Diving Head First Into NFT Creation
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the JPEGs
Hi. I’m NIMRODD and I’m a newly minted crypto addict. This article is about my NFT collection: NMRD Princess, and the thinking that went into it.
When it comes to crypto, I am kind of a late adopter. With Bitcoin having arrived on the scene in 2009 and Ethereum in 2015, I only took an active interest this year, 2021. It’s not like I was not aware that something was going on, but I was invested in my other passion, game development.
So… what changed? I read a book.
Ok. Disclaimer: I read a lot of books. However, this book, Grokking Bitcoin, provoked in me an epiphany! That’s no exaggeration. I had a strong feeling that there was something going on in tech that I could not miss out on. Groundbreaking, world changing technology, much like we experienced in the mid 90s. I was kind of young to take part in the web revolution then, but not this time. I learned shortly after what the NFT community calls this feeling: FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out.
I had it. Bad.
The Problem
The problem was I didn’t have money to immediately jump into crypto in any significant way. Bitcoin was around 50k USD at the time. Ethereum, 3800 USD. This was the beginning of September and things have only gone up since then. It’s around 4700 USD at time of writing. I had a problem. What to do?
As I started reading a lot more about crypto, I found out about NFTs. The first article that I read on NFTs was about a 12 year old selling ‘weird whale’ NFTs.
NFTs? Non Fungible Tokens? What?
NFTs are a sort of digital property that is unique (non-fungible) unlike most crypto which works like money and is not unique (fungible). Five USD is equal to any other 5 USD but a baseball card is not the same as a comic book. NFTs can be anything from visual art, music, domain names, and really — any digital object which has the property of being unique/semi-unique.
Was this my entry pass into crypto? I always liked drawing. However, like playing guitar or studying foreign languages, I never considered it anything more than a hobby. So now I just had to learn smart contract programming and sharpen my front-end web development skills up for the first time in years… oh yeah — and do the actual art.
What could be so hard about it?
The Art
Weird Whales is a generative art project. It uses a number of different image slices, or layers, which represent different properties in a drawing. With a little code it stacks the layers on top of each other. Different layers have different probabilities of being selected. The end result is a number of images being generated, all different. Given the probabilities they were generated with, the images generated have relatively different rarity among them.
This was, and to an extent still is, the hotness in the NFT space. These types of projects are called PFPs — profile pictures, and are meant to be used as user’s profile picture on social sites, a sort of web3 identity. Twitter has since talked about verifying users PFPs. Some of the big players in PFPs are Larva Labs CryptoPunks and more recently Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Ok. It was decided. I was creating a PFP NFT project to get into Crypto!
The project would have six properties, or layers: Hair Style, Hair Accessory, Mouth Expression, Eye Type, Clothing and Bling (or jewelry). I am a fan of clean line art and flat colors. I try to err towards minimalism in most things.
I got to work and around three weeks later, after quite a bit of artsing and coding, I had my PFP NFT collection. The NMRD Princess NFT PFP collection was born! Why NMRD? NMRD for NIMRODD, of course!
Looks Rare
As previously mentioned, rarity is something to be considered in NFTs. The way I decided to represent a particular NFT’s rarity was by using the background of the NFT itself. While a lot of PFP NFTs don’t really use the background for much, mine encodes the rarity in a visual manner. People have told me since that it’s not quite clear, so I’ll explain here. It’s simple.
There are eight levels of rarity. Depending on how rare the NFT is, the more filled in the background effect is. The common level of rarity has a plain color background. As the NFT increases in rarity, the background fills in with a radial pattern effect. At the top three levels of rarity a highlight is added behind the character, then a swirling of the radial pattern and finally the rarest of NFTs have a colored in swirling radial pattern.
This way, the rarity of one of my NFTs can be known just by looking at them. Neat, right?
Now… how to sell these for some sweet, sweet ETH?
The Technology
I had the art, so now I needed a smart contract and a simple website to mint my NFTs from, right? After some serious consideration, and understanding that I’m going to be learning this space for a long time, I decided that I simply wanted to get going as soon as possible. This meant that I would not create my custom smart contract, which in turn meant I didn’t need a minting website. Opensea allows people to use their shared smart contract to mint NFTs, so I thought — why not? I can still verify NFT ownership through their API, if I build the project in that direction.
