Can you, and should you, make NFTs from artwork, collectibles and tweets? - Hindustan Times
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Can you, and should you, make NFTs from artwork, collectibles and tweets?

Nov 17, 2021 10:32 AM IST

There is a potential of earning big from a sale of a collectible you may have as an NFT. This is not financial advice, but NFT sales have seen a steady increase over the past few months

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, aren’t exactly simple to understand. Nevertheless, they are proving to be quite popular.

Top artwork NFTs on the OpenSea platform, which also hosts NFTs for music, collectibles, domain names, trading cards and sports. (Screen shot)
Top artwork NFTs on the OpenSea platform, which also hosts NFTs for music, collectibles, domain names, trading cards and sports. (Screen shot)

These digital tokens, which cannot be broken down or divided, are one way of cementing the ownership of valuables while also adding value to them if you eye raising funds by selling them.

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There is the potential of earning big from a sale of a collectible you may have, as an NFT. Mind you, this is not financial advice in any sense, but NFT sales have seen a steady increase over the past few months, indicative of people making and selling more NFT assets.

October saw at least 73,059 NFTs being sold globally, and that’s just in the field of arts. It’s a bit lower than the 95,523 pieces of art sold as NFTs in September, which is more than the 89,251 art-related NFTs sold in August this year.

Digital platform Nonfungible.com says that in the last three months, daily sales of NFTs have ranged between 7,981 and 82,752. In the same period, the average NFT sale has been pegged at $3,544.79 (around 2,63,909). The numbers make for interesting reading.

Also Read: NFT: The new brush stroke in the Indian art world

An NFT could be anything - an artwork, a painting, a video, music, a GIF you created, a meme you made or even a social media post. The important thing to keep in mind here is - you must be the original creator of whatever it is that you wish to convert into an NFT. If it’s not so, copyright and other legal hassles could await you later.

Once you have identified whatever it is that you wish to add value to as an NFT, you’ll need to choose a platform where it can be created and listed. Some popular platforms include OpenSea, Axie Marketplace, Rarible, SuperRare, Foundation, Nifty Gateway, BakerySwap, Mintable, and ThetaDrop.

Choose wisely, because certain platforms and marketplaces are focused in nature - NBA Top Shot Marketplace is best if you wish to list or buy basketball NFTs. Some are larger than others. The OpenSea platform is already worth much more than $3.5 billion NFT listings, and counting.

Now you have to choose a wallet. That’s where payments in cryptocurrency will be received for NFT sales. But before that, this is where you’ll make payments in crypto coins to the platform you’ve chosen to mint your NFT.

These platforms usually take payments in crypto coins such as Ethereum. If you don’t already have, you must buy some crypto coins at this stage and add to your crypto wallet.

How much you need to buy and what you spend from real-world money for that depends on factors such as the number of NFTs to be minted, the fees to mint these, and the crypto coin purchase rate at the time.

Often, your choice of wallet will be from the list of options that your chosen NFT platform works with. For instance, OpenSea will let you choose between MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, WalletConnect, Fortmatic, Opera Touch on mobile and Dapper, to name a few.

Once this is done, the NFT platform will guide you to upload the digital asset that you wish to mint as an NFT. It could be an image file, an audio file, a video, a GIF, etc. You can add descriptions, version details, supply stats, if there’s more than one version of an NFT in a sales listing.

You will then lock this data down forever with this NFT - a process also referred to as “freeze” on certain platforms. At this stage, you can put it on sale.

While NFTs are popular, it is hard to predict which way the winds will blow a few months down the line. Your NFTs could multiply in value or stay the same. Maybe even tumble. This is best described as an unknown territory. Be prepared to lose some money, if things go pear-shaped.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Vishal Mathur is Technology Editor for Hindustan Times. When not making sense of technology, he often searches for an elusive analog space in a digital world.

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