Transcripts
1. Introduction To Our Course: Hello, my name is Benji. I'm an artist, an entrepreneur, and I'm a massive fan of technology. Now, you may have heard the word NFT or the acronym NFT recently. If you're an artist or a creator, this is a revolution in technology that is going to be defining the way art and creativity is done online. Just recently, this JPEG, this image behind me here sold for $69 million at the famous Christie's auction house. This is literally a JPEG. It's a digital file. How does it sell for $69 million? What are NFTs, and how can you get involved in this world that is really going to be the future for artists? That is what I want to share with you, the way the technology is trending and how you can create your very own first NFT, non-fungible token, for your artwork today. Let's jump in together to our project and get started.
2. Class Project: Awesome. In this class together, we're going to be walking you through how to create your very first NFT. I'm going to be showing you, by creating an NFT and non-fungible token, with this piece of artwork here that my sister has drawn. A little piece of sushi, running away from chopsticks. You can see it's also there, behind me. We're going to go, and walk you through step by step, how to get into this world. Now, I know it's going to be quite a technical feet, but that's my job here, is to make sure we do it as simply as possible, and walk you through the process in a slow step by step manner, that you're understanding what you're doing at every step of the way, all the way to the end, to the point where you have an NFT of your own artwork, available for purchase on OpenSea, which is the biggest marketplace out there for digital artwork. Your NFT, your non-fungible token can literally be any file or digital file formats. It can be a movie, it could be a sound, it could be a GIF, or it could be a JPEG. It could be a combination of the six of those things. But anything that's a digital file, I'm going to show you how you can make these things unique, and verifiable, by creating him into an NFT together. If that's exciting, let's jump into the first steps together and discover, what really is an NFT, and where did they come from?
3. What Is An NFT?: Awesome. What is an NFT? Defined as simply as possible and to make it as easy to understand as possible, an NFT is simply a unique digital asset. NFT stands for non-fungible token, which means it cannot be interchanged or substituted. A good example of this in a real-world is something like the Mona Lisa. There's only one Mona Lisa and it is verified to be a Mona Lisa. People can have a copy of it, but they can't actually own the verified, unique asset of the original painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Examples of fungible items, items that can be substituted or interchanged are things like, dollars. The US dollar can be exchanged for another US dollar or something like gold. You can exchange gold with other pieces of gold because it is not uniquely identifiable. Something like Bitcoin is fungible in the digital world, meaning I could trade you one Bitcoin for one of your Bitcoin because they're valued at the same amount and they're not uniquely identified. What are some other examples of things that aren't fungible? We know the Mona Lisa, there's only going to be one Mona Lisa. Something like a house. There's only going to be one of that house or that specific location in the world. In the digital world, you have something like trademarks. You may have a trademark on a word or a term, or an image, or even a patent on a product, meaning you own the rights to use that product. But the trademark is just a digital ledger of who actually owns the rights to that product. Moving further into the NFT world, you have something like CryptoPunks, which was the world's first non-fungible token. These CryptoPunks were set up in a very limited quantity. I believe there was about 10,000 of each of these CryptoPunks, and these could be verified of who owned it, and therefore they became the world's first unique digital assets. So what makes these digital assets unique? Why can't we all own this JPEG file behind me? Or why can't we all own your artwork? How do we know who earns the original piece? Well, this is where the token word comes in. The token is the digital certification of who owns it. This certification is public knowledge on a public ledger, meaning you can track the ownership and the location of the ownership of who owns that digital asset. This database is what we refer to as the blockchain. Put simply, NFTs are digital assets that are publicly verifiable, intellectual property authenticated on the blockchain.
