How to Mint Your First NFT w/ Will Lucas

this podcast is for you. About a week ago, I mentored my first n f T and I've been increasingly enamored with the idea of both collecting digital art and the concept and implications of smart contracts over this past year, and after doing a bunch of research over the last couple of months, I decided I wasn't going to really learn by sitting on the sidelines. I needed to get in. Either I was going to buy some n f T s, or I was gonna make some, or I could do

both UM. What kept me apprehensive about buying n f T s was the hype surrounding some of the ones we've probably all heard of, Crypto punks and Board eight Yacht Club. While learning UM, I found it difficult to decipher signal from noise as I both explored what I wanted to invest in and learned how to actually buy

something I wanted. I knew the punks and the apes had a lot of value, but they were tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure, and there were cool things I found in price ranges I didn't mind investing in. But you know, being a newbie, I didn't feel comfortable yet that I was making a

good move buying something obscure or relatively obscure. And you might think that securing your first n f T is as simple as finding when you want in swiping your m X to get it as you would like on Amazon, but you would be wrong. There are layers to making transactions in the world of crypto, and it's very easy to make expensive mistakes. Simply moving your money from one

pocket to the other pocket can cost you um. All in all, I didn't struggle with understanding that the art hand in hand with the tech had value and big implications. But I understand why some people do have that challenge and internal questioning, and we'll talk about that another time. But what I wanted to accomplish was getting my hands dirty so I could fully appreciate what digital art would and could mean, both to me as a creator in my fellow community of creators and as a collector and

consumer who likes nice things. What I found in my study is so much more than just a community of dope creators with their work on display in exchange for EVE, but also an underlying technology that I believe will revolutionize agreements between people, the bedrock of functioning or malfunctioning society. But I digress. This is about making your first n f T, so I'll do my best to stick this scope.

We'll talk later about, you know, buying n f T s, smart contracts and other things, but this today is about making your first n f T. And you might think as skipping, you know, having those conversations about smart contracts conversations about understanding cryptocurrency are like skipping steps, but they're really not. You can get in and start creating without under understanding the breadth of the whole world of the blockchain. You can do this without having to know that and

fully appreciate that. Let's start creating some stuff, okay, and I promise you we will get to that all right. So there is some preliminary work we'll need to perform today to establish terminology definitions. If you will um hear some words and short phrases that are probably not in your daily lexicon, but will be need to be if you're to understand creating and even purchasing an n f T. First, n f T, what isn't n f T. To define n f T, let's first define what non fungible means

non fungible token. What does non fungible mean? Non fungible basically means that the thing is you nique and it can't be replaced with something else. For example, a dollar bill, a one dollar bill is fungible. I could trade you my one dollar bill for your one dollar bill and we'll have the same thing. You could even have a five dollar bill and I trade you my five one dollar bills and you also had the same thing. You got five dollars. But the one of one bosk yard

untitled boxer painting created is non fungible. If you have that Boski yacht painting and I trade it for the Mona Lisa, I'd have something completely different. So effectively, to be non fungible means it's like it's a one of one, all right. So let's add the tea back into non fungible. Now we have a non fungible token. So here's what people here's what people get confused. So the token is code. It's like metadata. It's a deed, like aded to a house.

The token isn't the house, like the deed isn't the house. But the deed is the documentation that I own the house. It's the proof that I own the house. The token is the documentation or the code in this case that says I own the JPEG, I owned the MP three, I owned the MP four video file, I own the JIF or whatever other digital asset. It's not the digital asset, but it's the proof that I own it. Okay, So, creators, whatever digital asset you create, whether it be a song,

it could be an audio file. Let's say you just spoke into your Apple, your iPhone, you know, voice recorder, and you made that in n f T. You can make that n f T. It's a digital file. You can make. Um. You know, you can go open up Photoshop or illustrator on your computer, create a piece of art, make it an n f T. You can make a word document in n f T. You can make a picture you took on your cannon. In n f T you can you can make all of these things n f T s. These can be non fungible. Their first

non fungible because you created them. But you can make them non fungible tokens by assigning to them this code that puts them on the blockchain. They're already non fungible. They're already one of ones. The voice memo that you record on your iPhone is already non fungible. It's it. I can't take your voice membo swapping from mine, and we got the same thing. Your voice memo is, it's yours.

