NFTs are a vital form of blockchain-based asset. Their rise in popularity signals that blockchains are moving beyond cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, governance tokens, and utility tokens. In this technical tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an NFT and deploy it to the Ethereum blockchain.
Before looking into how to create an NFT, it’s essential to understand exactly what an NFT is. NFTs are non-fungible, or unique, tokens. Non-fungible items are not interchangeable. This means holders are concerned with which specific token they hold, not how many. Trading cards are one excellent example of what an NFT could represent. To dive deeper into NFTs, check out What Is an NFT?
Minting is the process of creating an NFT. This is when a digital asset is stored on the blockchain. It’s important to know what is being stored during the minting process. It could be an entire work of art, in which case the entirety of the NFT and its metadata is stored “on-chain,” or it could be a reference to information stored off-chain using a tool like IPFS. Regardless of the data being stored, the simplest way to think about minting is as the process of creating an NFT.
Minting an NFT on OpenSea is straightforward. It consists of two steps. First, connect your wallet to OpenSea. Once your wallet is connected, click “create” and fill in the relevant information. Note, if you don’t have a collection, you may need to create that first. There are instructions in the “Collection” section to help. If you want a more programmatic approach to minting NFTs, deploying a smart contract to a blockchain like Ethereum could be a better option
So you’ve decided you’d like to mint your first NFT. How do you get started? You could use an NFT marketplace like OpenSea or mint directly onto the blockchain via a smart contract. Let’s take a look at both.