How To Create On-chain NFTs with Solidity
Incorporating user content into an NFT at mint
Having been some time since I’ve written anything blockchain or NFT related I figured an update was in order.
At the time of writing this my first NFT article, Creating Generative Art NFTs with Python and Solidity, has over 80k views; many of which resulted individuals, companies and dev teams reaching out for blockchain development or consultation services. Thanks to readers sharing these articles I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of interesting projects — today I’d like to share the details of one such project in particular. The client request in this case, to develop an entirely on-chain NFT with the additional capability of adding user content at time of mint.
Off-chain NFTs
This begs the question, aren’t all NFTs on-chain? Well, anyone who has worked on an NFT project on the Ethereum blockchain can tell you there are real limitations with regard to on-chain data storage; this is prohibitively expensive and most NFT projects store both image and metadata files off-chain. Typically the only data we see stored “on-chain” is an immutable hash to our metadata (our tokenURI) — The easiest way to describe this hash is a link to our actual NFT, the difference here being that a hash is dependant on the…
