Ev
After Christie’s auction house sold the first-ever made NFT artwork, which is a collage of images made by the digital artist Beeple for about $69.3 million, the Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs have suddenly grabbed the world’s attention to a newly cryptocurrency phenomenon.
So what does NFTs stands for?
Put simply, the NFTs turn artistic digital works and other collectibles into unique and verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain.
Even though this may not sound easy to understand for some, several artists like musicians and influencers have gained a significant payoff, with investors spending a lot to own different varieties of NFT artworks. For instance, a video clip of a LeBron James slam-dunk was sold for more than $200,000, a “Nyan Cat” GIF that is about a decade old was sold for around $600,000, and the first tweet of Jack Dorsey sold for $2.9 million.
However, the NFTs aren’t really new. One of the original NFTs was CryptoKitties, a digital trading game on the cryptocurrency platform Ethereum, giving the possibility for people to buy and sell one-of-a-kind virtual cats that were stored on the blockchain.
So why the NFT phenomenon is so popular now?
According to Mike Steib, the CEO of Artsy, “While some of that interest comes from people who choose to purchase the independent creators’ works as a kind of support; others are intrigued by the idea of taking a digital asset that anyone can copy and claiming its ownership. Seemingly, the recent headline price records for NFTs were driven by newly minted crypto millionaires and billionaires looking to diversify their bitcoin holdings and increase their interest in the crypto ecosystem.”
Here is what you need to know more:
What are NFTs?
the Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are something like digital content that is linked to the blockchain, the latter is a digital database that acts like an underpin to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ethereum, and like. Dissimilar to the NFTs, those assets are fungible, meaning they can be exchanged with another identical one of the same value, something like a dollar bill.
Conversely, the NFTs are one-of-a-kind and not mutually interchangeable, meaning that two NFTs are completely different.
NFTs are more like Pokémon cards, rare coins, or a limited-edition pair of Jordans, they create some sort of scarcity among the infinitely available assets, and there’s even a certificate of authenticity to prove its ownership. Typically, NFTs can be in the form of GIFs, tweets, virtual trading cards, images of physical objects, video game skins, virtual real estate, and more, which you can use to buy and sell different digital artworks.
How to buy NFTs?
Basically, you can buy any sort of digital image as an NFT. Yet, there are a few things you have to take into consideration when buying one, particularly if you’re not familiar with cryptocurrency trading. You’ll need to choose and be sure about the marketplace you want to buy from, the required type of digital wallet to store it, and the needed kind of cryptocurrency to complete the sale.
OpenSea, Mintable, Nifty Gateway, and Rarible are some of the most common NFT marketplaces out there in the market. Moreover, there are certain types of NFTs that can be used in more specific niche marketplaces, such as NBA Top Shot for basketball video highlights or Valuables for auctioning tweets like Dorsey’s tweet that is currently up for bid.
However, pay attention to the charged fees. Some marketplaces charge fees in form of “gas”, which is the required energy to complete the transaction on the blockchain. Other fees can include the costs for converting dollars into ethereum (the most commonly used cryptocurrency to buy NFTs) and closing expenses.
How to sell NFTs?
The NFTs can be sold on marketplaces and the process differ from one platform to another. You’ll need to upload your content to a marketplace then follow the guidelines to transform it into an NFT. You’ll have the possibility to include descriptive details and the price of your work. While ethereum is the most used currency to buy NFTs, they can be bought using other ERC-20 tokens such as WAX and Flow.
How to make an NFT?
To create an NFT, you will need to have a digital wallet, a small purchase of ethereum, and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and transform your work into an NFT or crypto art. isn’t That Simple?