How to Register as a TopBidder Artist from Scratch
Step 1: Install the MetaMask wallet
Link: https://MetaMask.io/
Click Download Now
Select the corresponding plug-in according to your browser and install it
Click Add to Chrome to start installing the plug-in
Add extension, wait for it to download and automatically complete the installation
After installation, you can see the little fox avatar in the plug-in bar at the right corner of the browser. Enter the next step
Step 2: Generate mnemonic words and back up them securely
Mnemonic words correspond to multiple sets of private keys, through which the ETH address can be generated in batches. However, if the mnemonic is lost or known to others, the assets on these ETH addresses can become inaccessible or stolen. In addition, the wallet may be lost if MetaMask malfunctions or crashes. Be sure to save your mnemonic words to a safe location offline by copying them by hand, by disconnecting smart phone, or by using a mnemonic steel sheet.
If you’re using it for the first time, select Create a Wallet
Agree to Plug-in Licensing
Create a personal password to open your wallet on a daily basis
Reveal the secret backup phrase, please read the tips carefully!!
Click the options in the correct order of the mnemonic words and click OK when you are finished.
Tip: Never save mnemonic words to your cloud disk, especially Evernote. There have been many incidents of private key theft. Do not use mobile message app or email to save or send mnemonic words. Any connected network service is at risk of theft.
Step 3: Get the ETH address to top up your ETH.
On the wallet page, you will find an address which MetaMask automatically generated. You can use this as the main address for TopBidder artist registration. Click Account 1 to copy the address for ETH top-up, as the withdrawal address after purchasing ETH (0xE2d1….86B9). This 42-bit-long string of address is your ETH address for registering artists, distributing works and receiving payments for bidding on works. Each operation consumes ETH, so we need to get ETH in advance for the processing fee
There are many ways to get ETH. If you have no previous exposure to digital currency, you can buy it from your friends who have ETH. Or, you can buy USDT/USDC through the fiat currency section of exchanges such as binance.com(NON-US) or coinbase.com(US), and enter the coin trading section to convert it into ETH. Then you can withdraw the coins to the above ETH address to finish topping up.
Transfer the USDT purchased in the fiat section to your coin account and buy ETH
Enter the withdrawal section, type in your wallet’s top-up address, click Withdraw, and wait for completion
Usually within a few minutes, ETH will be injected to your wallet address, and you can start the artist application
Step 4: Submit certification materials to inquire whether you can pass the artist certification
General certification criteria:
Fast certification: If you have been certified as an artist on any of the three platforms: SuperRare / KnownOrigin / MakersPlace, you can get the certification directly. Especially for artists whose works are ranked in the top 1000 in terms of total value, they will enter the fast track.
Social Media Certification: Artists with more than one year of consistent work posting on Twitter / Instagram / ArtStation / Behance and other art platforms, and artists with a certain level of popularity and fan base, and artists in a state of frequent interaction with collectors, fans and other artists will get certified. Please note: Do not use a newly-registered Twitter account to apply. This will prevent collectors from recognizing the true identity of the artist, so the application would be rejected.
Accreditation Committee: Artists can register through the recommendation of professors from renowned art schools such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts and curators. Current students or graduates of professional art schools, such as the University of the Arts Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, Central Academy of Fine Arts, China Academy of Art, etc. can apply for certification through this channel.
If you are not sure whether you’re qualified, you can send an email to artist@bidder.top with the above social media profile, or you can join the WeChat or Discord group to inquire, and the staff will reply as soon as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Is it possible to apply for label certification?
Currently, TopBidder labels are only available for art schools, auction houses, exhibition halls, galleries, and other well-known art institutions.
I have some artworks in my collection, can I distribute them?
TopBidder does not identify whether the distributor owns the copyright of the work, but only the social media profile of the distributor to possess the information of art creation or collection history. At this moment, artist certification is only available to art creators. There will be another service for collectors to distribute in the future.
