Develop your first NFT project with JavaScript

While the NFT markets have cooled down since their high in summer this year, Non-Fungible-Tokens continue providing a unique opportunity to create new business models, and make existing businesses more efficient.

A lot of the focus of the NFT hype was driven by speculation and so-called pfp collections, artworks with the primary purpose of being used as a profile picture. The future of NFTs is most likely driven more by the utility they provide.

If you have an idea for an NFT project you want to build but aren’t sure where to start, this post is for you. It will outline shortly the benefits and limitations of NFTs, and then introduce you to building your first web3 project all without having to learn smart contract languages.

Benefits and limitations of NFTs

In general, benefits of NFTs include:

• Ownership: NFTs allow holders to own a digital token and create a trail of provenance that cannot be forged
• Authenticity: Together with the above, NFTs facilitate establishing if an artwork or token is authentic or not. This is traditionally quite the challenge when dealing with digital items as they can easily be faked.
• Transferability: Unlike digital items you might earn in a game, NFTs can be transferred without constraints.
• Increased efficiency: On NFT marketplaces artists, creators and audiences communicate directly with each other without intermediaries. By digitizing physical assets as tokens, transactions become cheaper and authentication improves.

Yet, in their current form, NFTs also present some limitations:

• Metadata storage: Not much talked about, yet a crucial part of NFTs is how their metadata is stored. The challenge with metadata storage is that storing big files on-chain is expensive. And to tap into alternatives like IPFS developers will often rely on centralized gateways such as Pinata. In those cases, when the gateway is down, users can’t access their files, which has happened even with artworks from famous artists like Steve Aoki.
• Liquidity: The blue chip collections like BAYC and Azuki are fairly liquid meaning holders can easily sell their NFTs when they want to. However, for a vast majority of NFTs liquidity is a challenge that can’t be easily overcome.
• Lack of utility: PFP collections were great for awareness, yet eventually holders realized that they did not always get their money’s worth of utility. Another challenge with utility is enabling it in a native way where users can, for example, lend their NFT without having to give up control.

Building your first NFT project

When considering building an NFT project, the most popular platform remains Ethereum, or more recently Polygon. Both of these chains require programmers to create smart contracts using solidity to mint collections of NFTs.

Solidity: is the programming language of smart contracts running on Ethereum and EVM-chains. It was developed by the Ethereum Foundation and designed to be similar to other languages like C++. Thousands of smart contracts have been written in solidity since its inception.

However, learning a new language to build a new project might not always be sensible. And when learning Solidity, it’s still confined to the EVM ecosystem whereas other languages like RUST could be leveraged anywhere — outside and inside web3.

That aside, smart contracts are in their early stages, and complex pieces of software to code. Smart contract exploits are the most common type how protocols and users lose money when interacting in DeFi. While security will improve over time, there is no guarantee that any given smart contract is safe from hacks in the future.

What if you didn’t have to use smart contracts to build your first NFT project? Instead of learning solidity, you could just use JavaScript to get started.

Getting started with Ternoa

A few words about Ternoa: Ternoa is a next-gen NFT framework empowering anyone to build their first web3 project. It’s built using the substrate framework and provides a vast set of pallets (modular pieces of code) which you can use to create anything you want on Ternoa.

With a focus on NFT utility, Ternoa offers way more than just your standard NFT. You can create rental NFTs, soulbound tokens, and in the near future secret NFTs which can transmit confidential information. Through partnerships with leading storage networks like CRUST, Ternoa ensures that your metadata will be replicated, and remain available for hundreds of years.

The easiest way to start developing with Ternoa is our JavaScript SDK developed based on the PolkadotJS API. If you just want to start off by creating some NFTs, you can try our Hub which is making it easy to mint your first NFT or create a marketplace from scratch.

Lastly, you might notice that some of the functionalities such as Soulbound tokens or Rental NFTs aren’t available yet on the Hub. If you do want to give them a try, and experience the power of pallets, head to Polkadot.js.org, pick our alphanet, open the developer tab, click extrinsics and then choose what you want to create.