4. Why Artists Need an NFT: Awesome. Why do you want to create an NFT for your artwork? I think it's really important in today's day and age that a lot of art is done online. When you create an NFT, it means you're really claiming ownership of that piece of artwork when you put it out on the Internet or you put it out for people to share. Everybody will be able to trace back to you, that you are the original owner and you're the creator and the artist of that artwork. The world of art is always evolving and all these new technologies are constantly changing the scene, and as an artist, sometimes it's really hard to keep up, especially in the digital age. I really want to share this with the artist out there, to make sure they know where the world of art is trending especially if you're doing iPad art or patent art or anything online on a computer, you really want to stay on top of the game and make sure that you have ownership of your own artwork, and you know the way art is being displayed, and you're really as an artist need to stay on top of it. That's why you'd like to create an NFT for your own art. Basically, so you can make a unique identifier and everybody can know that you created that art in the online world. In the next couple of lectures, we're going to go step-by-step and show you exactly how to set up your own NFT so you can join the digital online world of art.
5. Creating Your Token: Awesome. If you're creator or an artist in any way, we're now going to go get digitally verifiable tokens that are going to be unique to your artwork and verify that you're the owner and you're the creator. Now the really cool thing about this before we jump in and create it is that you'll have lifelong commissions to your own artwork. This is new to the world and it really is going to be the future because the artist is the person who creates this thing. Therefore, that anytime that anyone sells or trades your artwork in the future, you are entitled automatically to a commission of that. Now this course, of course is not about getting rich, it's not about selling millions of dollars of art. But it's about introducing you to the world of digital art and getting your first piece up there and ready so you can actually have your art be digitally verified and unique on the blockchain. There's so much more that you can do with an NFT, so without further ado, let's go and get our first NFTs minted and created together and join the future of art.
6. Getting Your Wallet: Awesome. The first thing you're going to need when listing your NFT for sale online in the new modern world of digital art, is what you call a wallet. Now, we're really starting at square one here. I want to start with the absolute basics to make sure you understand and can follow along. Because it took me a little bit to understand all of these different terms myself, and I really just wanted to share that with you, in the way that I would have liked to being taught. The first thing you need to know is, what is a wallet? Now, what a wallet is, is probably one of the easiest things to understand because, you probably own a wallet, or have owned a wallet in the past, if you are now more paying for things with your iPhone or Google paying or things like that. But a lot of people still own wallets, which is basically in the physical world, somewhere to keep your currency, somewhere to keep your cash, somewhere to keep your cards, that you can pay for things, and keep it all together in one spot, that's a little bit more secure and organized. Now, there's a lot of different types of wallet, that's when it comes to cryptocurrency. But the biggest and easiest thing that I learned is that, you should be starting with an online web wallet, because these are the easiest things. They're little bit less secure. Making sure you're not putting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars into these wallets. But just make sure that you're putting a little bit at a time. Think of it almost like a checking account for your cryptocurrency, which I'll show you how to get in order to process your NFT. This is basically just where you can have really quick access to it in the old web browser, and I'll show you that in a second, so you can see online wallets are the fastest way to complete transactions, and these wallets allow users to manage the significant number of cryptocurrencies all at once. Wallets are basically where we're going to be keeping your cryptocurrency. Now, the best wallet on the market at the moment in my opinion, is MetaMask. MetaMask is used by millions of people, over one million users worldwide. It's a very simple plug-in. I'll show you my plug-in over here, down here to MetaMask, pop that open, and you can see that it's just right here inside my Google Chrome. Now, it works on Google Chrome. I believe it works on Firefox, and there's a couple of other browsers where you can install this, and very quickly get access to your cryptocurrency no matter what website you're on. If you want to pay at anytime with any cryptocurrency, you can literally just use your MetaMask wallet, with one click, and you can pay for something. You can see it's a crypto wallet, and a gateway to blockchain apps. We don't need to get too deep into exactly how it works and what it does. But essentially, we are going to be linking this app with two apps down here called Rarible, where we're going to be minting out NFT, creating out NFT, and OpenSea, which is where our NFT is actually going to be available if somebody wanted to come and browse it, and potentially purchase it. Everybody needs to download MetaMask if you want to create your first NFT in the simplest way possible. Once you download it, you follow the prompts, create a very quick account, and you'll be assigned a wallet that you can access at anytime by clicking this cute little fox guy on your web browser, and access all of your cryptocurrencies. Now, it doesn't matter what sort of cryptocurrency they are, you can hold it here, in your wallet.
