Minting your 1st NFT: a guide for digital artists
Objective
Recently I helped Nella Figueroa — a 3D artist and designer — to launch her first NFTs. While doing so I learned a lot. The goal of this article is to share the experience and help digital artists to enter the NFT space. I will touch on the following key topics:
- Why NFTs
- How to mint
- Wallet
- Marketplace
- Minting options
We had a live discussion with Nella on this topic on her Instagram, however, this article expands on some concepts further.
Why NFTs
Non-Fungible Tokens have exploded in 2021. No doubt you heard about it, but what is it in a nutshell, and as an artist why should you care? Let’s break it down.
NFT is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain — a technology that records every single transaction, which eventually enables digital authenticity, ownership and trade. (Here’s a great visual demo on how blockchain works).
To understand the concept and its relation to digital art better, let’s go back to a time hundred years ago. Back then the authenticity of an oil painting was granted by the creator’s unique style and signature. An art investor would have the painting in his room as proof of ownership. For someone to copy or duplicate the art was not a simple task: one needed to be an artist themselves and spend a considerable amount of time carefully replicating color palettes and brush strokes. Authenticity, rarity and ownership were pretty solid.
It all changed with the advent of computers. A digital file — be it an image, video or 3D file — can be easily duplicated, modified and distributed. Anybody can have a copy of the digital art, but no one really owns it, and without ownership, there’s no value.
Blockchain technology effectively solves this. Think of a blockchain as a register book, in which every single transaction is being recorded: who has created what and when, and what happened to that file ever since. These transactions can not be deleted or modified, guaranteeing even higher authenticity and transparency than physical objects. And when an owner of an asset can be proved, it can gain value following a demand from a like-minded community, which then unlocks economic opportunities, such as exchange, trade and investment.
These economic opportunities are what attract investors and speculators, fueled by prospects of a high return on investment when the digital art / NFT appreciates at price. The factors involved in price appreciations are various, but involve a combination of community strength, give-aways, social status signaling, the celebrity status of the creator, or the potential of an artist to become a celebrity one day. Furthermore, just as in the 90s we could not have predicted where the Internet would lead us, it’s hard to imagine all the use cases of the future world revolutionized by blockchain and metaverse technologies.
Where there’s a demand, there’s a supply. As a 3D artist, you most probably have been creating your work only to end up in a portfolio, or be shared on social media to attract a potential new job or collaboration. By releasing your work as an NFT, not only do you upgrade your online portfolio to record the authenticity of your art in a blockchain but also give an opportunity for others to invest in it. Now you are running your own digital art shop and your art can finally pay for itself! Surely, investors won’t turn up queuing in your NFT store overnight, and you do need to put the effort into nurturing a community around your work, but if you are a digital art creator with a long-term commitment, then getting into NFTs is a no-brainer.
What about the environmental concerns — isn’t blockchain technology requiring a lot of energy? Yes, it does, however, I personally believe it’s just a matter of time before the problem is solved by transitioning entirely into renewable energy and improving the technology to require less computing power (e.g. Etherium’s transition to Proof of Stake vs. Proof of Work). Furthermore, you can choose to offset your NFT carbon emission by using services such as Nori, and others.
Minting NFTs
Now that we have discussed the reasons why being a digital artist you should at least be considering releasing your work as an NFT, how should you go about it?
Minting your first NFT will consist of the following main steps:
- Having a crypto wallet
- Funding the wallet
- Choosing a marketplace
- Creating a collection (or not)
- Minting
Crypto wallet
The concept of a crypto wallet is not much different from a physical wallet that holds your cash, or a digital wallet that holds your digital cards, Apple Pay, etc. Essentially, it’s a smartphone application that securely holds cryptocurrencies and NFTs that you own.
