On this page I’m going to walk you through the steps you’ll need to take to create your very own NFT.
The process of creating an NFT is quite straightforward, once you have an account on the OpenSea platform and marketplace. However there are a number of prerequisites to setting up your OpenSea account. You must have a crypto-wallet set up to link to your account, and in order to have a crypto-wallet you need to have some crypto-currency. I purchased a nominal amount for the purposes of this exercise. Follow the steps below to get your finances in place.
Open an account with a crypto-currency exchange platform, this will allow you to purchase crypto-currency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I signed up with Coinbase – probably the best-known such exchange.
There are over 50 crypto-currencies in existence but not all are accepted by every platform. I bought a small amount of two of the most widely used ones Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC).
Next I created an online wallet to hold my digital currency, again there are many options to choose from – Coinbase offer one – but I chose MetaMask as it was recommended by a number of marketplaces such as OpenSea, and it would also allow me to access other blockchain applications.
Once you’ve completed all of the above steps and set up your OpenSea account all you need to do to mint your first NFT is to click on the create button.
The first task is to upload a supported filetype. I chose a jpeg of my own.
Next you name your item and provide a link to your webpage, if you have one.
Then you can provide a more detailed description of the file.
Finally you need to add the file to a collection – the gallery where it will be visible on OpenSea.
You get a few more options to add descriptive metadata and select the blockchain you want to mint it on (it currently offers two options, Ethereum and Polygon) then it’s just a matter of clicking on the Create button to mint your first NFT.
Simple as that…!
Once it’s created you can see further information, such as its Token ID, and the Blockchain that its on.
My final gallery now has four NFTs. Once I initialise my OpenSea account I can set my price and make them available for sale.
To set the price and actually start to trade your NFTs you’ll need to initialise your OpenSea account. The cost of this once-off initialisation process (itself a blockchain transaction) fluctuates depending on market forces such as network demands. Gas Fees. The first time I tried to do it (a Friday afternoon in Ireland, just as the US West Coast would be waking up) the cost was estimated as 0.055631 ETH or $234.50. The second time it offered me a price of 0.03255089 ETH or $131.74. Either way it was a bit too much to spend for one college assignment – I might leave that to another day….
Stop Press (Kinda) – OpenSea has recently updated some of its functionality and you can now create NFTs on the Polygon blockchain WITHOUT having to pay gas fees. They’ll still appear in your collections, on the regular OpenSea marketplace. Here’s a link to the steps on their help page No Gas.
