Minting a Non Fungible Token: Personal Experience of a Photographer

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Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

This article is intended to give a real life example on trying to deploy art in to non fungible tokens (NFT). I will not try to explain any concepts or terms here and only concentrate on specific actions and their results. I believe this could be helpful to a small group of people today and a larger audience in the future as they grapple with similar issues. So let’s start..

My pain point is..

I have a set of digital photographs that I put up to sale through traditional sales channels. Those channels have serious shortcomings: (i) They are crowded due to a huge influx of supply, (ii) They have no authentication mechanism and thus rely primarily on the artist to limit number of available editions, (iii) They lack sophisticated financial transaction mechanics and are limited to major fiat currencies, (iv) No practical fractional ownership is possible and (v) As all sales channels are proprietary, their solutions and products are intrinsically custodial and access at the same level over a long time period is naturally not guaranteed.

My alternative solution was..

I was reading about NFTs and thought whether I could mint my photographs in to tokens and let them live forever on the blockchain. However I was not sure where to start from. So I started looking around..

A marketplace?

I had tested OpenBazaar over a year ago and was hugely disappointed due to lack of quality content and serious buyers for digital art. This was true in a general sense and more pronounced for more personalized non-utilitarian photographs that I am interested in. So I was looking for someplace else that was newer, better and could incorporate NFTs.

A quick search revealed OpenSea as the premiere NFT marketplace. A lot of listings, variety of products and prices and most importantly an actual track record of closed transactions were all there.

Consequently couple of days ago and still today, I give the site high marks.

However how was I to list something there?

Mint thy token

In order to list on the OpenSea required eligible NFTs. As a result, I looked for a place where I can create them. The most obvious source was Rarible which itself is the biggest store in the OpenSea.

Thus I went over to Rarible and quite simply started creating a digital collectible. The process was quite simple to administer but creating one listing ended up costing around 7 USD which I thought was a good price.

I was able to list in Rarible’s marketplace and there was an option to list it on OpenSea as well.

The wallet is the identity and the identifier

Here I should take a step back and mention that most of the account management so far and going further was handled by the Ethereum wallet. Most of these sites accept couple of the major ones quite practically and thus the wallet becomes the identifier of the underlying address that stores the NFTs. So by logging in to the sites with that wallet, the site reads the address, sees the blockchain and makes the connection.

It does not always work seamlessly as it seems some sites do not update the blockchain with all your actions done on their site regarding the NFT but generally it works.

Back to OpenSea and into some confusion

Rummaging around other listings, I realized that some of them have attributes that my listings lacked. Such as this exquisite CyberGeisha which mentioned file type among its attributes. This was the moment I realized my contract did not have an asset locked in to it. Rarible allows links or keys but actual JPG cannot be added as an unlockable content.

Thus I was befuddled. I had created tokens that operated on a promise to deliver the underlying asset but others had created tokens that have these assets locked in. So I needed to find a way to mint the token with the asset locked in.

But before that I wondered where the tokens I created resided? Not to mention that in between I kept paying up fees to list stuff and allow sites to use the wallet. Given high Gas prices, this ended up costing a dear sum as well.

Anyhow, I decided the token’s residence should be addressed before unlockable content and I went to Etherscan and looked at my transactions. That was the moment I realized that my tokens naturally resided under contracts that for example Rarible or others created. Thus I had token reference in my address but the actual smart contract and the token was not under my custody (as per my limited technical understanding).

So now I had an ownership question and an unlockable content technicality. I kept on reading and checking other sites..

An easy way to add unlockable content?

My next stop was Cargo which is like Rarible a marketplace and a DIY minting service. Cargo has a different pricing structure which eventually ties to ETH. Its main advantage is the ability to add unlockable digital content seamlessly. Similar to Rarible, Cargo also seamlessly connects to OpenSea to reach a wider audience. So I repeated the same steps as before and created another token. Thus I had made sure there was a way to add content, photographs in my case to the tokens.

But I still wanted to see how the set up would change with a contract that would be linked to my account on which I can mint tokens for each photograph.

Seeking the contract transaction

Upon still further reading I boiled down my choices for creating an Artist Contract or basically an ERC 721 compatible contract where I would set the name and the symbol and such. I decided to choose from two alternatives: infiNFT and Mintable. Both sites went with different methods to provide the same service and I decided on infiNFT as they had good quality listings on the OpenSea that I thought were compatible with what I had on mind.

When I tried to get the contact created, infiNFT had a fee of 0.1 ETH which I thought was reasonable.

However with the gas cost, the contract ended up costing over 0.4 ETH.

While I thought this to be very steep, I checked Mintable’s costs only after the fact to see it was 40%ish lower. I would assume this would be due to different gas usage more than anything but I have not double check this.

Now it was time to mint some photographs in to forever lasting NFTs on the blockchain.

You wish..

Where does the autobahn end?

Up until this point, 8 hours had passed and minting a photograph on my own contract would have been a good ending for the occasion. After struggling awhile to spot the contact ID on the Etherscan, I moved to choose a photograph meticulously, filled all the details and clicked Mint.

Up came the result: 0.005 ETH fee — good. And gas cost of around 0.581 ETH — WHAT?

Even though I knew gas fees were high, a USD 200+ cost to mint only 1 photograph was beyond my expectations. I decided to wait a bit and the cost kept up increasing towards USD 400 as the gas cost was going up.

At that juncture I tried to adjust the transaction gas usage which proved not actionable due to contract related technicalities. With this information on hand, I decided contact the infiNFT team on Discord to seek their advice.

Upon our initial conversation, I tried different file sizes and adjusted the length of descriptions which effected the token’s byte size but not its gas usage. I am expecting further guidance from them.

UPDATE 1: The guidance actually came and was very helpful. I chatted with the infiNFT developer Natealex and he pointed out that I was using the wrong contract ID. This had happened due to a timeout because of the ETH transaction taking too much time.

Once Nate fixed the ID problem, the cost of minting fell to around USD 18 even at the elevated gas prices.

Status and what I did learn..

As things stand around 12 hours later, costs are still high and not feasible to mint a bunch of tokens for me.

I learnt from this experience that gas costs are a major hindrance that pretty much make usage of the Ethereum network restricted. While it seems like simple supply and demand dynamics, the actual problem is that very different verticals are running on Ethereum. Consequently high costs in one can be a lot more detrimental than the other. Obvious effect in this example is limitation of access due to cost which is a factor of demand somewhere else on the mainnet.

Furthermore I discovered a group of companies / projects that are helping to grow the NFT ecosystem. This is an area where I expect tremendous growth and creativity. The companies have a lot to improve especially on support and documentation but they are heading the right way.

Finally, with this experience I realized that if there was an article like this, I would have spent far less time and ETH to come to the same point.

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Investor, Strategist, Business Developer, Management Consultant, Writer & Photographer — hotabak@gmail.com