NFT Art: Make and Mint Your First Digital Asset

1. Introduction: I'm excited to teach this class because I get endless questions from people all the time about what is an NFT, how to mint an NFT. To settle this once and for all, we'll do it here at Skillshare. [MUSIC]. Hi, I'm Pplpleeasr NFT artist and Digital Creator, and now a Skillshare teacher. I was working as a digital visual effects artist for six years until the summer of 2020 when I became unemployed. To make a living for myself I started creating animations on the side and through that, I also learned that NFTs exist and it really blew my mind that people were willing to pay money to own my digital art. I started minting NFTs as well. Then some 20 animations later, I made an animation and it sold for more than half a million dollars, and then it just became my full-time career. There's a lot of information circulating the web about NFTs, and the goal with this class is to condense all that information into one place that's digestible and provide an easy step-by-step so that you can know how to make your first NFT. I'll help you understand the minting process and the technical knowledge required to mint an NFT from start to finish. I'll also help you understand the importance of community, connecting with them, and authenticity within the space. This class is great for anybody who's never minted an NFT before, or if you're just super curious about the space in general. If you're ready to do your deep dive into NFTs, let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Getting Started: Welcome to the class, and we're going to dive right in about all things NFTs. The big why of why you should care about NFTs or Web3, is that we're in a new era of monetization for our creative work. Now independent creators and creatives have more ownership and authority over their work as well. Not to mention, each time your work is resold, you will get resale royalties as a result of that, which is it always should have been. Because the work is digitized, you're opening up to a larger audience and global market that you can directly sell your work to. Before NFTs, I was working as a visual effects artist, just doing lighting composing down the 3D animation pipeline. I worked on various movies in Hollywood such as Batman versus Superman, Star Trek Beyond, Wonder Woman. But I was just a small cog in a large machine and mostly just executing on other people's visions. Anybody who has worked in the visual effects industry knows that it's not the most stable. You're often having to look for work from contract to contract. That's pretty much what I was doing all the way up until 2019. I had finished up my contract at Blizzard, and I was looking for my next gig. I finally found one at Apple and I was supposed to go work there as a digital artist. But then in 2020, the pandemic happened. Right before I was supposed to start, they rescinded my offer. Then I was unemployed for a little over a year after that. That's how I transitioned my career into making animations as a side hustle for a lot of DeFi protocols and also selling NFTs. Then, slowly it just became my full-time career. DeFi is short for decentralized finance and it is a subcategory in cryptocurrency. What DeFi protocols are, are essentially software that mimic traditional banking products, but are done on the blockchain and automatically. That's why they are decentralized. Because there is no centralized entity such as a bank that is doing these things such as loans or exchanging of funds. My first gig in making a DeFi animation was back in 2020. This was when I was still looking for jobs. I was casually browsing crypto Twitter and I noticed that there was a lack of creative talent within promotional materials within the space. I joked show my friends saying that they should just hire me to do their animations or promotion material because I needed a job. [LAUGHTER] Then one day, one of the protocols called Iron finance, put out a tweet asking if anybody was good at video editing and my friend referred me. Then I made my first animation for DeFi. That's where it all started. That was not my first dip into crypto though. My first dip into crypto was in 2017 when I had saved up a little bit of money from working with jobs in visual effects and I was looking for alternative ways to make passive income such as investing. Obviously, I knew nothing about stocks or anything to do with traditional finance and traditional financial products. Naturally, I migrated over to read it and I found the cryptocurrency sub read it. Then from there I went down the rabbit hole of learning about cryptocurrency and how to invest there. Then so I bought my first cryptocurrency back in 2017. I think in 2017, I probably put around $2,000 into various different cryptocurrencies. Then, I think at one point it went up to maybe over $9,000, which was really cool, but then I never sold. Then the bear market hits. Then [LAUGHTER] I think at the lowest point, it probably went down to $600. But I actually just never sold any of them. Then so when the bowl mark had picked up again in 2020, I exchanged all of the other cryptocurrencies such as Vechain, Ripple, and different coins into Ethereum that I've been holding Ethereum ever since. Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. You can think of it as a virtual computer that is run on a bunch of physical computers or on the Cloud. People can build apps which are built with smart contracts on Ethereum. It's basically a virtual computer. NFTs are goods that you can exchange on the specific blockchain. You can also exchange NFTs on other blockchains too. But for this class we're focusing on Ethereum. Cryptocurrency is just like the currency that you can use to exchange these goods. For this class, we're focusing on Ethereum because Ethereum is the most popular blockchain that people are building apps on top of as well as making NFTs on. After my first gig with a DeFi protocol, I made a little animation that they used as promotional material. Then because people in the community, which was so small at the time, thought it was very cool, then very quickly through word of mouth, my work or reputation quickly spread in the space. Then all of the DeFi protocols started hitting me up to make animations for them. Around that time I think I was probably whipping out maybe two animations per week for different DeFi protocols. I think by the time in March 2021, I had probably made at least over 20 something animations for various different DeFi protocols. Around that same time, I had noticed a large surge on interests in specifically the topic of NFTs. I also was minting NFTs since the summer of 2020. Then in early 2021, there began an explosion of interests in NFTs. I saw this opportunity to make myself also known in the NFT space on top of the DeFi animations that I've been making. When I started minting NFTs back in 2020, nobody knew really what they were. Everybody including my friends and family thought I was crazy when I was talking about them. Now fast forward just a little bit over a year later, I think everybody has at least heard of the term NFTs. Many headlines and news and has all stars on SNL episode about NFTs. Basically a lot has happened, but we're still early. I'm creating this class because there's obviously a huge curiosity around the topic of NFTs, but not a lot of firm resources out there that teach people knowledge about NFTs. The hope with this class is to get that settled for people so that you can understand it a lot better. So much has happened in the space and there's so much information out there. But really my hope with this class is to take us back to the basics and just focus on why this technology is revolutionary. What you should care about and how you can mint an NFT properly. By the end of this class, you'll have all the knowledge you need to mint your first NFT properly, set a reasonable price for it. My goal here is really just for you to find your first collector. For this class, you're going to need a computer, a stable Internet connection, and some money to buy Ethereum with if you want to mint an NFT for real. If you don't want to spend any money, that's fine too, because I'll teach you how to go on the test net and requests some test Ethereum, which is free. Last but not least, you'll need some visual medium or art that you're going to upload as your NFT. I know there's other types of NFTs out there such as music, but in this class we're going to focus on something visual. Join me in the next lesson where we're going to deep dive into what is Web3 and everything surrounding it. [MUSIC] 3. Get to Know Web 3.0: In this lesson I'll teach you on a high level, what is Web 3? What the Blockchain is, and go into a little bit more detail about what an NFT is. At the end, we'll explore some cool NFT projects together. What is Web 3? My personal favorite definition is from Chris Dixon where he says, Web 3 is an Internet owned by users and builders and orchestrated with tokens. The main difference between Web 2 and Web 3 is that Web 2 refers to anything that came from the social media era, for example, apps like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the difference between Web 2 and Web 3 is that all the apps on Web 2 are mainly centralized, meaning that one centralized company will have full control and ownership over everything and all the content that's on there. Web 3 is more decentralized, in which all the users and builders are uploading their data on the Blockchain and it is more permanent, transparent, and also decentralized. The main cons of centralization is that you don't truly control or own any of the content that's being put out there. Let's say you're an influencer on Instagram, your entire resume and body of work exists as post on Instagram but because Instagram is a centralized entity or company, they can decide to shut your account down or take away your content at any point and there's no really anything you can do about that. Therefore, in Web 3, where content is decentralized, there is no centralized entity or company that can take control or ownership over your work. As a creator in Web 3, you have full ownership over your creations and it also creates new opportunities in which you can monetize and make money for yourself with your work. Web 3 is all about things like efficiency, transparency or smart contracts so that you don't have to worry about things like bank transfers or signing a bunch of unnecessary paperwork. Everything that happens in Web 3 mostly happens on the Blockchain. Now we're going to talk about what is the Blockchain? The Blockchain is the underlying technology that enables trustless transactions so that things like cryptocurrency and NFTs can exist on top of it. There's a lot of benefits to the Blockchain, such as the fact that it's not manipulatable and once data is stored on chain, it can't be reversed. As well as the fact that everything is transparent for everyone to see. As a creator, you don't have to go through other distribution platforms. You can sell directly to your collectors and earn royalties. Once a creator gets a taste of money in Web 3, it's really hard to go back to traditional ways. For example, because with NFTs you're getting paid right away when the sale goes through. You don't have to do things like the awkward freelance stance of reaching out to your clients and being like, "Hey, when am I going to get paid" and then waiting a few weeks or sometimes months for that to even happen. My previous work, I was doing, mostly executing other people's visions and it was less creatively stimulating for me but now my day-to-day looks a lot more different where I'm always working on projects that interest me and inspire me and I'm not having to do work just for the sake of making money to pay rent. This is just a really brief overview of the Blockchain. If you're interested into diving into the nitty-gritty of everything, in the Resources tab, there's a link to a bunch of blog posts that really do a deep dive into what is the Blockchain and a bunch more resources about the space. Now that leaves us to ask the question, what is an NFT? NFT is also known as non-fungible tokens, allows you to assign or claim ownership attached to any digital asset, and it is tracked on the Blockchain. Now there's a lot of different Blockchains out there but for this class we're going to focus exclusively on Ethereum. Ethereum is like a virtual computer that has run on a network of physical computers on the Cloud and you can build apps on it using smart contracts, which is code or create tokens which are either fungible like cryptocurrency or non-fungible like NFTs. The difference between fungible and non-fungible is that something that is fungible means that you don't care if it is one or the other. For example, if you're going to a store and you're using a dollar bill, you don't care if this is a dollar bill that came from 1979 or 1992. Whereas non-fungible means that within each token that is unique, you care whether or not this one or the other one, NFTs are non-fungible because you care whether or not your NFT is a people pleaser NFT or if it's an NFT from 7/11. For this class, I'm focusing on Ethereum because Ethereum is the most popular Blockchain that people are building apps on, as well as making NFTs on. How do you compare between the different Blockchains? You can think of the different Blockchains like cities. Ethereum would be most taken to some place like New York City, where it's the most popular. Everybody has heard of it. Everybody loves to visit or live there, even though it's expensive, you're also more likely to get noticed if you set up a shop there. NFT could represent digital arts such as gifts, collectibles, 3D objects, videos, music. They can also represent real-world items such as tickets to an event or access to something you've created. The benefits of creating NFTs are that you can easily prove you're the creator. You determine the scarcity. You can earn royalties every time the NFT is resold. You can sell the NFT on a marketplace or directly. You're not locked into any platform specifically and you don't need middlemen to intermediate your sales. The world of NFTs is not just about making sales, but it's also more importantly about the community that you build. With building communities in Web 3, there's a sense of ownership and belonging and also people seek out communities that have values that resonate with them. When people buy NFTs, each project has their own specific cultures. In my opinion, one of the best ways to understand the space and participate is just to become a collector's. Go out there and collect your first NFT and then you'll know quickly what the experience of becoming part of a community is like. Everybody thinks about collecting NFTs differently, but the way that I like to think about it is that you should never spend money, especially more than you're willing to lose. When I buy an NFT, I'm buying it because I like it and simply because I want to collect it, not because I'm trying to make money off of it. Similar to when you're going to a store and you're buying a hoodie or a computer, you're spending that money, not expecting anything in return. I've been collecting NFTs for a while and I want to show you some of my favorite NFTs as well as other examples of utility NFTs. Here we're on OpenSea and this is the site that most people like to use to browse NFTs and these are some of the NFTs that I've collected over time. Here you can see all different kinds of NFTs. Some of them will take the form of digital art, such as this one. This is a video of art that I collected from an artist named Aberfresh, which is a looping video. Now, there's also other NFTs for example, these are 3D object NFTs. These are a little bonsai trees that you can use to decorate your metaverse apartment with. What I mean by that is there are other NFT such as RTFKT space pods, which look like this. Now what does it mean to own this NFT? They're literally 3D virtual spaces that you can own and go into. If I show you a live demo of this, you can enter somebody's space pod and it's fully interactive and here you can see an apartment looking like space and within this NFT, you can also hang and display your other NFTs as art on the walls. Lastly, there are also utility NFTs such as these membership cards and here is an example of one. This typically give you access to something that you might be interested in or a community that you want to be a part of. That's just a tip of the iceberg of what is possible and all the different kinds of NFTs, but really anything is possible within the space. Now I want you to go to the Resources tab where you're going to find a link for all the people that I recommend following within this space, just to get a sense of what it's like to be part of the community. In the next lesson we're going to explore if NFTs are right for you, so join me there. [MUSIC] 4. Are NFTs for You?: In this lesson, we're going to be looking into whether or not NFTs are for you and what mindset you're supposed to be having and just really getting a better feel for what you should be mindful of before you get down this path of creating NFTs. NFTs have essentially teleported me to places in my career that are not easy for people to get to very quickly in a normal sense, and some examples of this are the financial benefits that it has provided for me, or specific opportunities such as collaborations with magazine covers as well as other publications. My experience is pretty unique. Part of it has to do with me being in the right place at the right time. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be the same path for everybody. But I'm optimistic about the opportunities that it's going to open up for you. The whole industry is really new. They don't teach crypto, or NFTs, or most things about these topics in school yet, even at all. Every year that you don't jump into web free is another year that someone else is gaining experience in the University of Web3 that's being taught and real-time right now. We're literally in the infancy of this booming industry right now. Everyone is paving a path in real-time and you can be a part of the innovation and all the changes that are happening in this industry right now because it's so new. There's no handbook telling you this is how you do Web3. Web3 is all about inspiring people creatively, whether that's through art code or how to integrate things with blockchain technology. People are constantly coming up with new ways to expand the industry. The next question is who are NFTs for and what mindset do you need to transition to this industry? One of the main paradigm shifts that people face is just needing to accept that digital assets are a thing. I think that this is less difficult for people who have played video games in the past, for example. If you've ever played Neopets, you're probably very aware of the concept of digital goods. The concept of value is really a social one, and people attach values to things. Just like I can go out to a store and buy this vase that has a plant in it, it really you could say, serves not much utility, but I'm trading money for it because I believe it has value, and really it's the same thing with NFTs. Right now, most NFTs are often referred to as JPEGs and still images. But really the hope is that as we move towards the future, people are getting more and more of their heads wrapped around this concept of NFTs having utility. Right now we understand NFTs mostly as digital art. But the future could really look like NFTs being integrated into so many aspects of our daily lives. For example, your passport, your driver's license could be NFTs, your birth certificate could be an NFT, and concert tickets could be NFTs, and there's so much more. We're at this really cool tipping point in time right now, where you're seeing all of these corporations and industries pouring their interests over to NFTs and the metaverse. Facebook literally changed their name to Meta, and all of the other really smart entrepreneurs and innovators are also looking closely at the space. If these are not telltale signs of now being a good time, I don't really know what it is. It's really just to show you that this technology is probably here to stay. If you're somebody who likes to think about the future, challenge the status quo or re-invent social structures to be more efficient and better. Or if you're an independent thinker or a creative person, which is why you're here, or just really tech savvy. This could be a really interesting space for you to explore. But there is a financial commitment to consider when you're thinking about this space. The idea is that whether you're buying or selling NFTs, real money, that is translated into cryptocurrency is required to do any of these actions. If you're selling NFTs there's these things called gas fees that you have to pay, which are essentially transaction fees. But we will talk more about that later. If you're buying NFTs, you also need cryptocurrency to buy them, and this is how I like to think about it, is that when I buy something, I'm buying it because I like it and not because I'm thinking of it as an investment. Just like when I go to a record store and I buy a vinyl, if it happens to go up in price later, that's cool, but that's not why I'm buying it now. I'm buying it because I like the music or the artwork, and that's really how you should be thinking about NFTs. Success can look really different for all different people. But success in this space is really very similar to success in Web2. Let's say you're trying to be a successful artists on Instagram. First, you need to find your niche. You also need to market yourself in the right way and you need to build the following, and those things are very similar to Web3. The only difference is that in Web3, at least in this point in time, you need to specifically market yourself or find people who are crypto native and willing to spend cryptocurrency. What that means is, even if you're somebody with millions of followers on Instagram, that doesn't necessarily translate one-to-one over to Web3, because most of your followers are probably not people who are crypto native or going to want to spend cryptocurrency. There's a lot of conversations happening about NFTs right now. For example, their impact on the environment or whether or not it's a scam. But I think what's most important is for you to do your own research and find what you're comfortable with. The reality is, a lot of people are always just scared of things that are new and emerging, and it is often referred to something that the industry people call FUD, which stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. I personally think it's pretty important to not just read the headlines, but do your own research and explore. If you're interested in new technologies and you're curious about everything we've talked about so far and you have some disposable cash or income to buy cryptocurrency with or you don't and you just want to play around with the testnet, I would say you're ready. Before we go into the next lesson where I help you set up your wallet, I've shared some links on blog posts under the Resources tab that dive deeper into the topics that we've talked about. Come and join me in the next lesson where I'm going to help you to set up your wallet. [MUSIC] 5. Set Up Your Wallet: In this lesson, I'm going to help you set up your crypto wallet. A crypto wallet is essentially your online bank account, as well as your identity about where you store your cryptocurrency and NFTs. That's really what the blockchain is, is just a place to store all the lists of transactions that are happening. Let's take a look at what the blockchain looks like right now. Here we have Etherscan, which is the main display layer for viewing transactions on Ethereum, this is the Etherscan homepage. For example, I'm going to go look at my own wallet and see what's happening on there. When you come to this page on Etherscan, you can see very many things. The first thing is an address which shows my wallet address. This is the exact address that I would give to people when I'm telling them if they're trying to send money to me, they would send it here. Here you can see the balance [LAUGHTER] of the amount of Ethereum that I have. I have 4.659 Ethereum in my wallet right now, and that is around $15,000 at current prices. If you go down here, you can see all of the transactions that have happened on my wallet for all of time [LAUGHTER]. Here's something called a Txn hash, which is just a unique identifier for that specific transaction. Here's the exact time of when it happened. For example, where funds are coming from and where they're going to? How much value, how much funds has been transferred? The Txn fee would be the amount of gas fee that was required for this transaction. This page is quite similar to what you would see as a bank account history page where you can see all of the transactions and actions that have happened on the blockchain. Here are the different types, you can see if I sold something on Uniswap if I minted something if I sold something and the amount that I sold it for, it's really just a combination of your online identity as well as bank account. To even have a page like this, you first need to have a wallet. Now there are two types of wallets. First, there's the hardware wallet and then there's a software wallet. Software wallets are also commonly known as hot wallets. A hot wallet is one that mainly lives online just like a browser extension and is usually used for fast transacting. Later I'm going to walk you through how to set up a wallet on a service like MetaMask. Then there is a hardware wallet, which looks like this [NOISE]. They look like USB drives, and where hardware wallets there's two main brands, there's ledger and trezor, and they range anywhere between $60-$250. The main difference is just that the hardware wallet is more secure, but the hot wallet is faster. People typically store their most valuable assets on their hardware wallet, but they also keep a hot wallet with a little bit of cash in it for fast transacting. An example of this would be, let's say Drake is dropping some NFTs and there's only 10,000 of them. Now, there's definitely a lot of Drake fans out there and I really want to get one, but I don't have time to be competing with the other 10,000 people while I'm trying to