7. Depositing Crypto: Awesome. Now you follow that step-by-step and signed up to MetaMask, I want to show you [inaudible] actually buy your first cryptocurrency, or if you have cryptocurrency in another place, I'm going to show you how to deposit it into your MetaMask wallet. It doesn't matter what sort of cryptocurrency or token that you hold. The easiest way to do this is to come in and just click ''Buy'' down here. When you click Buy it's going to give you two options. One, you are going to either deposit Ether, and this is just if you already hold Ethereum, the cryptocurrency Ethereum. You can just come in and get your account address and deposit it straight in. I'll show you more on that in a second. If you don't, and you're currently in some form of fiat, maybe the US dollar, you want to come in and use this platform called Wyre, which allows you to use a debit card in order to purchase cryptocurrency. Once you click that button to come over to Wyre, make sure you're at sendwyre.com over here, come in and click the fiat or the country's currency that you are actually depositing from your debit card here, and then choose what you want to deposit into. The default is a Ethereum, but you can do anything like bitcoin, USDC, which is a coin that is tied to the US dollar, a so-called safer coin, but we won't go into the details there. There's another one down here called USDT, which is essentially trying to keep your money in USD while inside of your wallet. I'm just going to click Ether here. It's the best one for creating your NFT because that is what will be paying to mint out NFT with. Then you just want to type in how much you want to deposit. There is going to be a little bit of a transaction and a network fee down here and you can see it's going to be a small amount if you deposit more money. So if you deposit say, $1,000, you can see it's going to be $32 of a fee. But if you had [inaudible] to deposit something like $10, you can see it's eight dollars of a fee down there. So you want to make sure if you're depositing some money, you pay attention to that fee, because you don't want to be overpaying for this if you're going to deposit more money in the future. You can just say, put in something like $300 there. If you are minting your first NFT, you don't need anything really more than $60. It's not going to cost six dollars for every NFT you mint, but just to set up your account, it is going to cost a little bit, unfortunately. You can pay by card or you can pay by Apple Pay, which makes it really easy. Just authorize Wyre to debit your account and transfer that into the actual cryptocurrency that you want. I'm not going to do that here because you know how to do it. You just hit that ''Deposit'' button down there, and you can see it's going to populate your wallet with your cryptocurrency here pretty immediately, won't take more than really a minute in order to get that here. Once it's in here, you can start to send your Ether and you can see up here your Ether address. This is a string of numbers and characters that is unique to you. If you give that to somebody and they come into their MetaMask wallet, for example and they click ''Send ''and ''enter your ID here, your address here, they can send money instantaneously into your account, which is pretty incredible, very awesome technology, but we don't want [inaudible]. We don't need to get side by that. We're just setting this up so we can join the online world of digital up. The other thing you can do is you can swap, which means you're basically saying that you want to, let's put 0.009, $19, and you can swap it into any currency you want or any cryptocurrency, should I say, that you want inside your wallet here, just like that. Very simple to use, very easy. Once you get a little bit of money deposited, we're going to jump over and actually upload our digital artwork and mint it into our first NFT. Let's jump into that lecture now.
