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Discovering NFTs and the use of free and opensource software, chronicling the creation of a collection of NFTs to deploying a smart contract and selling the collection on Opensea. This is an ongoing project and is currently about the three quarters through. I will however chronicle from the start.
Is it easy enough to create and list an NFT collection on Opensea?
Yes and no.
Can we create and sell an NFT collection and sell on OPENSEA for free?
Again, yes and no.*(see at the end)
You don"t need to be an IT expert to create and sell an NFT collection. There are many tutorials available on YouTube and the necessary coding for creating generative artwork is freely available. Where changes to the code is required, it is pointed out too and simple to change.
There are some challenges though, though not insurmountable. One for example is finding actual useful tutorials. I've watched numerous tutorials, only to get to some point in the tutorial to find out I have to make use of some or other web-based service, a paid for service of course. I have no objection in principle to web-based services charging fees and I'm sure they deliver good services, but keep in mind our goal here is to see whether it is possible, armed with a laptop or desktop only, to create and sell an NFT collection with basically no capital investment.
All of these challenges will be explored in this post series.
What is an NFT (Non Fungible Token)
This past December I saw a few post on social media about NFTs. Being somewhat of a pleb when it comes to Internet Technology I had no idea what NFTs actually are.
Curiosity got the better of me and I started digging.
In layman's terms, here is what I understand an NFT to be:
- NFT stands for Non Fungible Token
- An NFT is anything that can exist digitally on the internet. I can be an artwork, drawing, piece of music, a video, an E-Book etc.
- Any of the above needs to be minted though before it qualifies as an NFT
- Minting is done on a blockchain
- Minting assigns the NFT a value in crypto currency
- The rarity, owning the original minted NFT makes it valuable. I like the example of many people owning copies of a particular Rembrandt painting , though only one person owns the original of that particular painting (the original being highly valuable)
- Ownership of the original is validated on the blockchain
- Collections are generally made up of what is called generative art, that is a basic art piece with each one in the collection differing in some way from the other
Creating an NFT collection
In the next posts in the series we'll explore the tools and creation of an NFT collection.
Success conditions would be the following:
- All software used must run on Linux (if you are using Windows or iOS don't worry, it will also work)
- All software used must be free and opensource
- No or little fees
- Deploying the NFT collection to Opensea for minting
See you next time and don't forget to follow Crypto Bay Yacht Squadron on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Crypto_Bay_Y_S
- It appears we'll need some MATIC tokens to deploy a smart-contract to Opensea. Very little from what I can gather, only about one dollar's worth or so. This is incidentally how I ended up on PublishOx. So far PublishOx and PIPEFLARE are the only two legit site sites where I have managed to gather tokens. I have tried numerous faucets such as matic.supply etc, as far as I'm concerned they are all scams. I'll believe otherwise once I either manage to gather tokens myself or I am physically present to see someone actually getting any tokens from these faucets. So don't bother posting links to these scams in the comments.
I've been on PublishOx for about a week so far and managed to gather $0.04 in Ethereum and $0.05 in Ampleforth through daily tipping alone. It will take a while to get to the withdraw limit so if you're interested keeping your NFT project completely free I'll advise reading PublishOx and tipping daily.
