What is NFT ? | Demystifying NFT for Artists
An induction manual on crypto art and basics of NFT by NFT Malayali.
What is NFT?
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) are digital assets that can be created, sold, or bought through online marketplaces that are built on a public blockchain platform. Artists use NFT as an ownership contract that is linked to their publicly hosted digital contents like video, image, or music and transfers the NFT to the buyer as a certificate of ownership. This certificate of ownership is not the same as copyrights but more like an autographed content from the creators. The creators are guaranteed to get royalties from the secondary market or any other sales thereafter with help of blockchain technology.
What is blockchain: Blockchain is a record book or accounting ledger which records all transactions and contracts in a secure decentralized manner maintained by the public. Therefore transactions can never be erased.
What is Ethereum and Bitcoin: Ethereum and Bitcoin are the two most popular public blockchain platforms. Bitcoin can only process transactions while Ethereum can support smart contracts. Since the creation and transfer of NFTs require smart contracts, Ethereum is the most used platform for NFT.
What makes NFT unique: Every NFT is a contract with a unique ID that links to the location of artwork and embeds a digital signature of the creator. Even though the artwork can be copied, they cannot copy the digital signature to create another NFT. Therefore each NFT is unique to the creator.
What is a marketplace: A marketplace is like an e-commerce website that is built on top of the blockchain platform for non-tech-savvy artists. They can use the marketplace to create, sell or buy NFT.
Can my NFT art be copied or downloaded: Yes, anyone on the internet can download your digital content if you uploaded it as NFT, but they cannot imitate your digital signature to create another NFTs masquerading as you.
Are NFTs private: No, NFT contracts are recorded on a public blockchain. Anyone on the internet can view the contract and see the details of the transaction including the link to original digital content, creator’s address, buyer’s address and price of the content/artwork, and so on.
Glossary
Collector: One who buys NFT
Reserve Price: Starting Price of an NFT
Bid Price: Amount bid by the winning bidder
Minting: The process of uploading and creating NFT
Listing: The process of setting a reserve price and listing your NFT on a particular marketplace
Shilling: The act of promoting your NFT directly under a collector's public post or tweets
Burning: The process of deleting the NFT you own.
Crypto Exchange: An application using which you can buy cryptocurrency
Wallet: An application that holds your cryptocurrency and make payments in any marketplace
How to submit work
- Create a wallet eg (Metamask for Ethereum blockchain)
- Signup on any Crypto Exchange eg (Wazirx for Indian bank transfer, Coinbase for VISA credit card users)
- Buy your cryptocurrency and transfer it to your wallet
- Go to the marketplace website and connect your wallet
- Upload your work and mint (pay with cryptocurrency)
- List your work (pay with cryptocurrency)
- Any additional payments depending on the marketplace contract
Choice of Blockchains and Differences
There are mainly 2 generations of blockchain. The first generation including Bitcoin and Ethereum uses the Proof of Work protocol to validate transactions. Which is very slow, costly, and consumes large amounts of electricity. But they are also very secure, most adopted, and popular.
The new generation of blockchains like Tezos, Binance Smart Chain uses the Proof of Stake protocol to validate transactions. This is comparatively faster and cheaper.
Reasons for people to choose Ethereum
- More collectors
- Sell for a higher price
- More chances to last for a very long time. If the blockchain disappears, the NFTs minted on the blockchain will also disappear.
Reasons for people to choose new blockchain
- Faster transactions
- Cheaper to mint and buy
- Environmental concerns
Market Places
- Nifty Gateway — https://niftygateway.com/ (Ethereum)
- Makersplace — https://makersplace.com/ (Ethereum)
- Superrare — https://superrare.co/ (Ethereum)
- Foundation — https://foundation.app/ (Ethereum)
- Knownorigin — https://knownorigin.io/ (Ethereum)
- Rarible — https://rarible.com/ (Ethereum)
- Opensea — https://opensea.io/ (Ethereum)
- Hic et nunc — https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ (Tezos)
- WazirX — https://nft.wazirx.org/ (Binance smart Chain — BSC)
- Liquidfty — https://app.liquidifty.io/ (Binance smart Chain — BSC)
Type of work ( 2D/3D Art, Music, Photography)
The type of content or work that can be minted as an NFT, in our view, depends solely on the creator. The NFT space holds an unlimited and untapped avenue of possibilities. At any point of the workflow, more than the artwork, we feel it’s the artist who brings and adds value to the same.
We do not intend to advocate nor promote a specific NFT Marketplace or Platform through our blog. The choice of the NFT Marketplace lies entirely with the discretion of the creator.!
- Opensea (one-time payment) and Rarible don’t need an invitation.
- Foundation requires an invite to join as a creator.
- The rest of them are application-based.
Wallet Basics
Your account on a blockchain is basically a pair of keys — namely public key and private key. As the name suggests, a public key is used to create your account address which is shared with others to receive payments. A private key is used to digitally sign any transactions originating from your account. Since these keys are very large alphanumeric characters that are hard to remember, the wallet application will provide you with a 12 or 24 set of English words called “seed phrase” or “passphrase”. When you first create your account it is very important to safely store this seed phrase hidden from the outside world. In case you delete your wallet application due to some reason, you can always recover your account with the “seed phrase”.
