How do you mint NFTs?
This is not financial advice.
Minting an NFT means making an NFT for the first time on a blockchain. You can turn things like art, music, event tickets, and other digital assets that you already own into NFTs.
Some of you might wonder why you’d want to learn how to do this at all? Well, for one thing, you might be an artist, a musician, or someone who makes things and wants to sell them and get repeat royalties from future sales. Or maybe you’d like to buy a certain NFT from a collection that will be out soon? You can do any of the above if you know how to mint.
“The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.”
— Henry Ford
This article hopes to simplify the 7 main steps to minting NFTs. Here we have featured the commonly used platforms, wallets, cryptocurrency, and blockchain, although there are many viable alternatives for you to choose from in the ecosystem.
Here’s how:
Step 1: Get a crypto exchange account
Getting a crypto exchange account, such as Coinbase or Coinhako, is the first step towards minting your NFT — or doing anything in crypto. You’ll need a crypto exchange account to buy Ethereum, to cover the cost of minting NFTs
Step 2: Buy Ethereum
You’ll need an NFT marketplace, just like Amazon, to purchase and sell NFTs. Transacting in an NFT marketplace will incur fees. Buy some Ethereum to pay for these fees.
Step 3: How much Ethereum will you need?
You’ll have to pay “Gas Fees” as the cost necessary to perform a transaction on the blockchain. How much Gas fees depend on how busy the network is. Gas fees per transaction could be worth $3 or $3000 (0.0016 to 1.6 ETH at today’s price) Sometimes, people will not mint when the gas fee is too high and will rather wait until it gets cheaper
Step 4: Get a crypto wallet
You need a crypto wallet to work in the NFT marketplaces. MetaMask is a wallet that has more than 10 million. active users. It’s a browser extension for Chrome. Wallets require you to set up a password and “seed phrases” to keep your money safe.
Step 5: Send Ethereum to your crypto wallet
- Next, put some Ethereum in your Metamask wallet
- To send Ethereum, go to the “send” or “withdraw” tab on your exchange, which allows you to send funds to your Metamask.
- You’ll need :
- The amount in Ethereum you want to send and
- our Ethereum public address
Step 6: Sign up for OpenSea using your Metamask
- “OpenSea” is by far the largest of NFT marketplaces
- On your browser, unlock MetaMask with a password
- Go to opensea.io using the same browser where your MetaMask is installed
- Go to Profile
- Connect your wallet (almost done)
- Fill in your details on OpenSea
- You’ve now signed up on OpenSea (done)
The next step depends on whether you’re a Creator or a Collector of a brand new NFT project
Step 7A: Collector: Minting an NFT as a Collector of a newly launched NFT project
- Find your favourite NFT project (eg nftcalendar.io)
- Most mints happen at a specific launch day/time on the Project’s website.
- You typically need to:
- Know which blockchain the mint is occurring
- Connect your wallet
- Click a button to mint the NFT
- Pay the mint and gas fees
Step 7B: Creator: Minting an NFT as a Creator of your very own art, music, digital creation
- Go to Opensea. Click “Create”.
- Upload a supported file such as an image, video or music.
- Give your NFT a name & description.
- NFT is now up on Opensea. To list it for SALE, click “Sell”.
- OpenSea will ask you to sign on to your MetaMask wallet for various things including one-time wallet initialisation.
- Pay the mint and gas fees
So there you have it. I hope this gives you an overview of what it takes to mint NFTs. Although, for those who aren’t ready to sell their creative work yet or those who would rather buy NFTs from a secondary marketplace like OpenSea; you don’t need to mint them.
“Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.”
— John Maynard Keynes
What has been your experience in minting NFTs? Share your story.
#web3 #nft #metaverse #blockchain
This is not financial advice.
About the Author:
Norliza is Decentraliz — a Marketing Evangelist making the leap into Web3. She hopes to help the community and ecosystem through learning on Web3, NFT, Metaverse & Crypto. She is also a Certified Information Privacy Manager and has a deep appreciation of Data Privacy by Design when building businesses. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing
