Own your art, Own your smart contract
OpenSea, Foundation, Super Rare, Looks Rare and other platforms are now used by thousands of artists to mint their NFTs and to sell them. These artists own the art but donât own the smart contract they used to mint their art. They donât have any control over it. Hence, today we will present you Manifold, a solution for artists and creators to own their smart contract without the need to code.
Manifold allows you to prepare for your project by working using drafts and allowing creators to edit the metadata before the mint date.
To sign up on manifold youâll need to sign a message and provide an email address. You have to provide a valid address since thereâs a confirmation email.
Once you signed the message and clicked on the confirmation link manifold sent you by mail. You can open the Manifold Studio and start creating your smart contract.
By clicking on âStart new contractâ, youâll arrive at the following page.
Youâll have the choice between âERC721â and âERC1155â tokens. These are two token standards for NFTs with different proprieties. The ERC721 standard was the fisrt standard allowing the minting of NFTs. This standards allowed tokens to be unique, limited in quantity and tradable.
The ERC1155 standard was introduced by the Enjin projectâs team, a block-chain gaming company. In simple terms, it brought batch transfers to NFTs and the ability to have different types of tokens in the same smart contract. The ERC1155 supports multiple tokens in a single smart contract whereas ERC721 needs a smart contract for each token. ERC1155 is cheaper and more efficient than the ERC721 standard hence we recommend it for your smart contract. Yet, ERC721 is the most used standard and is considered a norm in the NFT industry.
For this article, we decided to use the ERC1155 standard. After choosing a name and a ticker, we deployed the smart contract to testnet. When deploying on Ethereum mainnet, youâll only pay the gas fees. Manifold doesnât charge any fee for their service.
After deploying your smart contract, youâll be able to see this when you open the âMy contractsâ page.
The user experience is very enjoyable since the steps are easy to follow. Once we click on the contract, weâre asked to âmint new tokenâ which will lead us to the next page where we will be able to upload the art, specify the quantity and the description. You can also add an external link (to your website) if you wish to do so.
You are therefore able to mint to your wallet or airdrop it to a specific wallet. The origin of the token is the smart contract and the smart contract is yours.
OpenSea recently implemented «Mint with Manifold», learn more about it here