Step 5: Create an Artist rNFT Distribution Contract
If you’re pretty sure to pass the artist certification, you can start working on the NFT distribution contract registration. By registering as an artist on TopBidder, you are essentially generating a smart contract that belongs to yourself for the distribution of NFT works. The contract stores the artist’s name and symbol, as well as the number and metadata information for subsequent NFT distributions. It also has the most central feature of TopBidder protocol: the Radical Auction mechanism.
All NFTs issued based on these artist contracts will only be owned by the highest bidder recorded natively in the contract after the auction opens, while the artist will receive 50% of the premium for each future bid. In other words, the artist becomes a permanent shareholder of the work, and the work can exist in free form, free from the control of the trading platform.
First, go to https://bidder.top and connect your MetaMask account, check the ETH-filled address and click Next to connect to the site
Click on Register/Login on the right corner to login. Unlike traditional Internet applications, Ethereum native applications are connected through MetaMask wallets, so there is no need to register an account and set password. Your Ethereum address and private key are equivalent to the username and password of a traditional website.
Click on Dashboard below your Ethereum account to enter the artist registration page, which is also the page where ordinary users can set up their personal information
Click the green button Apply Artist to start registration. Be aware that Twitter account is needed here. Please do not use a newly-registered Twitter account to apply, otherwise you will probably be officially banned, and you will not be able to show actual identity to collectors, which will result in unsuccessful sell. For crypto art, social and identical attributes are more important than the work itself sometimes.
#1: Set the artist’s name (2+ letters, underscores, and numbers), click Generate Signature and copy it, then post the signature to the prepared Twitter feed
#2: Click on Copy link to Tweet in the share menu at the bottom right corner
#3: Paste the signature tweet address into the bottom column and click Submit Signature to proceed to the next step. If the signature is invalid or expired, please re-generate sign and retry the above steps.
#4: If the signature is approved, you will be prompted to confirm the artist’s name, click Continue to the next step.
#5: Enter the NFT symbol as the default code for your future releases.
#6: Confirm the NFT symbol, which cannot be modified once the transaction is sent. Click Continue to start initiating a contract registration transaction, pay attention to MetaMask’s transaction link that pops up in the upper right corner. (it may take anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute)
#7: Set Gas Price and Gas Limit in the pop-up transaction. You could set the parameters as below, and click Confirm to package and make transaction.
The transaction cost is equal to Gas Price * Gas Consumption (about fixed 4.5 million), so the only way to save costs is to lower the Gas Price. However, the package will be delayed when Gas Price is too low. If you want to speed up the transaction, you can accelerate transactions that have already been sent but not yet packaged.
#8: After the transaction is sent, it will prompt that the artist is under registration. You can stay on this page for a few minutes. If the transaction is successful, MetaMask will pop up in the upper right corner and this page will also prompt that you’re successfully registered. If the transaction is not packaged for a long time, please accelerate the transaction (see #7). This page can be closed without affecting the artist registration.
#9: After the deal is packaged successfully, click on the deal completion prompt or enter MetaMask and click on this deal. You can enter Etherscan browser to check the the transaction details.
#10: At this point, when you return to your personal interface, you can see that your artist contract has been created. The artist certification still needs to be approved by the administrator, which usually complete within 24 hours. Once certified, the artist will be able to release works with BID distribution rights. You will have the opportunity to do so once every 30 days, which can motivate collectors to bid your works.
Step 6: Distribute your artwork
Artists can distribute works regardless of whether they complete the certification or not. With certification completed, you can distribute works with BID. The process of work distribution is as follows.
#1: Click Publish Artwork in the upper right corner and select corresponding media type. Different media types have different file upload capacity limits. It’s suggested that you add a cover image for video and audio work, so that you can share the poster with this cover.
#2: Follow the instructions below to set up for your artwork. Bidding should start no earlier than the NFT release time. Please reserve more time for content posting which is better for verification.