press buttons on my hardware wallet just to get the transactions through. Therefore, I would use my hot wallet so that I can get these NFTs quickly. Now we're going to move into creating your wallet on MetaMask. We're using MetaMask because it's the wallet that's most integrated with all web free apps, as well as web browsers. The process of creating a wallet starts by downloading MetaMask as a extension for whichever web browser that you're using. In this case, we're using Chrome. We're going to install MetaMask for Chrome. Now that that's installed, I'm going to pin it to my extensions here and we can get started. If I click on this, it's going to take me to a new page and we can get started. MetaMask is going to ask you, are you new to MetaMask? If you not, then you click "No", and if you are, then you say "Yes, let's get set up". Let's create a wallet. You can agree to this, and here you have to create a password for your wallet [NOISE]. You agree to terms of use and create. Now, here's a short video that you can watch on MetaMask to teach you about your seed phrase or your secret recovery phrase on how to keep your wallet safe. Here MetaMask is going to give you a secret recovery phrase, also known as the seed phrase. This is extremely important because it is the only way that you can recover your wallet using the seed phrase. Now we're going to write down the seed phrase on a piece of paper. [NOISE] Now then we have that written down, we can go ahead and confirm the seed phrase again. It is so important that you remember your seed phrase or keep it somewhere secure and safe because if you lose the seed phrase, you will never ever be able to recover your wallet. It's not like Google where you can say, oh, I forgot my password, please email it to me. Nobody is going to email you your seed phrase, so it's all on you. If you lose this, it's game over. Congratulations, you have now created a wallet. When you go into your wallet, you'll see something like this, which actually the more common interface that people use is by clicking on this little "Fox" icon on your browser, and then you will see your account here. This would be the 0x89 something would be your wallet address, which is what we talked about before. Here is the your account balance, so how much Ethereum you have in your wallet? Under here would be all of the tokens that you own. Obviously, we have nothing right now because we just created this wallet. Over here where you see those 0x89.. long stream of characters is your wallet address, and obviously it's very long. Look, if I paste it here. It's an extremely [LAUGHTER] long string of characters that I'll never ever be able to remember. Therefore, I'd like to introduce you guys to something called Ethereum Name Services. This is something that you probably want to consider having. If you head onto their website called ENS domains, you can just Google ENS domains or it's just ens.domains. You can click that button that says "Go to app". Now, what does an Ethereum Name Service? An Ethereum Name Service, also known as ENS for short, is essentially like a URL for your wallet address. Instead of me having to remember 0x89da3b4 and a long string of characters, I can actually create a domain name for my wallet address. In my personal case, mine is peoplepleaser.eth. All ENS domains end with.eth and you can create yours. Simulating creating one, we could say skillshareemily.eth. We can search for it and it's available. You can click on it, and then these are not very expensive, but I think what make your wallet to experience a little better and streamlined. I highly recommend if anybody has crypto that you should get one. Now I want you to go and create your own wallet. Even if you don't want to spend any money, you'll need a wallet to request some test Ethereum to use on the test net to practice venting NFTs which we will talk about later. In the next lesson, we're going to explore different marketplaces, which is where you're going to be buying and selling NFTs. See you over there. [MUSIC] 6. Explore the Marketplaces: NFTs are basically things or stuff that you can sell. Let's say that I made this coaster and I want to sell it online. Now I need to find a marketplace to sell it. There's different marketplaces such as Etsy, eBay, Craigslist, Amazon. Similar to those marketplaces, I need somewhere to sell my NFTs as well. That's what an NFT marketplace really is. Now I can also create my own website to sell this coaster online, but doing that requires me to hire some developers and is more advanced and I also need some backend selling such as Shopify. Therefore, it's probably easier for me to go directly to a marketplace to list my thing for sale, such as Etsy. With NFTs it's the same. You have to choose where you want to sell your goods. For beginners, I would recommend you to find an existing marketplace to sell your goods and then later on with a little bit more success, you can hire some developers to make your own website or your own smart contract. Right now there's two types of NFT marketplaces. There's permissionless and curated. With permissionless marketplaces, anybody can go and upload and mint NFTs, and with curated ones, it's usually gated and there's an application process involved. With permissionless there's a lot of different marketplaces out there, but currently OpenSea, Zora, and Rarible are probably amongst the most popular ones. Let's head on over to OpenSea and check it out. OpenSea is probably the main site that everybody is using to browse NFTs as well as upload. It is both a browser as well as a marketplace. All NFTs that exist on chain are available to view on OpenSea. The most common type of transaction that people are doing on OpenSea are called secondary transactions. What that means is, it's the Web 3 eBay, where the difference between primary and secondary is that primary is when something is being sold for the first time and secondary is also known as secondhand or when it's being sold for the second time and onwards. For most of these marketplaces, you can sell your NFTs in two ways, either at a fixed price or by auction. If you decide to mint and sell something on OpenSea, they will take a 2.5 percent commission fee. Now let's take a look at Rarible, which is another permissionless marketplace. Rarible typically also takes 2.5 percent commission on their sales. One of the reasons why somebody might prefer to use Rarible over OpenSea is that they might like the interface better. The next permissionless marketplace is Zora. Zora currently takes no commissions on sales, which is probably one of the reasons why somebody would want to use it. Here we can see the homepage of Zora and get a feel for how it works. Let's go ahead and explore the curated marketplaces. The first curated marketplace that we're looking at is Foundation. Here's the homepage on Foundation where you can see the featured auction happening right now is literally the coffin dance meme. That's pretty cool. Underneath you can find their trending auctions. The way to go on Foundation is that you need to be invited either by somebody who's already on the platform as a crater or through an invite code. If you can get one of those to be on the platform, that's great and I would highly recommend it. The next curated marketplace is SuperRare. SuperRare is more of a high-end art marketplace. If you see yourself as more of a high-end traditional artist or somebody who has maybe a prominent social following, then this could be the platform for you, but you do need to go through an application process and it's manually curated by their team. The last curated marketplace that we're looking at is Nifty Gateway. It's very popular with celebrities or high-profile artists. There is also an application process to get onto Nifty Gateway, which is also manual by their team. Nifty Gateway operates a little bit differently from the other marketplaces because it's not fully on chain. One of the advantages of this is that you can actually pay with your credit card rather than just having cryptocurrency. But the other disadvantage is that generally there's another additional step that needs to be taken in order to transfer your NFTs to being fully on chain. Nifty Gateway currently takes 20 percent commission from sales. Currently, permissionless marketplaces are the Wild West where there's a lot of things happening and it might be harder to get discovered. But if you're confident in your own marketing skills or your fan base, then I would say, you don't need to worry about that. The reason why some people are more comfortable with paying the 15-20 percent commissions that are taken by these curated marketplaces, is because they generally might have a connection with a specific collectors or have better reputation in terms of the quality of work and therefore people are