It's that's that's the only one that exists. That painting that you make in photoshopper illustrator, that artwork, that's a one of one. It's already non fungible. But once you assign it to the blockchain, you place it on the blockchain, it gets assigned a line of code which makes it a non fungible token. All right, So we've already been super familiar with non fungibility because we've seen one of

one things, you know, our entire lives. Well, what what is new to us is the token part of it, where it can be assigned to a marketplace, a virtual world Web three, where we can track and verify who owns the thing, who has the right to sell it. You understand this When it comes to your house, I can go to the County Auditor's office and see so and so. Jim Smith owns the house at one to three four Main Street. Jim Smith has the right to sell it. I can see that already through real world experience.

What we have not had until recently is the ability to say, Okay, here's a j peg, who owns it? Who has the right to sell it? We have that now the moment we decided to place those MP three's onto the blockchain, you tokenize the asset and it then can take advantage of this new opportunity, a marketability of

ownership and value. All right, minting inn n f T. Before I get too deep into explaining this concept, need to remind you that the art itself, or the voice memo, the MP four, the jpeg itself, is just that it's a digital file, a non fungible digital asset. The n F ten of this asset, this jpeg, this MP four is when this digital asset becomes represented by a token on the Ethereum blockchain, the token is not the art, Ladies and gentlemen, The token is not the art. The

token represents the art on the blockchain. Okay, to mint, an n f T simply means you're assigning a non fungible token, something that cannot be duplicated, something that cannot be changed, something that cannot be altered, to your digital file, to your jpeg, to your voice memo. Once that n f T, that non fungible token is created, it cannot be changed, altered, or tamper with. It's done. I could go off script here because there's so much there, but if I do, I'll be on a scope with is

this episode. So I'll stay. I'll leave that there. But this is an important concept because, as I said, the token is not the art. The token represents the art on the block chain. Then where's the art? It could be many places in any place actually, where you can store digital file. If you store files on a w S, Amazon, web services like blue host, or a server in your bedroom, the original non fungible art or digital file could reside there,

right there in your bedroom. The person who owns it, however, could be somebody you've never met across the ocean. Again, there's so much here. I'm super compelled to go off script, but I will control myself. But just it's that the concept is that the token is not the art. The token represents the art, and it's stored somewhere on a

server somewhere. The most native way to store digital files for the purposes of tokenization as an n f T, however, is to store them on what's called and I PFS or the Interplanetary File System, which in Layman's terms, is a decentralized AWS or a decentralized server which holds files, documents, JPEG's, audio files, et cetera in the ether. I'm not gonna

go off script, but just rock with me. So minting n m T in short, is simply, again, the process of making a digital piece of art or digital file to be represented by a token and placing it on the blockchain. That's all it is. All right, I've got a couple more. Let's get through this super quick, alright. Crypto exchange UM let's use coin based as is arguably the most popular. A crypto exchange is an online market place where you can buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrency um

There are several of these online. So if you want to buy your first bitcoin, and you want to buy your first dose coin, you want to trade your dose coin for somebody's light coin. You do that on a crypto exchange. There are several of these online you can

use UM and ones you can download as apps. I will not go through them all UM, but the purpose for the purposes of this episode, this conversation will stick with coin based UM one of the most if not the most widely used among the whole see of them UM digital wallet another definition for you. Digital wallet is a software based system that stores your coins UM. A While a crypto exchange is where you buy, sell, and traded,

a digital wallet is where you store it. So using your wallet, you make transactions like making payments as its stores your coins or UM. You gain access to services because it stores your passwords. So that's what the digital wallet is. So actually, with a lot of these concepts, will talk about the way you get access to a lot of the sites we're going to be discussing today. You have to have a wallet because the wallet serves as like you're user name and password to get in.

