Just a few days ago, a CryptoPunk sold for over $7 Million breaking the previous record of $2 Million. According to the New York Times, we are currently in a Non-Fungible Token Mania with some NFTs being sold for $69 Million. NFT prices have gone parabolic lately, and many people are wondering how they can start creating and selling their own Non-Fungible Tokens.  In this post, I will show you how to create, design, and sell your NFTs using AtomicHub.

Creating NFTs on Wax With AtomicHub

To start with, I have to say that it is possible to create NFTs on a variety of different blockchains, however, with the ridiculously Ethereum gas fees, I think WAX is one of the easiest as well as most cost-effective chains to use for now.

Before we start, you do need to have a WAX wallet for this process. If you don't have one already, you can simply sign up here. The cloud wallet is incredibly simple to use and simply requires an email and password - no 12 words and phrases to memorize here

To begin creating your NFT, simply navigate to the “NFT Creator” to begin the journey. Although this NFT creator is exceptionally simple and easy to use, there are a few steps. The first step is to click on create a new collection. A collection can be thought of as a grouping of similar items. So, think of all the Pokemon cards you owned as a child as one collection. Think of all the Digimon cards in a separate collection. It's an easy way to group like items and is important during the NFT creation process.

Once you open this screen, you will see that you must fill out five separate fields. The collection name must be exactly 12 characters all lowercase or with numbers 1-5. You can also enter a display name, website URL, collection description, and market fee. Lastly, you can upload a collection photo. This is not the image that will be displayed on your card, but rather a photo that represents the collection. 

Most of these fields are pretty self-explanatory, however, I do want to point out that the market fee is more of a perpetual royalty that you will get every time a card is sold, not simply on the initial sale. In other words, if you sell the card to Joe and then Joe sells it to Steve and then Steve sells it to Fred, you will get 5% off each of those sales. 

Once you have completed that, click create collection and authorize the transaction in your wallet.

After we have created the collection, we can create a schema that is like a blueprint for what attributes our NFT will have. Let's keep going with the Pokemon example. Every Pokemon card that you own as a kid had certain features in common. For example, every card had an attribute called rarity. Every card had an attribute called HP, etc. With the schema, we are defining what attributes each card will have without saying what specifically that attribute will be.

For example, each of my cards that use the pteseries1 schema will have a name, associated image, rarity level, and mint issue. You can add whatever other features you like so long as they can be represented by either an integer, floating-point number, ipfs hash, text, or boolean value. After selecting the default attributes that we want each NFT in the schema to have, we finalize this and sign the transaction. 

From here, we can finally create our NFT by clicking “Mint New Asset". Notice that our NFT automatically inherits all the properties of the schema. in other words, by default, it asks us for a name, image to upload, rarity level, and mint number. 

RAM and WAX

Once we fill all these out, we can click create asset and authorize the transaction with our wallet. If you have done everything right, then your transaction should be…...REJECTED! Wait. If I did everything right, why is my transaction rejected?

One point that I do have to make is that creating NFTs on the Wax blockchain will require a certain amount of RAM. Unless you have already purchased some WAXP, you more than likely won't have enough RAM to complete this transaction. Not to worry though, you can get more RAM by paying in WAXP. For creating my initial lot of NFTs, I needed about 1 WAXP in RAM which amounted to 25 cents. 

Final Minting

I know that both Bittrex and KuCoin offer WAXP, however, you also have the option of buying it directly within your wallet itself which I wish I would have known before spending three hours trying to transfer funds to Bittrex, wait for confirmation, changing to tether, then try to purchase WAXP only to find out that my order was too small. You probably can't buy just one WAXP token, and I think the minimum order for me was $20, but don’t consider the rest of this WAX “wasted” as it can still be used to purchase other items on the marketplace, traded, or obviously used as crypto in its own right. 

With that being said, we will try for the second time to create our NFT. Once again, we get the error message, but this time we can buy RAM now that we have those tokens in our wallet. With everything good to go, we can finally create the NFT and mint it. 

That's it! Assuming you already have an image designed and WAXP in your wallet, you could probably do this entire process in less than 10 minutes. Once our asset is created, you can see the parallels between what field we inputted in the creation process, and the attributes of the created NFT. 

What Now?

So, now that you have your first NFTs created, what can you do with them? You can sell your NFTs on the market in two different ways. The first way is simply listing the asset for a given price. The second option is creating an auction with a starting price and duration. It's also possible to transfer or give these cards away for free which is exactly what I'm doing in this article! Just for kicks, I will be giving away 5 of my very first NFTs to the first five people that comment their WAX wallet address on my YouTube video for this article. 

Just to make things easy and keep track of who was first, you need to comment on the YouTube video. I publish on too many platforms to track down comments everywhere, but comment on the YouTube video, and I’ll try my best to send the NFT to you. No guarantees obviously as this is my first time dealing with NFTs.  

When you first create an NFT, it may not show in the marketplace depending on whether or not the user has unchecked the "only whitelisted NFTs" box. You can still sell your NFTs, but it just might make them a little bit less discoverable. To achieve whitelisting, follow the guide here.

Summary

That's a general overview of how to create your first NFT on Wax. As a creator, the choice of chain that you want to create on is totally up to you, but I think that WAX (in conjunction with AtomicHub) gives an easy-to-use interface that is also relatively inexpensive. As always, thanks for reading, and don't forget to claim your NFT on the YouTube channel. 

References

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/arts/design/nft-auction-christies-beeple.html

https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks/details/7804

https://wallet.wax.io/dashboard

https://wax.atomichub.io/creator

https://eos-amsterdam.medium.com/how-to-create-your-own-nfts-96414d0b015d

Some of the cryptocurrency platforms that I find helpful are listed below. When you join with one of my links, there is no cost or penalty to you, but it does help support my work.

Publish0x – Cryptocurrency blogging site

LBRY – Decentralized video hosting

Splinterlands – Online Trading Card Game

Coinbase – For those times when I need to use a centralized exchange.