Ever since last year, when high-dollar sales of NFT made headlines, people have grown more curious about the non-fungible token phenomenon. For some, the fascination lies in how something you won't ever hold in your hand could fetch such a price, while others set out to learn how they, too, could cash in on the NFT craze.
Meanwhile, creators of digital art finally felt validated. "Our time has come!" might have been the broad sentiment of the NFT community as they set themselves in the race to become the next big name in generated art.
All of this hype overlooks the fact that NFTs have been around since blockchain technology made minting, trading and collecting them possible. It also disregards the fact that there is more than one type of NFT.
| NFT Fundamentals |
|---|
| - An NFT can be a photograph, video, audio or music file; a document, a real-world asset or generated art. |
| - Two essential components of NFT minting are blockchain and cryptocurrency. |
| - The easiest NFTs to create are documents, photographs, videos and audio files. |
| - Real-world asset NFTs are a relatively new type of NFT. |
| - Generated Art NFTs are the most popular and most valuable NFTs. |
Have you caught the NFT bug? Do you, too, want to buy, sell and create NFTs?
Even if you're level of interest still lingers at the 'merely curious' stage, learning how NFTs are created may spur you on to try creating a few yourself.
What Can Be an NFT?
For now, we'll leave aside Everydays, The First 5000 Days digital artwork that sold for 0ver 69 million dollars. Despite the piece setting two NFT records - the highest price paid for an NFT and the first-ever NFT to be auctioned through the legendary Christie's auction house, Everydays represents a hard-to-attain standard for novice NFT creators to meet.
Let's talk about another NFT that netted a substantial haul last year: Disaster Girl.
This snapshot, of a young girl in front of a burning house who seems to signal that she authored that disaster, didn't start out as a non-fungible token. In fact, when that picture was uploaded in 2008, blockchain and cryptocurrency were but a theory.
Disaster Girl went viral in no time flat. The snap quickly became a widely shared meme and even won prizes.
Around the same time, a funny family video was uploaded to YouTube. Baby Charlie had bitten his brother's finger and the older boy was decidedly not happy about it. This video became a sensation; at one point claiming the title of most-viewed on the platform. So popular was it that it took Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to knock the brothers off the Number One spot.
Charlie Bit My Finger was minted and, last year, sold at auction for thousands of pounds.
These two high-profile NFTs prove that, while digital art makes up by far the largest stock of NFTs, not all NFTs are generated art. What, besides such art, can be an NFT?
- photographs
- videos
- audio files, either music or narration
- documents
- real-world assets
It's encouraging to know that, even if you're not a Photoshop expert, you too can create NFTs. And, if you knew the many things you can do with NFTs, you would try your hand at NFT creation as soon as possible.
Two Fundamental Requirements
Everyone understands that NFTs are digital representations that exist in cyberspace. It's also given that you must have some sort of connected device and, as an NFT creator, some software (or coding ability) to translate your artistic vision into digital artefacts. Those are all implicit in NFT creation. Amidst all the headlines about hefty paydays, other NFT-creation facts receive less emphasis.
Regardless of which type of NFT you want to create, you need to know how cryptocurrencies work and a bit about how blockchains.
To be clear, you don't have to know anything about either of those to create digital art. However, if you want to market your work, you have to know about NFTs' existence on a blockchain and how cryptocurrencies are used to market NFTs.
Here's how it works.
Once you create a collection of digital art, you must upload them to an NFT marketplace. This process is called 'minting'; it describes transforming a digital file into a digital asset that can be bought, sold or traded. In effect, minting makes it possible to attach value to an NFT, and it allows tracking the ownership of such assets.
To gain access to a blockchain, you have to have a cryptocurrency account. To do so, all you have to do is find a trustworthy cryptocurrency exchange and swap some real-world cash for coin. Note that most NFT transactions are conducted on the Ethereum blockchain so directing yourself to their site to pick a wallet and buy your coins is the easiest way to get started.
Opening your account and selecting your cryptocurrency wallet may be the easiest part of becoming an NFT creator but making money from NFT isn't difficult, either.
The Easiest NFT to Make
As Charlie and Disaster Girl show, if you can take a snapshot or shoot a video (and digitize it, if need be) you can make NFT. Document NFTs and audio files are also easy to create. But easier isn't always better.
One reason for that is: unless you and/or your work are already famous, your single NFT is likely to linger on the marketplace for far longer than you'd like. Collection is the name of the game.
Check here to learn about cryptocurrency on Superprof.
NFT enthusiasts prefer perusing a collection of works by an artist or group of artists so they can select the piece that calls to them the loudest. Also, collections offer buyers a chance to own a part of something much bigger, even as their piece is distinct and unique onto itself.
The automaker, Henry Ford, was famous for saying "You can have any colour Ford you want, as long as it's black.". That worked well because he had a corner on the automobile market; he didn't have to offer any type of variety.
By contrast, the NFT market is the epitome of diversity so, unless you and/or your work ride into it on real-world renown, it's best that you aim to create a collection of easy-to-make NFTs to sell.
Otherwise, you should consider creating one of the next two types of NFT.
Generated Art NFT
Art NFTs are, by far, the most popular and lucrative tokens, and they make up the largest share of the NFT market.
If you're feeling a rising dread because you've never created a piece of digital art, you're reacting too soon. There is a learning curve but, overall, learning how to create such works is not as challenging as you might think.
Some artists code their pieces from whole cloth, either in JavaScript, Python or whichever programming language they're most familiar with. If you know a bit about Python, you might explore PyPi's database to see what modules you can find to advance your digital art creation.
If you don't know the first still about coding, you're still not out in the cold.
Today's visual art creation software packages, Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Art Weaver and others make creating generated art a simple matter of knowing your software's capabilities and applying them to suit your artistic vision.
If you've played around with such software but aren't wholly familiar with it, there is no lack of tutorials to learn the techniques you need to create troves of generated art.
You might baulk at the price of art-creation software - Photoshop's biggest drawback is it's subscription-based, but you needn't worry about costs, either. There are plenty of free and open-use software packages you could use until your skills and earnings justify spending money on a software license.
And, before you invest in the tools you could use to create generated art, you might check out the best places to buy NFTs to get an idea of what's out there.
Real-World Asset NFT
Granted, the biggest splashes in the NFT world are artistic in nature; until recently, few people have thought to legitimate their real-world possessions on a blockchain. However, minting real-world assets is becoming one of the fastest-growing sectors of the NFT market.
Counterfeiting has become a billion-dollar industry - and a billion-dollar problem.
Designers have long railed that pieces from their collections are copied and sold, often with the designers' names attached. This practice makes millions for the counterfeiters while the designers have little recourse in protecting their work, other than through legal channels.
It's not just designers who suffer from this practice. Imagine laying out a wad of cash for a snazzy Michael Kors bag or a signature perfume, only to find that you paid good money for a fake.
Purchasing real-world asset NFTs guarantees that the item you buy is genuine because the designer mints their collection with a certificate of authenticity. Not a printed copy that could be forged, either; the piece's authenticity is recorded on the blockchain, and is thus inviolable.
Should you own unique, collectable pieces; maybe jewellery, furniture or art that's been in your family for generations and you wish to safeguard your assets, you could mint them and...
Whether you decide to sell them, hang onto them or use them as collateral for a loan, you're assuring the NFT community and yourself that your assets are authentic.
Now, join the conversation: how does one buy NFT in the UK?
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