How To Mint Your First NFT

The admiration in the form of extensive popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has gained a strong momentum over the past few months. It has taken the new media art and collectibles world by storm. In particular, after Christie's auction house sold the first-ever NFT artwork — a collage of images by digital artist Beeple for a whopping $69.3 million — NFTs have earned a lot of adulation across the globe in a very short span of time.

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So what are NFTs?‍

A number of artists have got motivated by this NFT buzz to transform their works into digital tokens. A similar craze is seen among buyers for these ‘art-collectibles’. In simple terms, NFTs are the tokens that are used to represent ownership of unique items and these digital items can be bought and sold using blockchain technology. NFTs are not fungible that makes them a different type of asset. These cryptographic assets have unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other.

Unlike cryptocurrencies, they cannot be traded or exchanged at equivalency. They let us tokenize things like art, music, in-game items, gifs, videos, and even real estate. Each NFT can only have one official owner at a time and are secured by the Ethereum blockchain – no one can alter the record of ownership or copy/paste a new NFT into existence which makes the mechanism more robust.‍

How To Mint Your First NFT

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Before diving into the ‘how’ factor let us also explore the ‘what’ factor. Yes, you have understood rightly as always we will take you to the step by step voyage of NFT and in this article, we will discuss all the important things you really need to know before minting your NFT.

What is Minting?

 The process of turning a digital file into a crypto collectible or digital asset on the Ethereum blockchain is called Minting.These digital assets are stored in this decentralized database or distributed ledger forever, and the exciting part is that it is impossible to modify, manipulate or delete them, in other words they become tamper proof.

Anybody can easily mint an NFT. But while there are many NFT marketplaces where you can start minting, we’ll discuss the largest decentralized platform for NFT collectors and artists – the OpenSea marketplace.

Create a Crypto Wallet:

To get started, you need to connect an Etherium wallet to OpenSea. There are a few options available in the market, but we’ll recommend you to go with MetaMask, as it’s the most straightforward wallet to use, and it’s the preferred option on OpenSea.

Metamask is also available as a browser plugin. For using it, just go to metamask.io and download its extension.  As soon as you install its extension you’ll see a tiny orange fox on the upper right side of your browser. After that, you can use it to store Ethereum and Ethereum-based tokens like NFTs.

Create an OpenSea account:

Now that we have the MetaMask wallet set up, let us link it to our Opensea account.

First visit the website of the platform: https://opensea.io/. ( Make sure you visit the website with the correct URL ).

Click “Create”

 The website will redirect you to connect your crypto wallet, where you have to choose MetaMask.

Next, a signing request will appear, and following the signing in, a “Connecting” screen will pop up, which will link OpenSea to your wallet. 

 Just, Proceed by accepting the Terms & Conditions. You can easily access your funds in the wallet icon at the top right corner.

Mint Your First NFT on OpenSea:

Here’s the most interesting part:  minting the NFT in actual.

Now that your account is ready to process transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, it’s time to

build your first NFT collection.

Are you ready for that?   All that you have to do now is-

Go to your profile and select “My Collection” -> hit “Create” to start a new one. Your new collection will be composed of the logo image, the featured image, and the banner.

Note- NFTs receive the best and most visibility and are best sold for being part of a collection. So, it’s important for you to create collection even when you have an option to simply upload an individual file.

Mint the NFT

After creating the collection, you can add items you want to tokenize.

Just follow the steps below:

1- Open the collection that you have just created and click the "Add item" option available on the upper right- hand corner of the screen.

2-  Upload your piece of art , this can be a picture, video, 3D model, or sound. ( Acceptable formats are JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG, MP4, WEBM, MP3, WAV, OGG, GLB, GLTF. Size may be up to 100 MB ). Also, add the details and description of your uploaded image.

3- Fill in the properties, levels, and all the mandatory information for the item.

4- Finally, choose the supply, which is the number of copies that can be minted, and the issuing blockchain.

5- After everything is set up correctly, click "Create" and your new item will appear as a new NFT in your collection. You are free to choose whether you want to keep it for display or sell it to the highest bidder.

And that's it! Congratulations!

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You've successfully minted your first ever NFT.

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Note-  OpenSea’s revenue-generating model is relatively simple but taxing. The platform takes 2.5% of every transaction that happens on it.

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Closing words:

Now that you know  NFT minting has become voguish and the past few months have seen the rising trend of this, peeps will most certainly get inclined towards this. However, the knowledge of how to mint on platforms like Opesea will surely smoothen the process.

This article clearly envisages that the crucial part would only be to create and link your digital wallet to a just platform and thus, you can create your own collection.

The process is quite simple and this article must have made it streamlined for you.