willing to make that tradeoff in order to be discovered. Now I want you to go and explore all these different marketplaces, click around things and get a feel for what each of them are like, and decide which one is the best one for you. Join me in the next lesson where I'll help you understand more about the minting process. [MUSIC] 7. Understand The Minting Process: In this lesson, I'm going to help you understand the minting process. NFTs are minted through smart contracts that record ownership and metadata on the NFTs. The metadata describes the type of NFT that's being created, and any other additional attributes that the creator wishes to associate with the said NFT. When someone mints an NFT, they're essentially executing code that is stored on a smart contract. The act of minting an NFT is broken down into two parts. The first one is specifying the metadata, and two is specifying the owner. The output of minting is a token ID, which is what the smart contract generates. This information is added to the blockchain where the NFTs are being managed. There are two standards for NFTs, ERC-721 and ERC-1155. ERC-721s are meant for unique NFTs where you care about the difference between one and another and the different rarity or attribute traits. For example, profile picture projects are usually 721s. Here on Chubbiverse Frens, you can see that there's about 9,000 of them, but each of them have their own unique number or token ID, and they also look different from one another. One could be wearing a baseball cap and another one is wearing a bandanna. When you click into each one of these, you can actually view the individual attributes or metadata, which are the different rarity traits. If you scroll down and you look at properties, you can see that the type of animal, this is a Chubbiwhal and the background is pink, and you can see that 21 percent have this trait. The body is wearing a shirt, only six percent have this trait. The face is mean, and only seven percent have this trait. These essentially are telling you the different varieties of each trait. Additionally, you can click into each one of them. For example, I only want to see mean Chubbifrens, therefore, I'm going to click into this one and it's going to filter by all the ones that are mean. People might care about this because of a personal preference or because the specific trait is really rare, hence making your NFT more valuable. Now we're going to move on to ERC-1155, which is a standard for NFTs where uniqueness matters less. Here's an example of 1155 by RTFKT which is called PodX. Now you can see that there's 9,000 of them, just like Chubbifrens, except that when you're browsing, it only shows up as one item. The reason is because all 9,000 of them are essentially the same. Now when you click into it, you can see why, because everybody's pod starts out looking like this. None of them is different to another. Let's say you're an artist and you want to sell tickets to your exhibition as an NFT, you'll probably go with an ERC-1155 first, because it's actually cheaper to mint these than an ERC-721, and if you don't care about rarity or uniqueness, then you should probably mint it through the standard, or if you're trying to sell a t-shirt, for example, and all 1,000 of your t-shirts look the same, and your NFT is just a token representing ownership of one of these t-shirts, then you can also use 1155 because you don't care about whether or not rareness or unique traits are involved here. Now that you know what an NFT is and what it actually means to mint one, how do you actually go about minting your first NFT. You can either use a platform smart contract such as on OpenSea or SuperRare, or you can deploy your own smart contract, such as on Rarible or Manifold. Another way to deploy your own smart contract is hiring a developer to write it for you. Why should you care about having a custom contract? When you mint on a shared contract, your token will display under the same collection as all the other tokens that minted under that same contract. When you use your own contract, then your token will appear under a unique collection that is just you. An example of this would be, let's take a look at one of the first NFTs that I've ever minted back in 2020. Back in 2020, I had no idea what it meant to have your own custom contract. Here you can see that even though the creator says pplpleasr, the collection says rarible. When you click on this rarible contract, you can see that there's 140,000 items in here,and they're certainly not all my NFTs, they are all just NFTs that were minted under the shared rarible contract. Later on when I realized what minting your own contract actually means, here you can see a similar NFT where the creator is still pplpleasr, but the collection also says pplpleasr. Now when I click onto this custom smart contract, I can see that there are only 44 items and they are all the NFTs that I have created. Platforms that use a shared contract, typically also own the contracts. That means that the creators are restricted to the rules and judgments of that platform. With your own contract, you own the keys to your own minting factory. Tooling companies are no longer the middlemen and you as a creator have the ability to publish and own your own work. In this world, value is typically tied to scarcity of things, and so I am pretty strategic about how often and when I mint an NFT. As an NFT creator, you have this unspoken contract with your collectors. For example, if I started minting pplpleasr NFTs indefinitely and everybody on earth had access to a pplpleasr NFT, then they wouldn't be so valuable anymore. The idea is that there should always be some caps supply to whatever you're creating. But since you're just beginning, let's start with just creating a OneOf One, which means a unique NFT. An example of a good OneOf One here is one that I collected from artists that I really like called Dead Seagull. Here it says created by Dead Seagull, and I bought it off Foundation. OneOf One means that there is no other NFT out there that is exactly the same as this one, and only one of these exist. While I want you to find success minting your first NFT, I think you should just think of this as a commemorative event that you're getting started in the Web3 space. Let's look at one of my very first NFTs that I ever minted. If you click on the History tab, you can see all the history of everything that happened [LAUGHTER] in this NFT and that is the beauty of the blockchain. You can see here on September 14th, 2020, I minted this NFT. I actually minted three editions of this, so it is not a OneOf One. Here you can see that I sold one addition to BitBuzz and two more of them to somebody called Matrix. The first one sold the same day that I listed it, and these two other ones to Matrix sold two days later on September 16th. Here, if you keep scrolling through the history, you can see all of the different times that they have sold for different prices, when people bought them for and what people sold them for or listed them for, and all of the different ways that it exchanged hands throughout the history of the blockchain or the lifespan of this NFT. The most recent listing of this NFT is a March 3rd of this year and somebody listed it for 15 Ethereum. How do royalties work? Well, here above pplpleasr it says creator 10 percent royalties. That means that every time this NFT was resold, I would get 10 percent of that back as the original creator. All of these histories that you see, every time that it resold, I got 10 percent of each one of these sales. This is a really big deal for creators because it's essentially a way to earn passive income through something that you created. One of the core concepts around NFT is the idea of provenance. Provenance means that something has history and value tied to it. For example, I'm really glad that I minted this NFT when I did. Even though if it was worth not a lot at the time or might have not sold right away, I'm really happy that I did it back then because now I can actually prove to people that I was around minting NFTs in the year of 2020 instead of waiting to mint something when I thought it was ready. Join me in the next lesson and I'll help you brainstorm about what you can actually turn into an NFT. [MUSIC] 8. Start Creating: In this lesson, I'm going to help you brainstorm what to actually turn into an NFT. If you're here, I'm going to assume that you're already a creator of some sort, so it's possible that you already have creations that you can turn into NFTs. Maybe you're a painter and you have an oil painting that you want to digitize, or you're a photographer and you have photos that you can upload. Or if you're already a digital creator, that's even better, you already have these files that you can upload. Or maybe you're a crafter