Getting a crypto wallet is fast and free, you don’t even need to provide an email or any personal data. It only requires you to download an application and complete a simple setup process, mainly focused on you saving a Secret Recovery Phrase and understanding its importance. There are various wallet options out there, the most popular being MetaMask. However, when setting up Nella for NFTs, we went for Coinbase Wallet instead. Our choice was mainly driven by the company’s reputation as a crypto exchange and their plans of launching a Coinbase NFT platform. Said that crypto wallets are free, so you can go ahead and test them out before you decide to fund the one you want to use.
One novel key functionality of a crypto wallet is an in-app browser that allows you to navigate Web 3.0 platforms, such as NFT crypto exchanges and websites, and to perform blockchain operations such as minting, buying, listing, and managing your NFTs. A crypto wallet is your gateway to the NFT world, thus before choosing an NFT marketplace — get your wallet first.
Funding crypto wallet
Now when you’ve got your crypto wallet — what’s next? To mint your 1st NFT, you most likely would need to have funds to do so. You would need crypto! While there are several ways to buy cryptocurrency, I will briefly discuss 2 main options: buying with a credit card and buying with a bank transfer, plus I will touch on the concept of “gas” fees.
Buying crypto with a credit card: is the easiest, fastest but the most expensive method by far. Some crypto wallets, crypto exchanges and 3rd party services such as Moonpay, offer direct credit card deposits, with processing fees varying anywhere from 3% to 12%. To save on unnecessary costs, consider bank transfers instead.
Buying crypto with a bank transfer: can keep the processing fees between 0.5% to 1%, especially when you initiate a transfer in your local currency (to avoid currency exchange fees if your currency is not USD or EUR). You can use 3rd party services such as Moonpay, or — for more advanced enthusiasts — get yourself an account with a crypto exchange, such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, BitOasis, etc.
What’s a crypto exchange in the first place? Think of it as your bank account for cryptocurrency: you can securely hold, buy or sell your crypto, plus exchange between different currencies (tokens). From your crypto exchange, you can fund your crypto wallet to mint your NFTs. Most importantly, when you want to cash out, you can transfer the crypto back from your wallet to your crypto account, sell crypto for fiat currency and make the transfer back to your original bank account.
Tip: if none of the crypto exchanges support transfers with your local currency, you can look into Binance’s Peer-to-Peer option, which allows you to purchase cryptocurrency of your choice directly from people who hold it and want to exchange it for your currency.
Gas fees. In addition to processing and service fees, there are also miner fees called “gas”. Coming back to a comparison of a blockchain being a register, miners are notaries who “write” the transactions into the “book”. To do such work, notaries require fees, so do miners. However, miner fees fluctuate based on how congested the network is at a given moment. You can track the gas fees in real-time (e.g. Etherscan for Etherium network) and if your transaction is not urgent, you can set your own target gas price to be executed when congestion eases (early mornings and weekends).
Which cryptocurrency to purchase?
Buy now, you hopefully have your crypto wallet and figured out the most suitable way to buy crypto. The last question to answer: which crypto? That depends on which blockchain you want to store your NFT.
As a matter of fact, there’s not just a single blockchain out there, and not all of them support NFT technology (e.g. Bitcoin doesn’t at the moment of writing). NFT was invented on the Ethereum blockchain, and since then other blockchains followed the suit, such as Solana, Cardano, Tezos, etc. Furthermore, to avoid Ethereum gas fees, the community has built scaling solutions on top of Ethereum, such as Polygon. It’s easy to get lost!
For Nella’s Non Funjible Jar NFT project, we simply went with the original and most adopted blockchain — Ethereum. Pros: Etherium is the 2nd largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, with a large and powerful community building further on the blockchain’s utility (e.g. DeFi, DAO, etc.). Top NFT collections are on Etherium blockchain as well (e.g. BAYC, CryptoPunks, etc.). Cons: high gas fees. However, it should not be the case once Etherium transitions to the Proof of Stake consensus method planned in 2022. Since Nella is into NFT for the long term, Ethereum seems to be a safer bet.