8. Minting Your Artwork: Awesome. Now, we have finally set everything up so that we can actually upload our image or GIF or video, or whatever digital art that you want to create into an NFT. You could come over to rarible.com, R-A-R-I-B-L-E.com. Now, here you can see that these are all NFTs that other people are currently creating and uploading. You can see they're traded in the currency of Ethereum down him. Maintenance is a little bit slow because I'm actually hot spotting from my phone. But you can see that in coming here, actually you buy other people's digital art or any of these NFTs that you want. But all we want to do is want to come up to the top right because it's our turn to actually upload our own artwork and create an NFT out of it. We're just going to click that Connect Wallet button. Now, we're being through wallets and you can see that we just want to click the "MetaMask" button here and connect our wallet that is on our browser. You can see it's just down here. But this is the beautiful thing about MetaMask is because it's on our browser, it's so quick and easy just to login straight away like that. Now, we want to come over to this Create button next because we are going to upload our artwork through here. You can see we want to create a single collectable or NFT. You can see there's this little form down here which we're going to fill out and you're going to have to spend a little bit time of filling it out on your side of what your NFT actually is and describing that. I'm going to come over to my Downloads on my computer here and come down to what is it, down here, Sushtastrophe. Little bit hard to say, but this is Sushtastrophe file right here. Because this is the artwork that we are creating for my [inaudible] into a non-fungible token available to be purchased or even just browsed on OpenSea and the Rarible marketplaces. We are putting it on sale and we're not having an Instant sale price. This means that if someone buys, they can buy it directly like this. But actually, you know what, [inaudible] probably can have an Instant sale price, and we're going to put that currently at 0.5 of an Ethereum. Now Ethereum, remember, is a dynamic price. It's not a stable currency. So you can see that you can just pop in. Because when you're doing this, Ethereum could be a lot higher, it could be a lot lower. Nobody actually knows. But you just want to test by putting in one Ethereum, you'll be able to see how much it is and then divide that all times that by how much you want to charge for your artwork. Let's go ahead and put in 0.5 here and I don't expect anybody. This course is not about making money or selling your artwork, but it's just about understanding the world and really joining it and having the chance to sell your artwork at whatever price that you would like if somebody was interested. You can see, we want to choose the collection which would be a Rarible collection here. Then we want to come down and name it. So we're going to type in Sushtastrophe here. Description is optional so you can come in and take some time if this is your artwork that you're really excited to put up here and you put a lot of effort into it. Can't put a big description in there. Royalties, this is a very fascinating thing because with the world of NFTs and cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, you can actually, unlike any other artwork in the real-world, receive a royalty for your work on an ongoing basis. Meaning, if you were to sell me a piece of your artwork, you'd receive all the money, of course, because you own the artwork. But then you lose the rights to the artwork. If I then sold it, say, to my dad, you would receive none of that transaction. However, royalties, this can actually hard code in that you will receive 10 percent of this items on sale price anytime it gets resold. If it grows in value, the original artist actually gets paid, which is pretty incredible. What we're going to do now that we have it uploaded, we have it named, we have our royalties put in there. Of course, you can put in whatever royalty you want. I'm just going to create that item, to create that NFT here. Let that load and we'll let that mint. You can see it's uploading the image and then minting the token, which we learned is a unique identifier on a public ledger that allows there to only be one of these. You can see it's going to connect straight into a wallet here, and it's pulling up here. It's showing us how much it is actually going to be. This is called a gas fee in order to mint this, which is $39.40 US including the gas there. I'm just going to click "Confirm" on that. Some of these are actually going to be quite pricey because there's a lot of different softwares that charge different amounts, MetaMask and Rarible and everyone else has different sort fees. You can search across them if it is a lot of money for you, but otherwise, just make sure you know what you're uploading and you know the value of it. Otherwise, you upload thousands of things, it's going to cost you a lot of money. You can see here, we're just going to Sign sell order, meaning we're just going to sign off on it from our actual wallet here which is, you can see once again from MetaMask and I'm just going to sign that. Once we sign that, you can see there's new items available, which is very exciting. When you click that Refresh button, now this was my very first NFT here, which is just a photo of my face, just messing around and learning the process myself. But now you can see, this is second NFT for 0.5 of an ETH, 10 percent of sales will go to the creator, collection on Rarible. You can see it is right there for people to browse and potentially purchase if they like it. The last thing I want to do with you is come over to OpenSea. OpenSea like Rarible is also a marketplace where people can browse NFTs. It's the largest NFT marketplace. I can browse and buy digital art here. To find out piece of artwork which we automatically added into OpenSea, you can see you can come up here to artwork. Actually, sorry, we come up here to Browse, then we search Recently Created to find the most recently created NFTs and then we click "Art" in the top-left here and this should help filter out because it's going to be a lot of NFTs at the moment. You can come down here and see, Sushtastrophe is right here on OpenSea for people to come in and actually make an offer on or just admire the artwork. We have officially minted and if you follow it along, your very first NFT, your very first piece of digital art, big congratulations on that. I'll see you in the next lecture.