Now, where to place my NFTs? Ethereum or Polygon? Ethereum is notorious for having high gas fees, the money paid to miners for their blockchain building work. Polygon is gas free. Ethereum had the momentum of all the action happening on it… but Polygon is gas free, people like free, right?
Yes and no. I was about to learn that NFT land works by its own rules, thinking and culture.
For better or worse, in the end I chose Polygon because of the monetizing strategy I had in mind.
The Strategy
I never paid much mind to social networks, so it’s not like I could just go online and announce my new project and have some sort of ready audience. At the same time, I was also reading a lot about projects “rugging” people, meaning projects that launch, take the money, and close down with no further plan to develop. I knew that people were more suspicious than ever, with reason.
How could I ask anyone to buy into my project, being a total unknown?
Traditionally, a project announces on their socials that they will start “minting” on a certain date. If a project does not make serious sales within a week of mint date or so, it’s sometimes considered a failure.
So, with these the points in mind: first having no audience and second never being able to sell my NFTs in a short amount of time, I decided to go in a sort of opposite direction, and try to sell them slowly. I would divide my NFT collection, made up of 2400 NFTs, into 200 daily releases of 12 NFTs, instead of a single massive drop. My thinking was: by dividing the NFTs into 200 days, a relative eternity in the NFT space, I would have time to get involved and slowly grow an audience on Twitter, at least. Another aspect of committing to such a slow release was that people hopefully would realize that I’m in this for the long run and not to pull a fast rug.
The pricing strategy is as follows: The first drop was priced at 0.001 ETH, about 4 USD at the time of writing. Every subsequent drop rises by 0.001 ETH. This pricing scheme benefits those first people that decide to take a risk on me, which I think is fair. The NFTs are randomly distributed and not priced according to rarity at all. There could be the most rare of NFTs on the first drops and they would cost just as much as the most common ones. Price only changes by drop and by 0.001 ETH each drop.
Now, this slow drop strategy introduced another problem. Every time you interact with a smart contract to change its state, in this case adding 12 tokens per day, you have to pay gas. As already mentioned, gas costs on Ethereum are prohibitive, at least for me. This left only one alternative: Polygon.
Polygon it was.
I started my daily dozen drops in early October and am now thirty drops in.
So… am I rich now or what?
The Results So Far
I am not rich. Yet. Sorry to disappoint.
Within a few days of talking with people on Discord and Twitter alike, I found some people that liked my project and bought in. At the time of writing, there are 360 NFTs in the collection, 26 owners — some of which have won NFTs from promotions I do on Twitter.
I have sold NFTs for a grand total of 0.225 ETH, and the larger part of that amount is due to one single collector, the first real patron of the collection.
I know what you’re thinking… 0.225 ETH is not that much. Yet, I am happy so far with this experiment. It may be slow going, but it’s working. It has proven to me that there’s something in this space. I already knew it, of course, but now its real to me — rather than something in the abstract.
Was launching the project on Polygon a good idea? Probably not. Ethereum has real momentum in the NFT space. People are weary of Polygon projects because of a few bad actors which have given a bad name to the platform. Another thing I learned is that the extra step of bridging ETH to the Polygon chain is something that a lot of people don’t care for. Finally, I could have realized sooner that it’s possible to “lazy-mint” on Opensea’s shared Ethereum smart contract without spending money on gas. Live and learn.
Next Steps
I have learned a good bit these last couple months. Dare I say, I’ve been having a lot of fun wrapping my head around this space. There’s so much more to learn, it’s like drinking from a fire hose.
What are my next steps? I’m going to keep trying to grow a following on my Twitter and I’m going to keep thinking of ideas to grow the project’s audience. There’s another 170 or so daily drops after all.
I’m already working on the next thing too, an ongoing NFT project that will have a YouTube channel as a driving force behind it. And I have long term ideas for things lined up way down the line. Plans. Dreams.
As I develop and build, I will keep writing about my experiences. I hope to be back here, writing a part 2 to my journey — soon. Don’t hesitate to come visit me on Twitter and say hi.
