How to Create NFTs for Fun and Profit, Maybe

It seems that theveryone makes money with NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, those digital works of art that have been labeled the next investment craze. Everyone except you. It’s the same feeling you had when you realized GameStop’s Stock was one thing and you missed the boat to sail to easy riches. Bitcoin too – had we only kept our stupid mining utilities on our PCs running 24/7 ten years ago.

But the latest get-rich craze is now upon us. Now you too can own a digital asset legitimized by the blockchain: wild and wacky objects like a New York Times column ($ 584,000), 81 Deadmau5 pictures ($ 50,000), or you know who ($ 501,000). (Yes, someone paid seven Teslas’s value for an “authentic” version of that pop-pie cat, whatever the authentic meaning here..)

There are a lot of issues surrounding NFTs: what you Actually get your money’s worth, what you can do with this item, what it means when a million duplicates of your original also exist in the real world, what means that when the source of your expensive NFT (like a popular digital collectible card site, for example) no longer exists in ten years, the copyright issues involved when someone creates an NFT of the idea or someone else’s work, the environmental problems linked to the cost of energy of play in the blockchain …the list goes on.

If you don’t care about it all and you just want to learn how to create your own get-rich-quick NFT or have a little fun, you might be surprised how easy it is. And, spoiler, it’s not free – at least, not if your NFT sells.

Listing an NFT is as easy as eBay

I’ll start with an assumption: that you want to build your NFT on the Ethereum (ETH) network, where most people play these days. As a result, you will have to pay for gas-a amount that varies depending on network congestion, designed to cover the cost of your calculations on the blockchain. In other words, you can’t use a script to generate 100,000 NFTs in the hope that you can sell a small handful to make money. Rinse, wash, repeat; you would pay a small fortune for this scenario –unless you switch to a service like OpenSea.

“The new collection manager allows creators to make NFTs without any upfront gas cost, because NFT is not on-chain before the first purchase or transfer.

We call this lazy hitting. It decouples the on-chain broadcast of your NFTs from the metadata. “

Back to creation. To keep it simple, we are going to create an NFT on Mintable, one of the ‘household names’ of NFT marketplaces that makes it easy to launch your own item into the blockchain without paying gasoline to launch the list. Start by creating a free account on the service, which will ask you to enter a verification code sent to your email address. Easy.

NOText, create a MetaMask wallet to use with the service, where your digital currencies will live. You will start by installing a browser extension:

To set up a new MetaMask wallet, you will need to submit a password. In return, you will get a “seed sentence,” which is a list of 12 random words. Write that down somewhere; it is your backup code that will allow you to access your wallet in case you ever lose said password. You will then need to confirm the said start phrase to continue:

Once you’ve done that, your wallet is good to go:

Go back to Mintable and click on “Mint an item”. You will be asked to choose if the NFT already exists in your wallet (it does not) or if you are creating a new one (you are). Mintable will use a gas-free NFT by default – remember, this is where you can download anything you want, and it won’t go into the blockchain (and incur a fee) until ‘it is sold or transferred. If you want to do things the old-fashioned way, click the slider to switch to Advanced mode, where you can select the transaction template instead. (Hello, upfront fees.)

You won’t have to connect your MetaMask wallet to start filling out the details of a gas-less NFT. But you might as well just register one step in and click on the big purple “Connect wallet” link in the top right corner of the site. After a few clicks, you will be ready.

As for the NFT, your screen will look like this:

Fill in the details, add your file, add any preview images you want to use, add a description, and choose whether you want the copyright to the item to be transferred after the sale is complete. You can then set a fixed price for the item, configure an auction, or choose a hybrid of the two. And that’s about it; it’s also easy to list an eBay item.

Earning (or losing) money costs money

Whichever platform you use, make sure you’ve done your homework and fully understand what you’re getting into. and what you will be responsible for selling NFTs. Including gas costs, all the transaction fees that a service takes as part of an operational cost (like eBay), and how commissions work for future secondary sales. What do you get? What does the service get? You could very well end losing money even if you make a successful sale, which will be difficult enough in itself.

But hey, that’s the nature of the game. It’s a hot market right now if you can get the right products., but he can have just as much impact backwards for people caught in the hype cycle with little to show. Good luck to you, fortune seeker.