Hey ben here and in today’s video I’m gonna take an artwork of mine and turn it into an unfungible token. I’m gonna do this on wearable.com, together with my Metamask wallet and then I will also safely and immutably store the original artwork in a distributed network using Pinata and the interplanetary file system.
Now in case this does not make a lot of sense to you don’t worry, I’m going to explain the entire process step by step in this tutorial But before this let’s take a brief look at what NFT’s are NFT is short for non-fungible tokens that are hosted on the Ethereum blockchain.
So an NFT is basically a unique digital asset. Like a digital painting or a digital collectible, and by tokenizing your work, you as an artist both ensure that the piece is unique and that you own it, the actual ownership, then gets managed by the blockchain.
Now, if you want to know more about NFT’s watch the NFT introduction video I’ve uploaded a few days ago. The link is in the description of this video and also, in the right hand, upper corner.
Before you can turn a piece of work into an NFT it is important that you are the creator or the owner of the piece and in this case I can prove it because I still have the 3d file available.
So it’s a scene that I have created now almost 13 years ago. Time flies – and this is the actual 3d file that I’ve used to render this thing. I remember it was a pretty complex project for me back then, because I was just starting out in CG. I’m going to export two versions of defined render in the next step…a big one that I’m going to save as a tiff file without any layers… I’ve already done this…. and then a slightly smaller version. For this reason I reduced the size by 50, and then I saved this one as a jpeg file.
In the next step, I go to Rareable which is the first community owned NFT marketplace. Before I click on create, I connect my Metamask wallet with the decentralized application. So I click on connect here. Select meta, mask, confirm this and connect to wearable. In case you don’t know what Metamask is, Metamask is a software wallet that’s available as an extension or as an add-on for the chrome and the Firefox browser you can charge it with ether. Ether is the cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain.
You have two ways to buy ether: you can use your debit card or credit card and deposit either directly into your meta mask, or you can, of course, directly deposit ether by using one of the big exchanges like Coinbase or BitPanda. Either way you have to have some ether in your wallet to come up for the transaction fees that will occur later on when we turn the image into an NFT.
Next, let’s click on create, and here I can choose between a single edition or multiple edition. So multiple addition means that you create an edition consisting of several different pieces of one and the same artwork. So, that’s not what I want for my creation, so I continue with single next we can upload our file, and here we can choose between a png, a gif, a web picture mp4 and an ap3 file, and even if it’s not stated in this list, it should Also work with a jpeg file, so let me try this one here, yeah it does.
I will continue with the jpeg for this demonstration, but I suggest that you export a png file before I continue. Let me point out a very, very important fact here: that’s something that I was already mentioning in a previous video when you turn an image into an NFT.
You must know that the artwork itself does not get stored in the Ethereum blockchain now. What does this mean?
The entry in the blockchain that gets created with the help of smart contracts only consists of a few lines of code, and in this code we have metadata, and this metadata contains the name of the image, a short description and something as simple as a link that refers to a place in the web, where the image is stored and in case of variable, they take care of this storage and they probably also compress the image and for my taste, this does not go far enough, because when I sell an artwork, I also want the buyer to get a high-res version of the image. And for this reason we have the option to check unlock once purchased.
And if you do this, you can add an additional link or a digital key to a file that you store somewhere. And you can then host it on your own server or you could store it, for instance, also on google drive and because this is still not secure and long lasting enough. I will save the high-res version of the image in the interplanetary file system. What a fancy name! So let me explain what this is: let’s open up the Binata website next and like it is stated here: it’s the easiest way to use the interplanetary file system, so an IPFS is a protocol and a peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data.
In a distributed file system and even if the file system is distributed, it’s not a blockchain, but it relies on cryptographic hashes that can be easily stored on a blockchain. Now the IPFS network allows you to address content based on the content itself, so this means that a name or a hash gets assigned to the content and in case the content, let’s say an image changes. Also the hash changes. So it’s not like having a classic url that points to a place where an image is stored. So in case you change the image or you delete the image.
The url always remains the same, and it is the exact opposite with the IPFS network. I already have an account on Pinata, so I go to Pinata upload. I browse for the tiff file. It is this one here and I do not upload it, because I’ve already done this before so I go to the pin explorer here this leaving arcadia, and this is the unique IPFS hash that was created in the network. So this one always points to the leaving acadia tiff file, no matter what and when I click on it and click on the name.