So we're talking about that more in a second. And then gas fees UM erased the idea in your head of like automobiles, gas fees in the world of ETHEREUM is the fee you pay for the usage of the network. Making transactions, as you might imagine, on the blockchain, uses computational power. Um that computational power causes cost some money, so somebody has to pay the electric bills. Somebody's gotta fix,

you know, the system if it breaks. So gas fees are the fee you pay when you perform transactions on the blockchain. We're gonna talk a lot about this concept um because it's important and this could make a break a lot of your UM experience with n f t S. So we're gonna talk a lot about this. But this for all you, for all you need to know right now is there's a concept of gas fees, which is fee the fee you pay for making transactions using um ethereum.

All right, so now that we've established some foundational language, let's mint our first n f t UM. The first thing we have to have is the digital asset. So you might have like a song you'd like to place on the blockchain, or a piece of art you created an illustrator or photoshop, or maybe a poem you wrote and you saved it as a JEF. None of this conversation matters if you don't have some digital asset you want to share with the world. I won't spend a

lot of time here. While having an asset is critical to this idea, it's obvious and there are other necessary steps more worthy of our time, so I won't spend time there. You gotta have it obviously. It's important, UM, necessary and required also UM that you have a digital wallet. There's no need in having a digital wallet if you don't have any coins. And yes, you will need some coins. Remember gas fees in order to mention first inn f T. The first thing you'll need to do UM is set

up an account on coin base. UM. You could use other crypto exchanges, but for this example, we're gonna use this one coin bage. To set up your coin based account, you'll need all the same kind of information you need to set up any other online account, like an email address, unique, use your name, password, and etcetera. But you also need to serve up a photo of your driver's license or some other state I d UM from the coin based website.

The reason behind requiring this documentation is to prevent fraud and to make any account related changes. Coin Based will ask you to verify your identity from time to time We also ask you to verify your identity to ensure no one but you changes your payment information, So be ready with your idea on hand when setting up your account. The next thing you'll need is your banking info in

order to buy some which you'll need um. You'll need to have access to an online account your bank account to connect to your coin based account to swap off the currencies you'll be trading your dollars for ethereum. So you're a genius. You got this far without much of a headache, right, Well, that was the easy stuff. It gets a little bit more complex from here, but I promise it gets simpler again shortly. But this is the part where I got hung up on for like a week.

There was a lot of un learning I had to do in order to be birthed into the world of web three. There were a lot of norms I was used to and had taken for granted, that are not native, or at least not at face value, native to how we perform in our analog world. This concept of a digital wallet took me a second. Um, I just assumed once I had some money in my coin based account that I was golden. I could go and make some purchases. But coin base is just an exchange. You don't buy

things from the coin based app. You need a digital wallet to do that, which, after I got over the momentary state of confusion, it started to make sense. If I have a bank account, that doesn't mean I go buy some yeasys on the confirmed app using my bank account. No, I use my credit card or a debit card, which is backed either by my credit worthiness or my bank balance.

You get the point. The exchange either way, it's just where I converted convert my dollars to cryptocurrency with the cryptocurrency of my choice, be it Ethereum, Bitcoin, dose coin, or Sheba or whatever. And the wallet is where I buy stuff in the marketplace, like a n f T marketplace. With this conversation, we're talking about minting n f T s, however, not buying them. But so far in our steps we're

still doing the same work. To perform I have a task, you still have to have a wallet to mint n f T s. Again, your wallet is also the holder of your coins and your passwords. Remember that, so moving coins over to your wallet, the process of moving my coins from the exchange to my wallet again being new to the game cost me a little bit of heartache. Before I describe the heartache, though, I'll tell you about

my wallet. There are two wallets that I have. I have one that is a meta mask wallet, and I also have a coin based wallet. Coin Based is not only a marketplace, they also provide a wallet to go alongside their marketplace services, though you do have to sign up for them independently. Once um you have some coins in your marketplace account, you'll need to move some over to your wallet in order to continue the process of minting your n f T east. This was my first

experience with the dreaded gas fees. Now, I mentioned before that you get charged gas fees when you make a transaction on the etherym blockchain. Remember so I also mentioned that at this point I had already purchased some eth. So why is now moving money from my coin based account to my wallet, in this case, my coin based wallet, when it wouldn't have matter. It could have been my

