The pace at which NFTs are using to take over the internet these days is very fast. Opensea.io, a major marketplace for NFTs had a transaction volume of over $21.78 Million Dollars in July alone. That’s very crazy! There have also been a lot of people that have earned a lot from NFTs. This has also raised a lot of misconceptions on NFTs. This article would teach you what you need to know about NFTs, what they are used for and how to mint one.
What exactly are NFTs?
NFTs stand for Non-Fungible Tokens. Fungible describes things whose value can be interchanged. A typical example is the dollar, this is because the dollar can be exchanged or interchanged with another dollar of the same value. Non-Fungible objects cannot be interchanged because they are unique.
An example of a non-fungible objects is your computer. Although millions of computers like yours was created. Yours has unique identity and coupled with the changes you have made to the default layout since you got it; it is very much different from others of its kind.
NFTs are Ethereum based, digital assets that represent ownership of items. The items can be your Arts, cars, collectibles, real estate, game characters, and digital sneakers and so on. For Example, you can turn your favorite artwork like this and turn into an NFT.
A world without NFTs
Today, content creators face a lot of problems. With the advent of a lot of content building platforms, their works on one platform can be copied and be pasted on the other platform. Funny enough, people even copy content and still post it on the same platform as the real creator without an acknowledgement.
The content creators also do not make as much as they are worth. The platforms with which they circulate their contents always take a large share out of their earnings. You can imagine how a creator who is supposed to earn $450,000 dollars per year now going home with less than $350,000 dollars at the end of the year. Trust me that would surely hurt!
How NFTs work
Just the way transactions are stored on a distributed ledger on the blockchain, the NFTs are also stored in the blockchain. This ensures that they are secure and cannot be tampered with. NFTs are mainly stored on the Ethereum blockchain although some other blockchain networks like the Flow blockchain and Solona blockchain supports NFTs.
You can create your NFTs from objects like:
· Art
· Music
· Sneakers
· Virtual Avatars
· Collectibles
· GIFs
· Videos
What are they used for?
Like I earlier said, content creators are plagued with plagiarism and piracy on their contents. Artists can create digital form of their artworks and place them on the blockchain. The presence of the NFT on the blockchain network ensures their work cannot be stolen or duplicated illegally.
They also ensure that the Content creators are paid royalties once their work is sold. The fun part of this is in the Ethereum blockchain, when the new owner of an NFT resells it, the original creator receives a royalty. That’s so cool!
The truth be told, people make a lot off reselling NFTs. On Twitter, there has been tweets about people quitting their jobs after earning money from NFTs. While some people are into buying and reselling of NFTs daily, others are rather interested in having a collection of them.
How to create an NFT?
The first thing to do is to determine the blockchain in which you want to mint your NFT on. The Ethereum Blockchain is popular for NFTs and can be seen as the best for it (not considering the high transaction fees). You can mint your NFT on the following blockchains:
· Binance Smart Chain
· Tron
· Tezos
· Polkadot
· EOS
· WAX
To create an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, you be required to create an Ethereum Wallet that supports NFTs and an account in an NFT market place that supports the use of Ethereum. Popular examples of Ethereum wallet provider is MetaMask and Coinbase. The biggest marketplaces for NFTs are Opensea.io, Rareible and Foundation.
You can then free to upload your image/Video/Artwork on Opensea.io. The process of minting is free but you would be asked to pay some basic fees. These fees are the extra minting costs, also called gas fees on the Ethereum network. The fees can sometimes be low as $50 and can be high as $600 some other times. But it’s worth it, isn’t it?
How to Buy an NFT?
You might not necessarily be a creator, you might just want a collection of NFTs or you want to go into the NFT flipping business. You just have to create account on an NFT marketplace i.e Opensea.io and an Ethereum Wallet provider like Metamask. You can then have access to buy from the thousands of NFTs on the Opensea.io/asssets page.
The rise of popularity of NFTs is similar to the rise of bitcoin in the last few years. Although it seems like the whole NFT story is about stupid rich people paying a lot for Jpegs, NFTs are bound to change the way we perceive ownership of assets in the upcoming years.