#3: Preview the work. Click Modify to make any change, or click Publish the Artwork to mint the NFT.
#4: In the pop-up transaction interface to set Gas Price. You can refer to Gasnow.org for more information of the gas prices corresponding to ‘high speed’ & ‘general speed’.
#5: After the transaction is packaged, click Transaction Information to check Token ID (incremented from zero), Token Name (artist name) and Token Symbol (artist symbol) in Etherscan.
#6: When you are prompted that the work is being processed or verified, the work is now in verification status. The verification process takes 1~12 hours, and the work will be published as long as it is legal. After publication, the work geos into the auction status, and the bidding will begin when the opening time arrives.
Other frequently asked questions:
Is it possible to borrow TopBidder’s distribution contract to publish regular NFTs?
Yes, it’s possible. Just set the opening time to some time long after, say 2099, so that the self-pricing mechanism will not take effect until then. rNFT is equivalent to regular NFT and can be listed and traded on OpenSea or other NFT platforms. (Since NFT is based on Ethereum and does not depend on any NFT trading platform, it can appear simultaneously on multiple platforms.) There are no platform fees for issuing NFT at TopBidder (since it is you but on one else who are issuing NFT through your own smart contract), which can save you the minting costs on third-party platforms.
Of course, you can also use this mechanism to set the work to open 1 year later or 10 years later. In that way, when the value of the work increases in the future, you can recapture the value of the work at the time you set. (Naturally, it’s not friendly enough for the last collector before bidding, and it is a way to encourage collectors to change hands more often.)
Can I make any change after the work is released?
It depends on the opening time. The distributor can delete the work before the auction starts, if there’s some mistake in the work or the distributor forgets to check the BID distribution right. Please check carefully before releasing. If you want to adjust the content after auction opening, you need to do it through DAO, which is generally not recommended.
What is a signature artwork?
Each artist can set up a signature artwork which is available for collectors to bid by transferring directly to the artist’s contract address through digital wallets. It has a great advantage in an offline live auction, where collectors only need to have an Ethereum wallet to participate without entering mobile page of TopBidder. This mechanism lowers the threshold for bidding.
What is the Artist Invitation Bonus and how do I invite artist friends to join TopBidder?
TopBidder reserves 1,000,000 BIDs for artists who join in the early stage and have successfully posted their works, and each artist can get 1,000 BIDs. This invitation channel is now opening. Inviters will receive 200 BIDs for each successful invitation (which means registering for a TB artist contract successfully and posting at least one work). Any TB user can invite with his/her exclusive link, and TB team will keep statistics in the background and settle the earnings on the last day of each month.
You can find your own exclusive invitation link by visiting https://bidder.top/#/invites/artists
Send the link directly to artists. If an artist who has not yet registered receives multiple invitations, only the first invitation link will be considered valid and subsequent invitations will not overwrite the first one, unless the artist clears the browser cache or registers on a different computer.
What is the BSC version? Does it have an artist invitation bonus?
bsc.bidder.top is a deployment of TB on the Binance Chain, using BNB as transaction fee payment and bid settlement. Unlike ETH chain which specializes in serving crypto artwork, BSC TopBidder also serves NFT genres such as music, fashion, animation, gaming, photography, branding, etc. It can be the alternative when Ethereum is congested.
Due to the low cost of BSC, bidders can also profit directly from bidding without BID subsidies. There are no plans for the moment to issue BIDs or artist invitation bonus. It’s possible in the future to move BIDs on Ethereum to BSC for governance or farming purpose. ETH and BSC are two separate chains. So for artists who have already registered and been verified on Ethereum, he/she can switch from MetaMask to BSC (visit chainlist.org for more information) if he/she wants to deploy a copy on BSC as well. He/she can transfer BNB (BSC chain) to the previous Ethereum address to pay for the registration and other transaction fees. The verification process is basically the same as ETH.
Contact TopBidder
