How Much Does It Cost To Release NFT Art Collectible with Rarible?
Digital art. Is it free to produce? Is creation of non fungible token a time consuming process?
As cryptocurrencies, blockchain tech and especially NFT (non-fungible tokens) is becoming more widely recognised and used these days, my wife Edita decided to step into this new field and explore opportunities.
She is the painter who moved from traditional art to the digital art and I am more of a crypto guy and techie in general. I explained her, that it is possible to create unique digital items on blockchain which cannot be replicated — it’s the most important trait of digital art and collectibles. Why not to combine both? Let’s make some unique digital art which can be collectible!
In my wife’s case this will be series of fish paintings which can be collected like some collectible cards. Idea: new unique fish painting collectible is released every X days, where X is random number between 1 and 365. Each fish will have unique number and creation date. And it will live on blockchain as NFT. It can be bought and resold later to other collectors or just people loving art. Or maybe someone who likes fishing? ☺
I’ve heard about Rarible a long time ago, but never actually tried to create NFT. Now this was a great opportunity for us to try. I suspected, that this may cost a bit because of Ethereum network congestion and high gas fees. This poor crypto (ETH) can’t scale yet, but we have huge hopes for the future!
One of the great things about Rarible is that you don’t even need to register account or undergo some centralised (could this possibly be objective?) vetting process. One of crypto strengths is being censorship free and decentralised, so Rarible goes along with the whole crypto movement. It is one of the easiest ways to create unique digital items — mint non fungible tokens.
It is important to have ETH wallet before using Rarible. The most convenient way is probably create one with Metamask browser extension. It’s very easy to connect to Rarible with Metamask and you are ready to create your first NFT.
Just click “Create” and choose “Single” to create one of a kind piece of art. There is a possibility to create collectibe which can be sold multiple times (chose number of copies during creation, so no more copies than defined number will be circulating between collectors), but my wife was always oriented to exclusivity, so unique paintings is her way do things related to art.
After clicking that button, page opens where you fill in data (up to 10 fields) about your NFT painting, upload picture and click “Create item” to create a non fungible token which represents the single piece of unique art.
After that important button click all the blockchain magic happened — interaction with Ethereum bockchain smart contract. This was 2 stage process. Confirming first stage cost was $12.64 in ETH gas fees. After that, second confirmation with Metamask was needed and it took $80.07 from the wallet. That was a bit more than we thought, but still a lot less, than creating your own smart contract for minting new tokens. If I remember correct, this was quoted to more than $800 in transaction fees, so we decided not to go this route for now. Hopefully these transaction fees will go down with future Ethereum upgrades. It should be a lot less expensive when Ethereum will have smart contracts functionality on proof of stake chain (as others call it Ethereum 2.0). But it looks like we will need to wait at least a couple of years for that to happen.
Right after creating NFT on Rarible, it also appears on Open Sea — largest crypto art, collectibles, domains and other NFTs market. You can check how it looks by clicking here.
You can see, that it has unique token ID on Ethereum blockchain (134471) which can be transfered to a new owner at any time for any agreed price.
Was this a time consuming process to create digital art collectible? NFT creation part was quite fast (just cost the ETH gas fees — in this case it was $92.71), so creating the digital art image was the most time consuming part. Conclusion: it makes sense for any digital artist to spend a little time (and money) to make piece of art unique, as this provides a whole lot more value for the future owner. Without NFT digital art can be easily copied and transfer little value to the new owner when it is sold.
Considering high gas cost while minting new NFT on Rarible, we will try also another platforms and blockchains for the upcoming paintings of this fish NFT collection.
By the way, here you can find all current and upcomming NFTs of this Fish Art Collection.
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