Creating my First NFTs

Yesterday I created my first NFTs. I did a bit of research first but this was more of a research my diving in approach.

This is not a "Why you should make NFTs" post or a "You can make a lot of money on NFTs" post. This is merely documenting and sharing what I've found out thus far.

I'm not going to do a "What is a NFT" section. I think a lot of misconceptions of NFTs come from people trying to explain it in a paragraph or two or in 30 seconds in a video. So I assume anyone here already knows a bit about them, and blockchain, crypto, wallets, etc. If not, NFT stands for Non Fungible Token and I recommend taking some time to do some research. If you'd like me to explain it, let me know, I'd consider doing a blog post about it.

So lets jump in!

Mintable.app

The first place I tried out was Mintable.app. I read a little about the site but what made me give them a try first is their gasless minting option. That url will probably redirect if you aren't logged in so you can read more about that this short medium article on the gasless option.

I wasn't too confident how promising this would be so decided to grab something, not necesarrily bad, but that I didn't care too much about so grabbed this:

Original Artwork Appearance

This is a simple PNG piece of pixel art that I created a couple years ago. As you can see, it is a isometric pixel art soccer field.

Minting on Mintabble was pretty quick and straightforward, if you do not get hung up on all the options or overthink it. There are "Advanced" options, which I quickly checked out, but for this one I just wanted to get something minted and see what happens.

In "Easy" mode, with less options, this is all you need to fill out or upload:

• Category (multiple choice)
• Title
• Subtitle
• File. This is "locked" as in only the person that owns the NFT can access or download.
• Preview Image(s)
• Description
• Checkbox for if Copyright transfers
• Price type: Fixed; Auction; Auction with Buy Now
• Price

And it turned out like this:

If you want to check out the page for this NFT you can here: ISO Soccer Field on Mintable. I'll bet it is still for sale, haha!

One odd note is that I was asked to set the price in USD, which I set at $10, but it obviously converted that to ETH so now the price in USD changes evertime I visit the page. I think it would be more straightforward to list the price in ETH.

The Pros

• Free
• Pretty quick and easy
• I joined their Discord to ask a few questions

The Cons

• Look at the Store name near the top: Mintable Gasless Store. So the trade-off of not paying gas fees is that the NFT is minted through their store. I see two issues with this:
  • 95 items in their store have sold. 15,267 have been created. Doesn't seem like good odds.
  • You see that "5% royalty on secondary sales"? That means the creator gets 100% on the first sale, but everytime the NFT is sold again the original creator gets a commission. This is what I see as one of the biggest benifits of NFTs for artists. I asked someone from mintable and apparently right now creators do NOT get commissions when they do gasless minting. I'd assume that 5% goes back to mintable.
• I did not see an option to mint more than one copy of this. I may have found it in the advanced options though, but unclear.

The non-gasless options on Mintable you will first need to create a store. A store is actually a NFT in itself. So you will need to pay gas fees on this but it also raises some further opportunities. I guess if you store gets popular enough you could sell the NFT for the entire store?

Rarible

Next I decided to check out Rarible. First impressions, everything seemed a bit more polished. Of course I knew going in I'd have to pay some gas fees.

For this one I decided to choose an old favorite of mine: Cheese Nightmare

Original Artwork Appearance

It isn't amazing but it is my first big pixel art gif. Look at the date, almost 5 years ago now.

Once again I did not see an option for creating multiple copies of this NFT. Afterwards I realized this was my mistake. The first prompt you select is "Single" or "Multiple". I was thinking that meant multiple as in uploading several different files and doing batch minting.

The options here were a bit different:

• Upload File
• Put on Sale or on mint (keep it for yourself)
• Instant Sale Price (buy now option)
• Unlock Once Purchased. Not sure how this works exactly as if you check this yes you are prompted to provide "Digital key, code to redeem, or link to a file..."
• Choose Collection
  • Create - as in create your own collection
  • RARI. Their default collection. I chose this for simplicity.
• Name
• Description
• Royalties. The percent that goes back to you for each re-sale
• Properties. These are key-value prompts. I did not add any. I guess I could have added height and width. I figured these are more for NFTs used in games and such.

After done the page looks like this:

Here is the link to see this one for yourself: Cheese Nightmare on Rarible.com

I did just notice that it says "Item is not on sale, but you can place a bid." So it sounds like I need to go in there and mark it for sale, or add a price or something. When I go to the page when I'm logged in it says "This token is place don our marketplace." Right now I believe people can bid on it and I can choose to accept or not. It is not like a timed auction though.

I did notice after minting on Rarible the NFT gets listed on Open Sea.

This was another NFT marketplace I was planning on checking out. Maybe first I need to look at the relationship between Rarible and OpenSea.

Pros

• Choose your commission amount. You can actually set it at 100% if you want. Of course it would be unlikely that anyone would resell as they wouldn't get any money from it.
• More polished experience.

Cons

• Two Gas fees. I apologize that I didn't research them both so I can explain them to you, but the first cost me around $7 and the second over $40. These of course fluctuate with gas prices. Maybe it is explained in Rarible's TOS somewhere.
• I didn't see an option to transfer copyrights. That seems like a useful option if you were trying to sell something others could use commercially - music, asset pack, story - and could fetch a high price.

There were other things I considered listing on these Pros and Cons but honestly I didn't dig into Rarible enough. So they are more of questions that I need to dig into first rather than pros or cons.

Conclusions Thus Far

I'd be surprised if either of these sell. Even further surprised if they sell for big or resell multiple times.

I wouldn't expect that though. As I think all seasoned artists know you can't expect to have financial success on your first time.

I think there is great potential here. I'd say there is also a lot of potential to waste decent money on gas fees. Especially with gas fees being so high right now. I hear there are multiple ways they are looking to reduce gas prices in the near future but I'm no expert there either.

This has brought up more questiosn than answers so I'll be looking to learn more!

What's Next

First I will want to learn more about

• Store option on Mintable
• Collection option on Rarible

These will probably cost some gas fees but I feel like NFT buyers typically go after pieces in collections or from artists that have some kind of theme.

I was going to look into OpenSea as well but, as I mentioned, if I mint on Rarible it automatically gets listed on OpenSea. So I'm not sure what the difference will be but might look into that.

I'd really like to make a collection. Not just in the Rarible sense, but like a group of NFTs all with the same theme. So I will also look into options to mint in bulk. Hopefully there are options which reduce gas fees greatly. (fingers crossed)

There are also the following platforms:

• Super Rare
• Nifty Gateway
• MakersPlace

I believe these three sites you have to apply to them all and get accepted. They probably either want to curate artists they think will do well or verify artists are legit so you don't have just anyone uploading work that isn't theirs, for example.

I'm in no rush to apply though as they take a few weeks and I don't really have a portfolio setup. I'll probably just play in the others for a while.

Get in touch if you'd like to hear more!