I first heard about NFTs from the @tag-comics Instagram page. They create and post African-oriented comics and have a particular comic that discusses how to make money by creating NFTs from artworks. Also, one of my favorite afro-centric artists - @indaviduall , sold a couple of his art as NFTs for high prices.
These events inspired me to learn that NFTs create a side gig that can become an income stream. Before you start making money from NFTs, you should know what an NFT is.
What are NFTs?
A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a digital token or an asset stored on a blockchain that can be sold and traded.
Here is why NFTs are not fungible: It is possible to say that 1 dollar is equal to another 1 dollar and can be used to replace each other at any time. The case is different for NFTs. An NFT is not equal to another NFT, hence the non-fungibility.
A fungible item is an item that is replaceable by another identical item or is mutually interchangeable. Likewise, Non-fungibility means that you cannot copy, substitute, or subdivide an item by another item even if they are identical.
What is a Token?
A token is a small piece of data that signifies something belongs to you and is provable on the blockchain, which serves as a form of the public ledger for crypto transactions.
Recently, the NFT hype has been around digital art, but it’s much more than art in reality. You can sell anything as an NFT, music inclusive, e.g., you could sell a piece of music or an album as Audio NFTs. Everyone has been talking about NFTs since the day Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT for 2.9 million dollars. Humans went bonkers about NFTs even though the concept has been around since 2014.
Things to know about NFTs:
When buying an NFT, you are purchasing the rights to the asset. NFTs are just a piece of data owned by an address, more like a certificate of ownership and whoever has the password to that address owns that piece of data. The owner of this address can sell this piece of data to another address, and this data is verifiable by the blockchain.
When you buy an NFT, you buy a piece of data that points to a server that hosts the linked media file.
What Makes an NFT valuable?
People buy NFTs because they see them as collectibles and investments. Here are a couple of factors that give NFTs value:
- If it’s the first of its kind: Just the way bitcoin is the most valuable coin because it was the first of its kind.
- Utility: if it has Real-world benefits. E.g. membership community, monthly launch meeting, etc.
- If it is Unique or Rare: e.g. Monalisa painting
- Ownership History: People might want to buy an NFT if it has been previously owned by a popular person
Can someone copy your NFT?
Yes, just the way someone can make a copy of the Monalisa picture. But you can trace the original NFT address back to the original creator since all NFTs have a log of their transaction history.
Bear in mind that the value of an NFT is not in the image. The value of the NFT is in the piece of data attached to it.
What does it mean to mint an NFT?
Minting NFT refers to turning a digital file into a crypto collectible or digital asset on the blockchain. The digital item or file is stored in this decentralized and distributed database forever. It is impossible to edit, modify, or delete the NFT.
How long does it take to mint an NFT?
NFT platforms, marketplaces, and tools have made minting NFTs easy, so it depends on you, and it can be as fast as you want.
What happens after you sell your NFT?
When you sell your NFT, you transfer ownership of rights, which is that piece of data, to the address that purchased your NFT.
What does it mean to list NFTs?
Just the way in a superstore, items are arranged with price and specific quantity per item type, e.g., having 100 pieces of apples sold at $3 each. That’s what NFT listing is. You tell the world that you have a specific asset up for sale.
Here are a couple of marketplaces to list your NFTs:
How do you buy an NFT?
It will be similar to the way you buy a company's stock. Most NFTs are sold on marketplaces, basically online stores that specialise in NFTs.
You can purchase an NFT on a good number of platforms using the Ethereum (ETH) token. This means you will need to have ETH in your crypto wallet in order to be able to make the purchase transaction. While on the topic of Ethereum, you may need to have some cryptocurrency trading knowledge in order for you to be able to figure out how get ETH into your wallet.
You could buy NFTs from the market places I listed earlier above.
You should also know that NFTs can be auctioned, and you can decide to bid on an NFT, and if you win, the NFT is added your account and the information will be stored in your wallet.
Where do you store your NFTs?
You store it in a crypto wallet. Ensure it is a safe and secure wallet you save it in. The best way to keep your NFTs is on a hardware wallet (e.g., a ledger nano, which is similar to an Arduino UNO) where it can be offline and protected.
But if you want to keep your NFTs online, some online applications host wallets for you, like metamask.io, trustwallet.com, and walletengine.io.
Further reading
If you want to study more about NFTs and also learn about the blockchain, some other concepts you could research on are:
- NFT Rarity
- DeFi
- DApps
Top comments (13)
I think you forgot to mention that NFTs are Not For Thinking people. They are literally a flash in the pan of human stupidity, with buyers all riding the bigger fool wave as many critics put it. That is, as they have zero intrinsic value and only the value that the market puts on them, any buy who hopes to make money on one is doing so in the hope of finding an even bigger fool than themselves (who will buy it off them for an even higher price).
Of course, if you have enough cash with nowhere to go and just want to beat some drum and don't mind losing the money, NFTs are a nice way to go and a great way for artists and such to tap into some of that lazy money that we have created in our world that refuses to share the wealth but rather creates poverty while lining rich pockets.
Seems you are misinformed, at least have a look to NFTs domains or utility NFTS as shibuya.xyz.
Misinformed is harsh. NFT domains are hardly an established or common thing and I don't even know anyone who understand how they work (the domain name is resolved to IP address) and in fact they don't unless as a user you tweek your browser:
unstoppabledomains.com/blog/gatewa...
To wit, it's an emergent technology. But I will give you credit that it is an application of possible merit. The jury is out on that still.
And shibuya.xyz, seriously:
So it's hot off the presses well behind the NFT boom and craze selling worthless IP. That said again, you are right and there is a possibly utility here for the idea (though I am left wondering if what shibuya wants to do can't be done with simple user accounts i.e. is not in any way reliant on NFT technology per se, just riding the wave). Which differs from NFT domains which do hinge on a way of proving ownership of a domain name without a central authority, but in the public domain, and NFTs do fit that bill well.
So, on the whole point is taken, there are sensible uses of NFTs, and yet, I don't know of any easy to use mature or mainstream applications, and the hype has been dominated by valueless NFTs (domain names have value, names in general do and the right to use them, hence registered trademarks).
And worth noting that we were commenting primarily about: What is the hype about NFTs? And the hype has a very bad rap indeed.
Folks should check out Metapunk
Absolutely, we would love this type of content over on the Metapunk Forem 🦙
NFTs, like most other things that label them as "web3" are get-rich-quick-schemes. Here's my thoughts on why should leave your fingers off blockchain as a developer: dev.to/canolcer/fellowdevs-stop-bu...
I strongly suggest watching this. It's long, but very informative. The problem with NFTs...
Blockchain - whilst being interesting tech - is still a solution looking for a problem in most cases. Sadly, the cases that are actually approaching being something like worthwhile are vastly overshadowed by all of the ridiculous money making scams. Even Ethereum's creator is worried about where all this is headed.
And even those cases are only approaching something like worthwhile. They have yet to demonstrate any benefit of this technological solution over others.
Quick note Bitcoin isn't the first coin to be created . There were a few failed crypto coins before Bitcoin. All in all, your writing is good and easy to understand for a newbie. 👍🏽
Thanks for your feedback, Pelumi. On the section where I mentioned "What makes an NFT valuable", I meant first of its kind. Bitcoin was the first coin of it's kind, Not the first coin ever created. Thanks for pointing that out.
All in all, Thanks for the positive feedback!
Ok. Thanks for the clarification
Solana is a blockchain, not a marketplace
there are many marketplaces on Solana like Magic Eden for example