and you want to sell merch. Let's say you sell t-shirts and you want to create an NFT that is tied to your t-shirt collection. There's very few limits on what you can do in this space. I'm going to share some of my work and how they could be classified as different NFTs. Here you could see some of which are just digital still images that I created as artwork. Or there could be a GIF or even a video with a play button here. Or sometimes I also have utility NFTs, such as this one, which has a token that represents a movie poster, which also doubles as a utility token so that if you hold one you'll get a credit in the upcoming Ethereum documentary. My latest project is one called Shibuya, where we sold these utility NFTs also known as producer passes. The point of these NFTs is so that we are making a Web three interactive web series called White Rabbit. To watch it and pick an alternate ending, you need to have one of these producer passes to stake it in the ending that you choose. When you're creating an NFT, there always needs to be a reason why someone is buying your NFT. Otherwise, it would just be like them giving you money for no reason. Why would somebody want to buy a producer pass? First the producer pass gives you access to seeing the content beyond one of these stores. So if you have one and you click on it, then you can connect your MetaMask and stake your NFT to continue watching. Otherwise, it would be to be part of the White Rabbit community, for example, there are some token gated discord channels that you can only access if you hold one of these NFTs. As a creator, I want to encourage you to think more about what can actually be the utility of your NFT and how you can use it to innovate in this space, as opposed to having it just be a piece of art or image that you're trying to sell for money. But maybe you just want to sell your NFT as a piece of art and that's totally cool too. There's a lot of people doing that right now and it's the most common type of NFT. Something really popular in the NFT space right right is creating communities that are token gated. You can only access this community, for example, on Discord or other places by buying this NFT or maybe you're making something physical and you want to sell an NFT as a token that represents that. You can have people redeem their NFT for the physical merch that you're selling. Taste is really subjective, but it might be beneficial to go look at what's trending on the different marketplaces right now, let's go ahead and check out what's trending on OpenSea. Here you can see some notable drops that they have going on here as well as the top collections or trending collections over the past seven days. If you click into, for example, the number one trending collection, which is Azuki right now, you can go and see that it's a profile picture project and all of the different ones that people are buying. Now let's go onto foundation where instead of it being about collections, it's more about trending auctions of one at once. If you go here you can see these are all the different NFTs that are trending right now. You can see their current bid price in the auction and how much time is left in the auction. Now if you go to Rarible, it's a little bit of a combination of both. You're seeing some trending individual NFTs as well as the top collections. You can use these trending pages as references, but as a create are you should really best understand what works for you, since taste is subjective and what's trending might not always be what to follow for what will sell for you. Trends are good references to have, but as a creator, you should understand that there's many reasons why something goes viral and something else doesn't. It's more important that you find one one two people who appreciate your work versus trying to chase an entire trend that is happening. I'm here to help prepare you with the technical knowledge required to mend your first NFT properly. But your success is ultimately up to how you market your work, as well as finding your own community just like any other creative project. Since I started creating NFTs, I've been really fascinated with the concept of virality. I've started applying some of these to my own work and I call it the people pleaser playbook. First, there's something that I call the cool factor, which is when you see something and you think, well, this is really cool. Now, most people will stop there, but for me, I like to dissect as to why it was cool and extract those elements and try to re-inject them into my work. When you really think about why was something cool, I think it's simpler than most people realize. If you want to go the meme route, you can create something that's often humorous, relatable or exaggerated, and a little bit over the top, anything that really makes people want to like and share your content. Another thing that I found really works is people really love things that sync up on an audio and visual sense. For example, if you're creating something and there's a music beat to it, how you're editing it should always be cut to the beat and people respond really well to that. Things that are trippy are quite subjective, but some tricks that I like to use is applying chromatic aberration to things, timing it well to audio, as well as adding specific warps or anything that can simulate a dreamlike effect. The goal is to create something that people want to share, so when I see something cool or interesting, I try to really study what makes those things interesting and try to extract those elements and re-inject them into my own work. That's it for the people pleaser playbook. Now it's time for you to decide what you want to mend as your first NFT. Whether you have a creation that already exists or you want to create something new, get ready because we're finally in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to mend your first NFT. What I'm preparing to mend is a sushi artwork that I created back in 2020. This is actually an artwork that I was commissioned to make back in 2020 for a decentralized exchange called sushi swap. We're using this in this class because I think it's a cute little piece of artwork that I made that I had never actually meant it as an NFT. We'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 9. Mint Your NFT: Testnet: Now, we're going to go through the steps of actually minting an NFT and you should decide whether you're going to mint one for real or just use the testnet. If you're not ready to spend some real money, aka Ethereum, then you can just sit back and use the test net and see what your NFT will look like. If you deploy to mean that anything that you put on the blockchain will be permanent and you can't reverse that. When I mint an NFT, I like to do a little practice and see how the metadata and NFTs look first, does everything look good to me and so that's why I use a test not before deploying it to maintenance. To do that, we don't actually have to spend any real money, we can dive straight into getting some test Ethereum. First you're going to go onto this link which is faucets.chain.link/rinkeby, what is Rinkeby? Rinkeby is the name for the Ethereum test net, what is the Ethereum test net? This is essentially a simulated Ethereum network where you don't have to spend real cryptocurrency to do things. There are other places you can get test Ethereum as well, but this is the one we're going to use today. When you get to this page, it'll tell you please connect your wallet on the Ethereum Rinkeby network to use the faucet. What you need to do first is go to the little fox icon that is MetaMask, click on it and when you see this part on the top that says Ethereum Mainnet, I want you to click on it, then hit "show or hide test networks". Then it's going to bring you to this toggle, turn it on, close it, and now when you hit this Ethereum Mainnet again, you can see all the different tests networks and the one we're going to select is Rinkeby test network, the yellow circle. Now, that we're on the Rinkeby test network, we can go back to the faucets dot chain link webpage. Here, on the top right corner there's a button that says connect wallets, hit that button and choose MetaMask, connect it and then now you'll see your wallet address is here and you can choose what you want to request. You can request 10 tests link, which is a different type of token, but that's not useful right now, we're going to uncheck this. All we're interested in is the 0.1 test ETH, which should be enough. Also hit this capture button and then send your request. When that's completed, you'll see that says tokens transferred and your request is complete. If you close this and go back to the same little fox icon and you click on it, you'll see now that you have 0.1 ETH in your wallet. The next step is to mint an NFT on