metal mask wallet. Why is now the first brush I've had with gas fees when I've had to pay gas fees to get my coins in the first place on the marketplace, Yes, but no, I could go off the deep end here, but I won't what I what I will give you is enough information to understand the core concepts without balking you down in details and minutia. When you buy crypto from marketplace like coin Base, that marketplace

already has the ethereum, the EAT. So having a thousand dollars in your coin Base marketplace account is effectively like having a thousand dollars IOU from coin Base. You really don't own the eath. When you go to move it over to your wallet, however, you're taking control of the e and placing it in your digital hands. So because you first simply had an IOU from the marketplace coin Base, in my case, you didn't, you didn't really have any have to pay any gas fees because you really didn't

have the eath. You had a promise of ease. So platforms can get hacked and it will matter to you because they're storing your EATH or your promised eth. If it's in your wallet, however, you risk losing it if you lose your keys or your keys get stolen. You're in control. Going deeper into that isn't in the scope of this episode, but I'll leave it at that. If it's on the platform. If you have not moved money out of the marketplace and into your wallet, you have

the promise of that currency. Once you move over to the wallet, then you have it in your hands. Okay, So this is where I came to pay my first real toll in the form of gas fees, moving money from my coin based marketplace account to in this case, my coin based wallet. Since I'm truly taking ownership of my ETH instead of having coin based the marketplace be a custodian from my ETH, I'm placing a recorded transaction

onto the blockchain. Therefore, that requires, as we remember, computational power, and I gotta pay for that. Gas prices, just like the gas prices were used to the ones that involve automobiles, fluctuate, and they fluctuate based on the demand for computational power, the volume of network activity, and since ethereum is in more demand than ever, gas prices have been higher than

they've been in months and years. Recently, they're incredibly high at the moment, so much so that the rates make some investments into n f T s UM no longer feasible and even ruin the value and possibility of future returns. So gas prices are high. UM, let's just lead it to the side because it's again out of the scope of this conversation. But it's important to know that gas prices are high and can you know can impact UM

whether or not you get involved. So let's say your comfy with paying the incredibly high fees to move your feet, and you make the move. So note, I'm going to use some very simple numbers going forward as an example of actual numbers in these real life instances, very second to second. But my goal here is just for you to understand the concepts. Giving you simple numbers helps me

communicate these ideas. So you had a thousand dollars in your in your coin based marketplace account, and now you have nine hundred in in your coin based wallets after paying gas fees. UM, here's a peek at everything you have so far. You have a digital non fungible asset like a piece of art or an MP three of a song. You have a coin based marketplace account, and

you have a coin based wallet with some in it. UM. The next thing you'll need to ment your first n f T is an account on an n f T marketplace. For this example, I'll use the most popular of these, which is open c. There are others like Wearable, Foundation, Mentable and more UM, but open c is the biggest. To set up an account on open ce, UH, to make your first piece of art, we're going to need to use the other utility of your wallet. Remember, a

wallet can perform more tasks than just spending coins. It can also serve as our password traffic keeper UM. In order to create our open sea account, will need to connect open ce by clicking the create button at the top of their web page to our wallet. UH. This require a little bit of authentication which we don't have to get into here, but I found it to be,

you know, quite user freely and uncumbersome. So if you've made it this far into this episode, you should get through the process of connecting open sea to your wallet without much of an issue. Guess what you have now created your wallet and move some feet into it, and you made it past much of the heavy lifting. Most people do not make it this far, so cheers. Now, after having connected your wallet, you should see that you

have an open sea account. Now you'll be able to click into your profile on open sea, upload a profile picture at a bio, your social handles and more. But let's get all that and get back to minting our first n f T. So the reason open c is the big dog in this n f T marketplace uh space, is they make it super easy to mint n f T s. What you're going to do simply is click create at the top of the page in the nav

bar and start creating your item. Open Sea allows you to upload a number of file types like JPEG's, pings, PNGs, just MP four's, m P three's on and on and on um with a max size of like a hundred megabytes. So you've got plenty of space to play there. So that's pretty cool, and creators have a lot of options, and so most of this page to creating and menting. I'm sorry your first n f T is self explanatory.

