How to mint your own NFTs

Learn how you can start creating your own NFTs for free.

Everyone seems to be talking about NFTs, but do you even know how to make one?

Some investors and technologists are speculating that NFTs, non-fungible tokens, could become mainstream as more use cases for the technology arise. Currently, an NFT is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain. Most NFTs are on the Ethereum blockchain, and creating an NFT, which is called “minting,” essentially encodes your NFT onto the blockchain. There’s a good explanatory article The Verge put together that demystifies NFTs.

I’m going to skip over the definitions and the internet history of crypto and tell you one of the most important things about NFTs right now: It’s one of the ways tech-savvy investors and creators are making and spending money. (To be clear, I’m not recommending this as financial advice. I am just saying people are profiting in this space right now.) 

Getting started

Seeing the potential of this technology, I started experimenting with NFTs in the spring of 2021. I created a few original designs and converted those hand-drawn sketches into digital illustrations. I wanted to then take those digital illustrations and transform them into NFTs. I went to the website Rarible, which is an NFT marketplace where celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Crypto artists like Pak were listing their collections, and I decided to do the same. 

Well, no one told me it would cost money to mint an NFT. So I was really surprised to learn that in order to convert my artwork into an NFT I would need to spend money in order to pay for the gas fees. Basically, every action that happens on a blockchain incurs cost – gas fees. I ended up spending around $350 in gas fees in order to mint two NFTs on Rarible. And guess what? 

They didn’t sell.

The results

I guess I was just assuming I’d basked in instantaneous success, which did not happen. Instead, my NFTs hung idly on my profile page, collecting binary dust. I was really discouraged by this. I had read about how other unknown artists were debuting their NFTs and selling out – sometimes in minutes. Some additional research has helped me readjust my expectations though. I think those major financial success stories are quite rare and have a lot to do with market manipulation and speculation, rather than the quality of the collections, which I will go into in another article. So, I didn’t sell anything, and I spent a decent amount of money minting my lNFTs. Now what?

I gave up on the whole process for a few months. Instead, I worked on developing an original set of illustrations that I was excited about. 

Finding a better way

Once I completed that collection, I decided to start a new account on OpenSea, which is a popular NFT marketplace with a growing community. After some research, I learned that there was a way to mint NFTs with little to no gas fees – which is much more sustainable for the average content creator like myself.

What was the secret? I was able to mint on the Polygon blockchain instead of the Etherum blockchain, which meant I didn’t have to pay high gas fees. I was able to launch a collection on OpenSea quickly and easily. 

You’re probably wondering whether I’ve made a sale? The answer is no. But that’s OK. That’s my goal for my next adventure. I’ll be building out a marketing strategy to promote my work and I’ll write an article about my process to share with you too.

In the meantime, the video above details step-by-step instructions on how you can start minting your own NFTs on OpenSea for free. Have fun and good luck.