Create and Sell NFTs with Google Cloud Marketplace Partner Origin
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are capturing the public imagination, unlike anything to come previously from cryptocurrency technology. NFTs are often characterized simply as digital collectibles, e.g. cryptocurrency versions of baseball cards, but there are many other interesting use cases for NFTs.
In this post, I will introduce you to the world of NFTs and teach you how to create and sell your own NFTs using the Dshop e-commerce platform by Origin Protocol. As a partner of Google Cloud Marketplace, Origin is excited to introduce this new blockchain technology to developers and creators using Google Cloud infrastructure.
Introduction to NFTs
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are cryptocurrency tokens that are unique or scarce. When something is fungible, it can be easily substituted by an equivalent. For example, a $5 bill can be substituted for another $5 bill or five $1 bills.
In contrast, NFTs can be unique objects, or 1-of-n objects, meaning only n of that object exists. NFTs have been adopted by the NBA and other sports leagues to represent digital trading cards that have video highlights attached to them.
NFTs are also used to represent ownership of physical objects, especially scarce objects such as limited-edition sneakers or fine art. Another use case is NFTs as access tokens to digital content or real-life experiences. An NFT holder could unlock exclusive or private content on the web or redeem their token as a concert ticket. One important aspect of NFTs is that future revenues or royalties to the creator of the token from sales of the NFT on the secondary market can be programmed into the NFT itself.
Case Studies
Origin Protocol has facilitated two high-profile NFT sales, also known as “drops”. In early 2020, we helped Brave Software, maker of the popular Brave Browser, switch from Shopify to Origin’s Dshop platform for their merchandise store. Brave now hosts their store on a decentralized platform that accepts their native cryptocurrency. Brave held a meme creation contest with their community in early 2021 and created or “minted” 30 NFTs in the form of three 10-of-10 NFTs based on the three most popular entries. This collection of meme NFTs was then listed on their Dshop for sale. All 30 NFTs sold out nearly instantly, showing there is an extremely strong demand for NFTs from their community and demonstrating a completely new form of interaction between software companies and their users.
In March of 2021, Origin broke the record for the highest-grossing NFT sale at that time when a tokenized music album was put up for auction. The sale brought in nearly $12 million and made headlines in industry and mainstream publications, including Forbes, Billboard, and Business Insider. Several different collections of NFTs with unique use cases were sold during this auction. All of these NFTs are freely tradeable and transferable by their owners.
More recently, Origin announced NFT sales with Grammy Award-winning hip hop artist Lupe Fiasco and Internet sensation and professional boxer Jake Paul. We plan to power many more NFT sales on our commerce platform in the future.
Guide to Using Dshop on Google Cloud Marketplace
To get started, we have to set up a Dshop on Google Cloud Platform. The process is fairly straightforward but requires a few steps. We provide both a written guide and a video guide illustrating how to do this:
You can read more about how Dshop works with Google Cloud Platform here.
Create an NFT and add it to Dshop
After setting up your own Dshop, it’s time to create or “mint” your NFTs. You’ll need a Web3-enabled wallet like MetaMask, which is an extension to your browser. You will also need some ETH in your wallet to pay Ethereum network gas fees. Minting NFTs is free on OpenSea, which is a popular NFT platform. A full guide on how to mint NFTs for free on OpenSea is available here and it is important to note that OpenSea primarily supports the ERC-1155 standard. If you want an ERC-721 NFT, you can mint one on Mintable, another NFT platform, for free using this guide. ERC-721 is the older and most established standard for NFTs but ERC-1155 supports more token types and batch transfers. The NFTs you mint are held in custody in your MetaMask wallet and you can transfer them however you like. They are not attached to your OpenSea or Mintable collections or stores.
After you have minted your NFTs, you can create listings for them on your Dshop. To learn how to do this, you can refer back to the video guide, starting at 3 minutes into the video:
We recommend putting a link to the NFT (usually in the form of an Etherscan link) in the description for your Dshop NFT listing so potential buyers can verify its existence and scarcity. Alternatively, you can post the link to the NFT from OpenSea or Mintable or another platform. A buyer will be able to purchase your NFT from your Dshop listing and complete payment with ETH or ERC-20 tokens on Dshop. The buyer will enter their Ethereum wallet address as part of the checkout flow. You will then need to transfer the NFT to them via OpenSea or Mintable to complete the sale. You can do this simply by selecting the NFT and clicking “transfer” and inputting the destination wallet address of your buyer. This transfer will require paying a gas fee to the Ethereum network and is a separate transaction from the payment from the buyer. Congratulations, you are now a successful NFT creator and seller!
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed this guide on how to get started with NFTs. As with any new technology, there is a bit of a learning curve involved. Thankfully, early adoption of decentralized technologies like NFTs is both fun and rewarding and we encourage you to give it a try.
Learn more about Origin
- Deploy Dshop from the Google Cloud Marketplace: console.cloud.google.com
- Launch your decentralized store: originprotocol.com/dshop
- Learn more on our company website: originprotocol.com