But the one thing, and among the last things to note here is the benefit of n f T s as opposed to the pre n f T world of art related to the creator's reward for her creation. Historically, and and still many, if not all, analog instances, say you create a painting and you're lucky enough to find a buyer at some community art show who you sell your paint too, for ten thousand dollars. You won. Right. For many artists, selling anything at that higher number is

a victory. It doesn't happen often, but if it happens to you, you know, kudos to you. But let's put a real world twist on this, because it's happened time after time. You sold that piece at that community art fair for ten thousand dollars. Two years later, the person let's call him Sal, has garnered a lot of interest in that piece as he throws his remarkable dinner parties at his home in Utah. A purveyor of fine art loves the piece, visits his home for dinner and it's like, yo, Sal,

I gotta have that piece. Sounds like you can have that piece. You know. They make an exchange for a hundred thousand dollars, So Sal is up ninek on his investment. He bought it for ten, he sold it for a hundred. You, the creator of the work, you realize none of that secondary sale value. That purveyor are lists it and Christie's. Then let's let's go further. He sells it again Chris and Christie's. Now it sells for six hundred thousand dollars. Again,

you see none of that money. Sal made a hundred K. That purveyor who's unnamed made five d K. He bought it four hundred and sold it for six hundred. You saw none of that. You saw ten thousand, and that ten thousand dollars that you were so excited about two years ago. It is starting to feel like a raw deal. With today's technology. It is with n f T s it is with an n f T. On that same page, we're looking at on open sea. You can create a

royalty that gets solidified into your art. It is not changeable, and it's up to ten in fact. So what does this mean based on our example baked into the smart contract, which is simply the settings were creating on this page we're looking at an open sea, we're baking into our n f T a set of rules that governs all transactions going forward about our n f T. So let's let's play this out again. Um, with our painting as an n f T. You're at that community art fair

and Sal walks up. He's like, nice piece, kid, how much you know? In this case it's obviously a digital piece of art. But walk with me. You muster up the courage and take that big gulp and you say it's fifteen thousand dollars. Nah. You and Sal haggle and you settle on ten K. So you got ten grant. You feel like a million dollars because you just sold a piece for five figures that you created at home in your draws. Sal has his dinner party at his

home in Utah and the purveyor shows up. He loves the piece and he buys it from Sal four hundred thousand dollars. This time you're not mad though, because baked into the n f T is a smart contract that outlines attend percent royalty. So you you made your initial ten k, and now that Sal is out there selling your stuff again. You made ten k on his sale. You made ten percent on his sale to that purveyor, and you cast in another ten k as you earned

ten percent of his hundred thousand dollars sale. Now you had twenty thou hollars. You had your original ten k and you had his tin k. That purveyor, being a friend of Christie's auction house, list the piece and it goes for six hundred thousand dollars. Your ten percent royalty never goes away. It's unchangeable, it's unmodifiable, it's baked in

what you just earned sixty thou hollars. In total, you're up eighty thousand dollars and you didn't have to do anything else besides your n f T and it went to work. Obviously, there will be millions of n f T s created as the awareness grows over time, and not all have this outcome. Most won't have this outcome. If that's not important. What is important is that we now have the opportunity for what to happen. John Michelle Botsky. I didn't have that. Gordon Parks didn't have that. You do.

In the future, we'll get more into smart contracts, dolls, and other implications of n f t s like what will the means for health insurance? Possibly home sales even more. But my goal with this podcast episode is to pique your interest in the future we can all take advantage of now and benefit from for generations to come. What

will you create? Black Tech, Green Money and production of Black they Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast Network in iHeart Media and it's produced by Morgan Davon and me Well Lucas, with additional production support by Love Beach and Marissa Lewis. Special thank you to Michael Davis Adam Sims. It's a car savon Jan you know, like the wine. Yes, that's his real name. Learn more about my guests and other technis reuptres and innovators at afro tech dot com.

Enjoying black tech, green money. Leave us a five star rating on iTunes. Go get your money, Peace and luck,