9. Different Blockchains To Mint NFTs On : Awesome. I'm here on Coin Market Cap, and this is basically a summary of all the biggest, on this homepage at least, all the biggest cryptocurrencies and blockchains out there. These are all different blockchains here. You can see the market cap is here, and it basically gives you all the basic information. We don't really need to get too much into this financial side of things, but Bitcoin was obviously the original blockchain. But Bitcoin didn't actually really have a good integration for smart contracts, which means they couldn't really mint and NFTs and ownership of tokens to its blockchain. This is where Ethereum really separated itself. You could actually mean ownership tokens and this is where NFTs and Curia causes first crypto punks being second, started to mint artwork and ownership of the artwork to these blockchains. Now, there's actually a problem with Ethereum as well, and hence why a lot of these other things exist, they just trying to solve the problems that these popular ones don't currently or can't solve or don't know how to solve. Ethereum prices for gas, now gas fee is basically a transaction fee. If you say go to the VeeFriend's website and you try and mint a VeeFriend, and the Veefriend might be $1000, but you may get a transactional gas fee of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of $ in these peak times, because basically, people are bidding for you to process their transaction first, and these gas fee get ridiculously high, and everybody's like, well, this is not something that is sustainable. This is where things like Solana has come in. Now, Solana has risen very recently, it's had a very big Bull Run or an appreciation of the value of the coin you can see here, and it's been quite phenomenal because Solana has very little gas fees, and what people are actually doing is they're actually starting to mint their artwork to the Solana blockchain. Now you remember basically an NFT, it doesn't have to be on one blockchain, it could be on the Ethereum blockchain could be on a Solana blockchain, it could be on also the Cardano blockchain. Cardano NFT is a very new, very nascent. But all of these people are coming in, all of these businesses or coins and blockchains are coming out with competing products to the Ethereum blockchain. You can see Cardano is here, Solana is there and there's a few others that are coming up and really want to own this NFT game. Basically, I'm not making any recommendations here. Ethereum are trying to solve their gas price issues for NFTs, and if that happens Ethereum will probably maintain number one. But I just want you to know if your minting artwork, if you're collecting artwork, you need to know that it's not all happening on the Ethereum blockchain anymore. Polygon is actually another big one that is also supported on OpenSea. If we go to OpenSea and we go to its overall rankings up here, you can see the chains. The chains are the blockchains and the ethereum blockchain is obviously the most popular, but you can start to see the most popular artwork on the Polygon blockchain, and you can see some of these are actually games, because games you need to actually have a lot of transactions going on. There are not high priced, and it's funny that you measure the ethereum, but they're not crazy high price collectables, but they're things that need to be transacted much quicker and the quicker you need to transact the less gas fee you want to pay. A lot of people are building on top of things like Polygon and Solana now. Make sure you go and check out those chains if that's right for you to venture artwork there and make that decision yourself. But at the moment, ethereum still is that original number one first mover, and I think it's going to be hard to kick it off. But please do your own research and see where you want to mint your artwork.
10. What Now?: Awesome. Welcome to the digital art world. You are now an official member with your first NFT being minted. I hope you enjoy this. Before you go, I have three quick things that I'd like to ask of you. Number 1, if you enjoy this, could you please leave us a review here on Skillshare? I'd like to read what you do like and what you don't like about these courses so I can make the ones in the future, better for you. The second thing, head over to YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel where we put out bite-sized pieces of information to help you. Number 3, go into my profile here on Skillshare. We're coming out with new Skillshare courses every two weeks, so I'd be excited to have another adventure with you. Go and choose the best one to suit your needs, and I'll see you there. Also, finally, the fourth thing as a bonus, make sure you post your project in the Skillshare description below, as a class project. I'd love to see what you minted and what you created. Thank you very much. Thanks again.
Benji Wilson, Social Media & Entrepreneurship
