While you may not be an artist or creator, this article will help you understand how people are creating NFTs that are selling.
At its core, the blockchain is a distributed public ledger and a ledger is a fancy way of describing a database of transaction and/or item records. Banks have a private ledger of account balances, and if you’ve used a Visa or Mastercard, you’ve used a distributed private ledger. For access to Visa’s ledger using debit and credit cards, they charge businesses a ‘merchant fee’. The main difference between distributed private ledgers and distributed public ledgers like the Ethereum blockchain is that public ledgers don’t require a centralized trusted authority to verify transactions or the authenticity of goods in a person’s wallet.
One of the benefits of the Ethereum Blockchain is that it supports Smart Contracts. Smart Contracts allow parties to transact with each other without a centralized authority. Ethereum is the currency required to transact using smart contracts and it is required to create and buy NFTs. When you transact in Ethereum you pay a fee called the ‘gas’ fee which varies depending on Ethereum blockchain traffic. This gas fee goes towards miners who process the computations used to process the smart contracts.
Ethereum can be bought using various cryptocurrency exchanges. The most popular exchange in the US is Coinbase. Once you’ve purchased your Ethereum, you’ll need to send them to a Metamask wallet for storing. This step is required because a decentralized wallet is needed to create, sell and buy NFTs.
Metamask is a decentralized Ethereum wallet that allows you to store Ethereum and other tokens. It also allows you to connect to NFT marketplaces and other Decentralized Finance (DeFi) websites and tools.
Once you’ve purchased Ethereum, send the funds to your Metamask wallet because you will need them in the wallet to create your NFT. These funds will cover the $80 - $100+ worth of gas fees it will take to pay for minting your NFT. Minting is the process of turning art files into NFTs on the Ethereum Blockchain.