Brief Guide and Introduction to NFTs; What you should know.
NFTs is making artists and art resellers money, causing an impact on the way arts are being traded, and is here to stay here.
NFTs has made millions for art creators and resellers drawing lots of attention to itself recently with the Twitter CEO selling off his first-ever tweet for a whopping sum of $2.9 million and a digital artist who recently sold his NFT piece, “CROSSROAD” for $6.6 million and the Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS : THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” sold for a massive sum of $69.3 million.
In this article, I’m going to tell you what is NFTs, their difference from traditional artworks, how to make, trade, and where to trade them. So let’s dive in.
What are NFTs?
So what are NFTs, NFT which is an acronym for ‘Non-Fungible Tokens’. These are digital assets with proof of ownership recorded on the blockchain.
The blockchain is the same kind of technology being used by many cryptocurrencies which you know today (Ethereum, Bitcoin), it is a kind of a public ledger keeping records of who owns what, it is secured and can’t be forged or manipulated easily.
How is NFT different from Traditional Art Works?
NFT is like any work of art but digital. examples are memes, pictures, music and audio records, video footage, virtual experience, virtual items that are available online.
Since it is digital, it could be seen by anyone, captured, downloaded, or screenshot and even be printed out but NFTs has unique information which proves its authenticity and ownership which makes it trade-able (transfer of ownership).
Trading NFTs?
So by now, you should know what NFTs are, what they are made of and they can be traded online.
So how do you trade the works you have made, first let’s start with how they are being made and recorded on the blockchain.
It is the by a term called “minting”. Minting is a process that is done online on the platform you want to trade your NFTs on. The various platforms will guide you on how to do this and it’s quite simple and straightforward.
After minting on any trading platform, your artwork will be ready to be sold.
Buying NFTs
In as much as some platforms try to make to NFTs available for purchase by the use of credit cards and other mundane payment methods, the most platform requires buyers to have a digital wallet and use cryptocurrencies to pay for NFTs they want to purchase.
Where can you buy and sell NFTs?
Mind you there are platforms that only support and accept certain native tokens (like FLOW and majority Ether) of the blockchain they rely on, for the purchase of NFTs on their platform and some accept credit card payments.
Popular Platforms where they trade NFTs are;
This platform sells a kind of NFTs, that’s sports clips and video highlights, cards with sports highlight moments on them which are released for sale in drops. Total trades worth over $230 million have been traded on this platform.
2. OpenSea
OpenSea is a platform that's based on the native token called Ethereum. It is the largest of all the NFT market places and it prides itself in this and charges nothing to make NFTs on their platform.
It is very big and allows sales of all kinds of collectibles, CryptoKitties, trading cards, virtual worlds, etc as NFTs.
3. Foundation
Is another popular NFT trade platform that allows creators to put their works for sale. It is concerned with the economics of artworks and its platform is very open to creators.
4. Rarible
Allows creators to upload images of any kind including blank images as NFTs. Their platform provides very low barrier entry for creators which is a concern for some people.
Other platforms where you can trade NFTs are;
5. Nifty Gateway
6. Mintable
7. Zora
8. SuperRare
9. BakerySwap
10. KnownOrigin etc
Conclusion
As said at the beginning of this article NFTs as a form of making and trading artworks is here to stay, is a good thing that artworks can now be treated as digital assets and right of ownership transferred, this will help creators as another form of trading and making money off their creations.
It is a good win.
Note: Nothing stated here in this post or any of my posts should be taken as financial advice.
PS: I’m a technical content contractor. If you are interested in working with me, you can shoot me a straightforward, real quick email soamodu@gmail.com.