Wallet to the marketplace (OpenSea in our example), you are good to go to mint your first NFT. Click on Create button in the top menu right corner, and create a collection. Fill in all the information needed, and save. Now you’re ready to start the actual minting process of a new NFT.

 

Click on the New Item button which will allow you to load your artwork, and give all the details you want about it. You can add a name, description, and set the rarity of the NFTs as well. Once you are done with details pull the trigger, click create.

 

Congratulation, you have successfully minted your first token. In order to sell it on OpenSea, you need to open the newly-minted item in your collection and click on the sell button. This will take you to the sell page, where you can choose the cryptocurrency you’ll accept as payment and whether you want to sell with a fixed price or at an auction. You can also set the royalties you would want to receive from the first and subsequent sales.

 

 

 

Another popular platform Mintbase also allows creators to easily mint NFTs and is quite similar to OpenSea in that you first must create a store to mint NFTs. For now, Mintbase only supports images and so is best for visual artists. Just like Open sea, after creating the store users can mint NFTs with a name, description, and other details and add them to the store. In the case of Mintbase all NFTs are for sale by default, but users can check a box to halt them from being listed for sale. 

 

We hope you now have a good understanding of what NFTs are and are equipped with the tools and knowledge to start dabbling in this exciting new world.