the test net, one of the easiest ways without hiring a developer to create your own smart contract is through manifolds studio, here we're going to do a quick demo. First head to studio.manifold.xyz, when you're on the page, you hit "Connect wallet", once you're finished connecting your wallet, hit the "Sign" button and it will lead you to the sign-up page. Here, you can put your name, your e-mail. After you're done verifying your email and setting up your account, you'll get to this page that says, welcome to manifolds studio. You can just X out of that dialog box and if you're ready for your first contract, you can hit the button that says new contract. Here, first, you need a contract name, for my previous one, for example, I put people pleaser. This one I could say Skillshare, Emily and the type of standard that I want, can choose between, like we said, ERC 721 or ERC 1155. In this case, because we're going to be minting a one-on-one which is unique, we're going to use ERC 721. The symbol that you're going to use is not a life or death decision that you have to make, but just come up one that makes sense to you. If this one says Skillshare, Emily, I think SSE makes sense. The next step is to find an ASCII mark or a signature that you want associated with your contract. An example of this would be, this is a contract that I made for my collaboration with Steve Aoki and so this is the ASCII art that we chose to generate along with it. The ASCII signature really doesn't matter that much, it's just in case anybody wants to poke around in your code, they'll find your signature. Here, if you click on this link that says plenty of tools, it will redirect you to a page where you can generate ASCII art and so I'm just going to type Skillshare in here. It's just a way that you can be more fun and creative with your smart contract and you can pick your own style. Let's see the Star Wars style. Now, you can copy and paste and go back and paste this into your ASCII art, and then you can hit "Preview ASCII With Frame". That's what it's going to look like on Etherscan, looks good to me. Now that you have your ASCII art all set up and your contract is ready to deploy, you'll see over here there's a button that says deploy on Rinkeby. If you click on it, it will give you, this progress and then you can just wait until it finishes. When you get to the awaiting signature, your MetaMask is actually going to pop up and it's going to tell you that this action is going to cost a gas fee. Gas fee, as we previously talked about are transaction fees on the Ethereum network that you need to pay. In this case, the gas fee is going to cost me 0.000687 ETH, I'm going to confirm this. The last step is to verify contract which makes the source code public on Etherscan. This can take anywhere between 5-10 minutes, so just sit tight for a little bit. After you've deployed or contract onto Rinkeby, here you can see the next steps here, the next step is to mint a token on Rinkeby. If you click on this, then it says, these tokens aren't going to mint themselves, hit the button that says "Mint New Token" and here you can upload your file and mine is the sushi.gif. Great. Now, you can see my artwork and now my artwork needs a title, I'm going to call it Sushi with Skillshare, created by Skillshare Emily. The external URL could be a link to your website, it's optional in this case, I'm just going to leave it blank. The description, here's an example would be, maybe what the title it's called or one you created this artwork. I'm going to call it 3D animation, 2020 which is when I created this artwork. Next is the properties which are part of the metadata. Here, we already have one that says the category is artist or the property is artist and the attributes says Skillshare Emily, which means that's me and then we can say, create a new property and here's a different types, it could be a text, number. The whole point of adding this, these properties on metadata is to help your work be more discoverable in the future. Right now, these metadata or properties are quite useless because the display layers don't quite know how to use them yet. But the more you add, the more helpful it will be in the future to help you find your work. In this case, we're just going to have one that's called artist and the artist is Skillshare Emily. Now, we can actually get ready to mint this to Rinkeby, which is the test net. When you mint this, you can choose a recipient which as either to yourself or something called Airdrop, which is minting to somebody else directly, in this case, let's just mint to ourselves first. Again, our MetaMask is going to pop up and tell us how much gas this is going to cost, we can just confirm this. While we're waiting for that to happen, I think it's useful to explain what exactly gas is and where you can see where to track gas. Gas, like we previously said, are basically transaction fees that you have to pay to do any actions on the Ethereum blockchain and it's always based on how many people are using the Ethereum network at once. If more people are using it, gas is going to be higher and more expensive. I like to go to Etherscan.io/gastracker to look at how much gas is at any given time. By the way, gas is denominated in this unit called gwei, G-W-E-I and here you can see low gwei means 69 and average is 70 and high is also 70. I would say anything below a 100 is probably reasonable, and 40s is probably on the low side. That means that our token was successfully minted on the test net and now you can see the preview links to view on, for example, OpenSea, you can view it on the test net there. If you click on this, they will take you straight to the OpenSea test net version. Here, you can see that my NFT is viewable and it says made by Skillshare, Emily and it's called sushi with Skillshare. Here are the properties that I added, which is artist and here is the item activity history, and it says that we minted this four minutes ago. Those are all the steps to basically deploy your contract and mint something on the testnet. But if you want to do something for real and deploy to the main net, keep following along. [MUSIC] 10. Mint Your NFT: Mainnet: If we go back to manifold right now, we can go to our little MetaMask icon again, click on it. Switched from Rinkeby test network back to Ethereum Mainnet. Then now we can click on the button that says Mint to Mainnet. First, we need to deploy our contract to the Mainnet. Let's go back to manifold homepage again. We can see Your Contracts and this is the one that I created. Here, only says Rinkeby because I've only deployed it to Rinkeby. If I click on it, now I can select "Deploy" on Mainnet. If you click this really obnoxious Rainbow button, you're going to be doing this for real. Here, MetaMask is popping up and it's telling me the gas that's required to deploy this contract. Here, the estimated gas fee is 0.022 ETH which is also $73. Now, that's a little bit pricey. Let's go back to the gas tracker that we used and see that the average right now is about 57. Just to double-check, because sometimes MetaMask can give you the wrong information and hit "Edit." Then under Advanced Options as the max fee, which is denominated in GWEI on the very bottom. Now, 85 seems a little bit high right now, especially when the gas tracker on ether scan just told me that 59 is the average. I'm just going to put 59 and then I'm going to hit "Confirm." You should always do these steps when you're trying to deploy any transaction on Ethereum. Since gas is fluctuating all the time, obviously, the higher the gas I use, the faster my transaction is going to go through. The lower gas you do, the slower that it is. Sometimes if you really don't care about your transaction going through right away, for example, when people are sleeping, obviously the gas is lower because less people are using it. You can just put it at a low number and then you can just leave it there and wait until it goes through. If you're in a hurry, then you probably want to go to the gas tracker and see whatever the fast GWEI is and use that number as a reference. I typically just choose whatever the average gas is because I think it's a pretty safe bet that your transaction is going to go through and it's not too low that it's going to be really slow and not too high that it's going to be expensive. Now that your contract is deployed, it's going to finish the verifying process on ether scan. This, again can take between 5-10 minutes. When that's all finished, it's going to show you this page and it says Deployed on Mainnet. Now, we can actually go to our ether scan. To do that, you can go back to etherscan.io and click on the little MetaMask Fox. Go to where it says the 0x where your wall address is, and click to copy to clipboard, paste it in the search bar on ether scan. Now, you