NFT Marketplace
NFT marketplace is a platform that allows you to mint your NFT on a blockchain of your choice and list it for sale. There are many platforms out there, OpenSea being the most popular and biggest platform in terms of trading volume, yet, with Nella, we minted her NFT on Rarible instead. Other options include Looksrare, Mintable, Foundation, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Crypto.com, with more options that keep appearing. How do you choose?
A key concept to mention though, thanks to blockchain technology you can access and manage your NFT on any platform, regardless of where you have minted it, as long as it’s on the same blockchain. A platform doesn’t own or restrict your work. As discussed earlier, if blockchain is a “book” that registers the creation of your art piece, then a marketplace platform is a store in which you can display it. While NFT should be created once, it can be displayed on multiple storefronts. Listing your NFT on different platforms can require a setup transaction (thus gas fee), however, you might find a more engaged community on one platform rather than on the other. Furthermore, functionalities vary between the platforms: some give back loyalty rewards, others put effort into artist curation, etc. Feel free to experiment to see what suits you best
Minting
Since we have minted Nella’s NFT on Rarible, we will go through the options available there, however, the process is expected to be similar between all marketplaces.
Type: Single vs. Multiple — this basically means the number of copies of your art piece, whether you want it to be a single copy (1 of 1) or more than 1. Your choice might be influenced by the type of the NFT (avatars, products, etc.) and how many of them you plan to publish in your collection: if you have 10000 unique avatars (e.g. BAYC) most likely created programmatically, then 1 of 1 makes sense to keep its individuality. Your community has the potential to grow to 10000 members. In contrast, since Nella’s artwork is a handmade 3D animated object and each piece takes a considerable amount of time to be crafted (remember, that digital artists create art for the pleasure of creating) we settled on 5 copies of each NFT to start building a community gradually, instead of having just 1 owner per each.
Artwork: upload your file and give it a description. For now, image, video and music files are supported. Most likely, with the adoption of metaverse 3D and AR files formats (USD, USDZ) will be added.
Collection: think of it as a folder or a gallery to keep your themed NFTs organized in one place. If you have or plan to launch several NFTs that you want to be organized together — creating a collection is a good way to do it. On the other hand, if your NFTs are one-offs you can publish them in a free collection of the marketplace, e.g. Rarible collection. Key points to consider: once minted, collection cannot be changed, and creating a collection is essentially a blockchain transaction that attracts miner fees.
Royalties: as a creator, you can choose to earn royalties on every secondary sale! That’s a great way to ensure you are still benefiting from your art as it gains popularity and soars in price. N.B. when listing your collection on a marketplace other than where it was minted, you might be required to set the royalties again on that specific marketplace (i.e. another blockchain transaction).
Free minting: some marketplaces offer the possibility to publish your work without minting. That gives you a benefit as a creator not to risk making an investment upfront, in case your work won’t be purchased. However, that also means that the buyer is the one who would need to mint it paying associated fees on top of the sale price you set, which can appear as a “nasty surprise” and make them change their minds. Free minting is also the reason why there’re so many irrelevant “art pieces” on the marketplace that offer such an option, as opportunists are trying their luck to hit it big. Ultimately, if it’s not minted, it’s not on the blockchain thus not much different from being published on a portfolio website. While to mint or not to mint is a free choice of the creator, I believe that artists who are in this game for the long term should not be put off by the upfront fees. If you believe and invest in your work, others will do it too.
Conclusion
Crypto and NFT space is novel and is evolving rapidly, making it hard to catch up. In this article, I’ve attempted to share the key concepts learned while helping the digital artist Nella Figueroa to publish her first NFTs. I truly hope this information can help you learn what it is all about, how it matters to you as a digital artist and how to get started. Personally, I do see the value and utility in the technology, and I firmly believe it is here to stay beyond all the hype. I’m so excited to follow how the space evolves and to participate in it, sharing my learnings as I go.
