Minting my first NFT collection

Introduction

So I thought I would find out how to create my own NFTs - and have now put live my first collection using the OpenSea platform.

I first looked at Rarible back in the spring of this year when I heard a lot about NFTs on twitter, this was before they went crazy with all the Bored Ape Yacht Club hype, but didn-t pursue creating anything on there due to the insanely high gas fees at the time. It would have cost me about $100 to mint each individual NFT.

Since then I found the OpenSea platform which allows you to create NFTs on the polygon network which is an ethereum side-chain where there are not any gas fees at all - hurray!

Minting my first NFTs

My first collection is based on the classic bitcoin logo, and I started with creating a version of the logo made out of ASCII text by using python code to change different parts of the image into ASCII text, which I think looks cool.

Then I experimented with more variations using neon and different advanced effects. After a few glitches with freezing the metadata, the collection is now live and ready for sale. I've called it A Bit of Bitcoin and you can see my collection here on OpenSea. If you like any of them please do favourite them (or feel free to buy one!)

So what's all this hype about NFTs?

NFTs, short for Non-Fungible Tokens, are unique and non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger (Thanks Wikipedia) - I will be writing a more detailed introductory guide on them soon. I first heard about these types of tokens when I discovered the turn-based blockchain game Axie Infinity, (see my guide to Axie Infinity) where you purchase the game characters called Axies, which are actually NFTs.

When I first looked at Rarible, I discovered the CryptoPunks and the very cute Cryptokitties which have been around for years. Since then, there has been explosive growth as mainstream media has picked up on this trend this year. According to market data provided by Nonfungible.com, the “NFT market generated over $2 billion in sales in the month of August alone, with the crypto art world accounting for another $670 million in NFT sales“.

Recent trending collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Fidenza are selling for eye-watering prices - you can find the real-time figures on OpenSea on their stats page, which shows their top NFTs ranked by volume, floor price and other statistics. At the time of writing, Cryptopunks have a trading volume of over 550,000 eth which is over $1.5 billion!

Fingers crossed my collection will be hitting these heady numbers soon :0