can actually see everything that you're doing. Here, it says five-minutes ago, created this contract called SSE, which is the ticker that I created. If you go here, this is the page for the custom customer contract. If you go to the contact page, here you can see the Ascii art that we created. Great. Now let's go back and actually mint a token for real this time. Here, we can hit "Mint a token on Mainnet." We can click the same token that we minted on the test net. Then now we can hit this button that says "Mint to Mainnet." Again, I'm going to mint this to myself. You can click "Yourself" and you can specify the number of additions here. But because we're making it unique, so we're just going to keep it as one and hit the Mint button. Look, according to ether scan, our transaction went through, which means our token was successfully minted. Now, we can go view it on OpenSea. If you go to OpenSea sea you connect your wallet, then you hit "Go to profile." Here, we can see our token that was minted for real on the Mainnet. It looks pretty much exactly the same as when we were viewing on OpenSea test net, except this one is for real. [MUSIC] 11. Sell Your NFT: What we just did on manifold is mint the actual NFT, which means register it on the blockchain essentially. Now that it exists on the blockchain, we haven't actually listed it for sale yet. It's the same thing as creating your coaster, so now that the coaster exists, but I haven't sold it yet. I haven't listed it for sale, so I need to go do that and so today we're going to list it for sale on OpenSea. When you view your NFT on OpenSea, you click into it. On the top right here there's a button that says sell. Let's go ahead and click that button. When you click "Sell" here, you can see that you can list your item for sale and there's two types. The first one is a fixed price, and the second one is a timed auction. A timed auction has a few different ways to do it. First is you can sell it to the highest bidder and you can set your own duration. If it's, let's say three days, then it means that within that three days anybody can place a bid and at the end of those three days, the NFT will go towards whoever bid the highest amount like a normal auction. There's also the second one that says cell with a declining price, which is also known as a Dutch auction. How this works is you're going to set an amount of the price that it's going to start at and with the duration as it counts down, the price is going to start decreasing until somebody purchases it during that duration. You can also set an ending price just in case you don't want it to sell for something very ridiculously low. For this exercise, we're going to go with the fixed price option. I think this is better for beginners just because it's more simple and more straightforward. You can just decide on a price that you think is fair that you're willing to trade your NFT for and list it at that price and see if you get your first collector. If you're having trouble deciding what price you're NFT should sell for, it's worth going poking around OpenSea or the different market places and seeing what other people are selling their artwork for. But keep in mind this is all subjective and subject to change. For example, when I first started listing my NFTs, I didn't know what anything was worth either. I think I at the time just listed them to what I thought was fair for my work, which I think was about $100 per piece. It's really up to you as the creator. Let's set a price here for this piece and I'm just going to put 0.5 because one Ethereum feels quite high and anything less than that feels a little bit low, so 0.5 seems fair to me. On this OpenSea page, when you're putting it in Ethereum, they will actually show you what this Ethereum is worth in $ value. Right now, 0.5 Ethereum is worth $1,624 US. Here you can set the duration that you want this to be listed for sale, which means that if nobody buys it during that time it will become delisted and not for sale again. I'm going to set it for one month. There's more options down here. You can sell it as a bundle, which we're not doing because this is a unique piece or we're going to reserve for a specific buyer, but we're also not going to do that. Here, the 2.5 percent means that OpenSea will take 2.5 percent if this piece sells. To deploy that contract and mint the NFT I will have spent roughly, in today's gas prices, around $130. Now we're going to hit the complete listing button and you're going to pay a little bit more gas for that and follow the steps, and then you're done minting your first NFT. [APPLAUSE] I encourage you to poke around on the test net, try out what your NFT might look like, and if you're feeling ready, deploy it to the main net for real. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to find your community and potentially find your first collector. [MUSIC] 12. Connect and Build Community: Community building is important in this NFT and crypto space because Build Community is going to be the people that are going to be supporting your work, and also probably how you're going to get collectors. The NFT and crypto community right now are a very specific group that care about things such as authenticity, quality of work, and how innovative your ideas are. It would probably be to your advantage to find a community that is crypto wealthy though that doesn't always have to be the case. In my specific example, when I started creating a community, it was mostly people who are participating in DeFi and also people that are very crypto native and have been occurring crypto from very early days, and so there are a lot more likely to spend cryptocurrency compared to the average person who's going to buy on Coinbase tomorrow. Finding your own market fit is quite similar to in Web 2. Let's say you're an influencer and you want a cell phone case, how are you going to get the word out there and how are you going to market yourself? It's quite similar to that in Web 3, except that most of this is happening on Crypto Twitter. Right now, social media is probably the main place that people are connecting and also promoting their NFTs. Most of it will happen on Crypto Twitter, but a lot of people are participating on Discord as well, and on Instagram people like to include a link tree with links to their various marketplaces. On my homepage, you'll see something that is pretty similar to what other people's Crypto Twitters look like, which involves a lot of influencers with avatars that are not pictures of real people, so they could be crypto punks or a zucchinis, mainly profile picture projects. Here you'll find an example of a tweet that somebody did, which is promoting their NFT drop. This is all up to the independent creator and everybody does it a little bit differently. But this is just a random example that I found, which is actually not on the Ethereum blockchain, but it's on Tussaud's and so you can see, usually, they will tell you the quantity and the price, and then they will put a link to where you can buy it. It's pretty normal that people will have some sort on Twitter and they post it for the followers but you'll often see people use hashtags as well. The hashtags would be similar to hashtags on NFTs, and it could just be a way for people to discover new work from people that they're not following. The next step for you is probably to go on Crypto Twitter start following a bunch of people and start observing how people are promoting their work and interacting on the space. Congratulations on getting this far. I know that was a lot of information to unpack and it can be really overwhelming sometimes. But really I just wanted to supply you with proper technical knowledge about mentoring an NFT and also understand the importance of community building and that the space isn't just about making money, but it's also about connecting with other people. [MUSIC] 13. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] We've reached the end of the class, it's been quite a journey. You got to know what Web3 is. Clearly decided that NFTs are for you and you set up a wallet and also played around on the Testnet. We explored the marketplaces, and you got to understand and mint an NFT. I hope that this has painted a little bit better of a picture around the topic for you, and I hope that you learned a lot in the class today. I tried to give you all of the experience and learnings from my own path, and I wish you all the success and finding your first collector. I want to see the NFTs that you guys are thinking of creating, so please upload them to the project gallery so I can take a look, and maybe even post the links to them if you've mentored them for real. Maybe I'll do a little shopping. I hope you understood NFTs a little bit more after this class. Best of luck from people pleaser.