It downloads the image and I can show it in the folder. So it’s this one here and then I can simply right click on the name, copy, the link address, go back to the available website check unlock once purchased, and here I paste the Pinata link. Then I can set an instant sale price, and here I type in something like six. Eighth, as you can see, rare bill takes a service fee of two point: five percent, so I will receive five point: eight five eve, which is equivalent to eleven thousand and four hundred dollars, depending on the current exchange rate.
When I scroll down, I can choose a collection, I keep it on the rarity token, you could create your own token, based on the erc721 standard, so this usually makes sense when you plan to release a collection of similar artworks and then you can enter your own Token name token, symbol, description and the short url, so I’m not going to do this, but I copy and paste the name of the artwork together with a short description and down here. You can also set some properties like the artist and the edition and then let’s also take a look at this royalty field here. The percentage value that you enter here defines the amount that you get every time your artwork is resold.
So this means that you now sell it once to the first buyer. Then you get 100 minus the 2 service fee and from this point on you get 10 of every future safe. When I went through the minting process before I’ve entered 20 instead of 10, which is actually already a little bit high, so I will keep it to 10 because it seems to be standard at the moment and if you think about it in case you get 10. For every future sale, then this is already a lot.
All that’s left to do now is to make sure that your wallet is still connected, and then you can click on create item this uploads your files and prepares them for minting. This can take a few seconds once it is done uploading the files.
You can then start minting a token now. The thing is – and this is not visible in this list anymore, because I already went through this process before so when you interact with wearable. For the first time, you need to confirm the interaction with the app, so this means that you also interact with the blockchain and, as you know, every time you do something on the blockchain it costs gas fees. So, in this case, wearable does not charge any fees for the confirmation, but again when something has to be written into the blockchain, it costs gas fees and I was paying 15 dollars before now.
Once the interaction contract is confirmed, you can finally start minting. So this brings up the Metamask wallet again, as you can see, the contract interaction costs, zero ether because variable does not charge anything to mint token, but, as you can see, we have really high gas fees here now there are a few options to lower this gas fee so the first one can be found under edit. You can set it to slow instead of fast or average. So this means that the transaction goes through quite slowly. It takes a few minutes or even up to an hour.
So you could pick slow here. You could also set the gas price yourself, so if you enter something low like 60, the price goes down quite a bit, but if this value is too low, then the transaction probably does not go through so be careful with these values. As you can see, my balance is still insufficient. I get this alert here because I only have something like 14 euros in ether in my wallet, so I would have to load my wallet with a little bit of ether to complete this transaction. So I’m going to reject it and then I also close this window now.
Fortunately, I’ve already completed this process before so this means that the NFC is already in my wallet. The minting process has cost me around 18 euros yesterday. So, quite a lot and when I go to my account, you can see that the NFC is listed under on sale, because I have set the price to 6 8 and when I click on it, we have the title at the top: the price, the description we Have unlockable content? I am the creator and I am still the owner. I have set a 20 royalty for every resale and I have made this NFT on the wearable collection from here.
We can directly move on to OpenSea by clicking on this icon, and I have also already listed the NFT on OpenSea. Open c is already connected to my wallet at the top. You can see that it was created on available here. We have the title the price in eth. Currently, I have no offers the trading history shows that I have created this NFT yesterday and I have also listed it for sale yesterday now the thing is – and this is also important when you list the item not only on wearable but also on OpenSea.
You have to go through this confirmation process again, so this means that there are some setup fees. It is free. But again, when you interact with the blockchain, it always costs gas fees, and in this case it cost me another eight euro or ten dollars to confirm the interaction on OpenSea and an additional 66 euros. This is again close to 80 us dollars to also list it on the OpenSea marketplace. As you can see, minting NFT’s on the Ethereum blockchain is quite expensive at the moment, mainly because the blockchain is under heavy load.
I do not expect the prices to go down in the future, but let’s see how it looks in a few weeks or in a few months now, that’s it for today’s video. I hope I was able to give you some insights on this topic. If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section below this video. If you like the content thumbs up subscribe to my channel and see you in the next one.
transcript provided by Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFD_8oDxw1k
