Minting NFT is an excellent way to sell unique art using blockchain technology. Every art, be it digital or real-world, is unique. To sell it using cryptocurrency, you need a representative token that is unique to other tokens. NFTs are designed to be unique, non-fungible, and rare, making them excellent tools to represent digital and real-world arts in a blockchain environment.

What Is NFT Minting?

NFT minting is a process through which you create a representative token for your digital art in a particular blockchain. NFT minting shares a similarity with coin mining in that both allow the addition of token and coin respectively into blockchain circulation. After you mint an NFT that represents your digital art, you can start selling the art and gain profit in the form of cryptocurrency.

Every NFT is unique, so you can only mint an NFT to represent an artwork. You cannot represent the art using more than one NFT. You also cannot trade an NFT with another NFT. If the represented art or asset allows fractional ownership, there is a special case in which an NFT can represent fractional ownership of that asset. But in most cases, an NFT is uniquely associated with only an artwork.

How to Mint NFT

You can buy and sell NFTs at specific NFT marketplaces, such as OpenSea and Rarible. If you are a seller, you need to mint NFT directly on your chosen marketplace. Different marketplaces may use different minting methods, but in general, the steps are somewhat the same. If you want to mint an NFT to represent a work of art, here are the steps that you need to follow.

Have a Crypto Wallet.

You cannot do any transaction in a blockchain until you have a crypto wallet. You need to create one before you mint your NFT. Certain NFT marketplaces recommend you to use a particular wallet. If you plan to trade on OpenSea, for instance, the recommended wallet is Metamask. You may want to check different marketplaces to learn more about their recommended wallets.

Of course, you don’t always need to choose the recommended wallet. Although a particular marketplace has a specific wallet recommendation, it also accepts non-recommended wallets. If you already have a wallet, you may need to check whether your chosen marketplace accepts it.

Put Some Coins in Your Wallet.

The reason why you need to have a wallet is that you will need to pay certain fees to mint your NFT. Some marketplaces may not charge extra fees, but you will always need to pay gas fees using coins when minting NFT. A gas fee is necessary because miners require compensation for your use of their computer power when you mint an NFT. So, it is not the marketplace that charges the gas fee. The fee itself is omnipresent as an essential component of crypto transactions.

Associate Your Wallet with a Marketplace.

After you prepare your wallet, you need to connect it to your chosen marketplace. This connection is necessary because you will allow the marketplace to access your coins for payment purposes. This connection carries a risk, so you have to make sure that you can trust the marketplace that you choose. There are numerous NFT marketplaces, but only a fraction of them is reliable. Do some research to learn about how reliable different NFT marketplaces are.

Prepare Your Art.

Although you can tokenize both real-world and digital art, it is easier to mint an NFT for digital art than for real-world art. Therefore, if you are a first-timer, you should start with tokenizing digital art, which can be a picture, a video, a musical piece, or anything similar. If you plan to sell a real-world art or asset, you need to take an extensive effort to create a piece of digital data that legally represents the ownership of your real-world asset.

Create Your NFT.

Almost every NFT marketplace puts a recognizable NFT creation button on its home page. You can click on this “create” button to start creating your NFT. You will then be directed to another page where you can select the type of digital art that you want to tokenize. On this page, you can select whether to tokenize an image, a video, or anything else.

After you choose a particular digital art type, you can start uploading the art. The uploaded art will exist inside a secure data storage system like IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System) or Arweave. 

The NFT creation process will follow. Here you need to specify several details about the NFT, such as its name, properties, levels, stats, etc. You can start minting NFT after you specify its details. Be sure to recheck the details that you have specified because after you mint the NFT, you cannot alter them. The NFT will exist in the blockchain permanently in the specified state.

Pay the Gas Fee.

Minting NFC is not free because it requires computing power. You need to pay the gas fee to use such power. It’s not easy to calculate the gas fee because many factors, such as block capacity and block processing speed, affect it. You can determine the relative amount of gas fee after some NFT minting experiments.

Sell the NFT.

Some marketplaces allow you to do direct selling, but it is also possible for you to auction it. Therefore, you can either set a fixed price for your art or a starting price if you prefer auctioning it. 

At this time, you can wait for a potential buyer for your art. The waiting time is quite similar to when you sell your images on any stock photography website. You can sell the NFT of digital art as many as you like, though too frequent sales of similar NFT may affect its price. Remember that rarity is one of the biggest factors that affect the price of your NFT, so make sure that it is rare enough to remain expensive.

Experiment with NFT minting so that you can reap as much as possible profit from minting NFT.