To have an additional layer of security the wallet will ask you to lock your account with your own password or fingerprint. Every time you initiate a transaction you will have to use this password or fingerprint to sign the transaction. In conclusion, seed phrases and passwords are the only things you need to remember. The seed phrase is eternal, while the password can be changed anytime.
Examples on Ethereum
Public Address: 0xDC25EF3F5B8A186998338A2ADA83795FBA2D695E
Public Key: 048e66b3e549818ea2cb354fb70749f6c8de8fa484f7530fc447d5fe80a1c424e4f5ae648d648c980ae7095d1efad87161d83886ca4b6c498ac22a93da5099014a
Private Key: 09e910621c2e988e9f7f6ffcd7024f54ec1461fa6e86a4b545e9e1fe21c28866
Seed Phrase:
apple banana chair table fan pen fear jump quick brown lazy girl
Community
How to engage in a community and thereby improve your personal branding as a creator?
All the technical side of the engagement such as setting up a wallet, buying crypto, minting your NFT is by far the easiest of steps that one can do. However, to score a sale on the NFT marketplace is not as easy as pie as most would assume it to be.!
To make things easier, consider this perspective. If you happen to be a collector of something, even in the real world, would you be willing to invest in an artist who is not active or who doesn’t engage with the community ?!
There is an interesting twist to this as well in the NFT marketplace. At times, one may come across some whale collectors who happen to amass NFTs or artworks quite randomly without studying the artist thoroughly. But we in the community would refer to it as sheer luck!! A real collector will always conduct a deep and comprehensive study about the artist that they are planning to invest in. They might keep the artist on their radar for months and evaluate the progress and activities of the artist in the social media and then and then only will they invest. This would not be limited to the marketplace actions of the artist but to a much broader spectrum involving the artist’s social media etiquette and image and the contributions of the artist in the community as well.!
A lot of you reading through this manual would have jumped into this because of the money factor. If you are in it, only for the sake of monetary benefits that are derived out of NFT, we have witnessed a lot many case studies to ascertain that you shall fail in the long run.
All you need to do is improve your brand and be genuine in what you are doing.
Some real examples — Profile identity, Linktree, Behance portfolio
Everyone cannot be a Beeple and you are not expected to be one either.!
You can craft yourself an amazing branding. The first step would be creating an identity for your profile/portfolio. Simple steps would be keeping the same username, profile, and cover photo across every platform. This would in turn offer a proper identity to your brand. It is an important pointer that even if a person has forgotten your username, they’d still be able to ID you with your display picture most of the time.
Also, it’s recommended to create a link-in-profile for yourself (such as Linktree, Lynkfire, Campsite, ContactInBio, and so on) as a means to connect all your social media profiles and portfolios. This would make it easy for a collector or a fellow artist to connect with you and moreover obtain a good study about you.
More often, collectors tend to time in the artist portfolios in Behance and Artstation than the social media handles like Instagram. This would empower them to understand and evaluate your progress.
What to do and what not to do.
- Be patient- play long term games with long term people
- Share your WHY
- Authentically engage with the NFT community.
- Uplift fellow NFT Artists
- Pay it forward to those following in your footsteps
- Be willing to experiment
- Never spam a collector
How does NFT help artists and art?
A great opportunity for artists to improve their brand value and to showcase their talent to a global audience. More than the monetary gain, consider this as an opportunity to express ideas and to connect with a global community.
It’s a great space for traditional Fine artists to sell their artworks and to collect some capital for their bigger projects.
Collectors are investing in an artist more than the art itself. So building a good profile on the major social media platforms matters a lot. And remember to share the behind-the-scenes and work in progress videos as well to build credibility to your work.
We encourage artists to speak up in public forums to share their stories and process of artworks. Join our ‘NFT Malayali’ club in the clubhouse.
The NFTs grant the owner (i.e the artist) distinctive and comprehensible proof of ownership and rights to the artist; because the artist who initiates the minting is always listed as the original owner of the digital artwork linked to the NFT.
NFT royalties grant its owner a proportion of the sale price each time their NFT creation is sold in a marketplace. NFT royalty payments are perpetual and are executed by smart contracts automatically. With most marketplaces, you can choose your royalty percentage. 5–10% is considered a standard royalty.
Intro About NFT Malayali
NFT Malayali is a global collective of Malayali artists from all genres in the crypto art space. Through NFT Malayali, we aim to bridge the gap between an artist and the crypto marketplace.
Mission: At NFT Malayali, our mission is to provide assistance & awareness to the numerous talents from Kerala on the NFT space. Thereby making the crypto art platform accessible and available to all Malayali artists irrespective of their technical know-how on the medium.
Vision: To foster the development of the Malayali artist community from all genres in the digital era by aiding their visibility to the global art connoisseurs and fraternity. Being the best choice calls for impeccable perfection, home for ingenuity & perseverance so that we assist good collectors to invest in good talents.
Meet the team
Melvin Thambi — Co-founder
Anantha Krishnan Nadamel — Co-founder
Adeeb Abdul Salam — Blockchain Advisor
Mahesh Krishnan (Bohomonk) — Content Creative
Shaarif Nazir — Event Moderator
Albin Thomas — Discord Admin
Contact hello@nftmalayali.com for any support and to share any ideas/feedback.
Connect with us : Discord : NFT-MALAYALI#3436
Let’s all unite under #NFTMalayali
