What is NFT and how can it benefit creative vendors?

March 2021 was an interesting month for NFT. Jack Dorsey sold his first-ever tweet as an NFT for nearly $3 million ($2,915,835.47 to be precise) after more than two weeks of bidding, which he committed to converting the winning bid into Bitcoin and donating it to charity.

Meanwhile, the art world was shaken when Singapore-based technopreneur Vignesh Sundaresan (Metakovan) bought an NFT work by a digital artist called Beeple for a whopping US$69 million (S$93 million).

So what is this thing called NFT? Is NFT a cryptocurrency? How can you create, collect, buy and sell NFT? If you are curious or confused, this post is for you!

What is a non-fungible token (NFT)?

Let's start with clearing the confusion. Is NFT a cryptocurrency?

Short answer: No, NFT is NOT a cryptocurrency. 

Long answer: A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital asset that represents ownership of real-world items like art, video clips, music, tweets, shoes, any collectables items you can think of. Each NFT can only have one official owner at a time; It is stored and secured on a blockchain that has a digital signature (via encoding) which makes it impossible to be replicated. No one can modify the record of ownership or copy/paste an NFT into a new existence. 

But why not? I can "replicate" NFTs... they are just a bunch of hyperlinks and images! I can just screenshot and store the JPEG, or download the music with a pirate third-party app right? 

Well sure, do whatever makes you happy, but the same argument applies to when you buy a $10 The Starry Night painting by Van Gogh and put that painting on your living room wall. It's pretty, inspiring, and makes you happy but everyone knows that that painting is not the original Van Gogh painting. Why does it matter? well, no one will pay for that painting on your living room wall for over $100 million.

Interesting right? NFTs can benefit many creative event vendors because, as mentioned earlier, you can tokenise any of your unique digital assets be it paintings, music tracks, videos, photographs, food recipes or even real estate! 

How can you create an NFT?

To align our storyline, we have a character named "Ali". Ali happens to be a writer and wants to sell one of their poetries:

"We did it, we bashed them, wee Potter’s the one,
And Voldy’s gone moldy, so now let’s have fun!”

So what should Ali do?

The first step is, make sure that you own the intellectual property rights to the item you want to turn into an NFT. You could get into serious legal trouble if you create an NFT for a digital asset you don't own.

The next step is to tokenise and set the ownership of your art piece, we call this NFT minting.

1. NFT Minting

Minting your unique digital asset starts with choosing the blockchain technology you intend to use for your NFT. The most popular among NFT creators is Ethereum, but there are also other options such as Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, Cosmos, etc. There are also different sites for minting NFT, such as:

• Rarible (https://rarible.com/) - Rarible's lazy minting feature allows you to mint your NFT for free!
• Binance Smart Chain (https://www.binance.org/en/smartChain)
• OpenSea (https://opensea.io/)
• Proton Mint (https://protonmint.com/) - Proton Mint doesn't charge any gas fees for minting. First NFT mint for free and minting additional NFTs is affordable.
• Venopi aims to provide this service in the future if we can prove enough demand from our event partners

2. Setting up your wallet

Although you can get away with free NFT minting, selling an NFT requires the network to do some computing and this transaction will cost some money, which is known as a "gas fee".

Although it feels like a hassle, it will benefit you in the long run. Say you successfully sell your NFT, you may want to cash out, convert to another cryptocurrency or do other things you wanna do with your earnings. Ideally, you want to feel comfortable buying and selling cryptocurrencies or NFTs like you would do transactions in the real world (as simple as buying a coffee or a pizza or a book or a horse). 

First, buy some Ethereum (ETH) or any other you plan on using on a crypto trading app and deposit it into your wallet. Don't worry, I will break it down for you:

1. Buy some Ethereum (ETH) or any other you plan on using. There are many exchange platforms out there and you can use whichever suits your situation and country of residence best. My favourite exchange platforms are:
   • Kraken (https://www.kraken.com/)
   • Binance (https://www.binance.com/)
   • Coinbase (https://www.coinbase.com/)
   • Bitstamp (https://www.bitstamp.net/)
2. Deposit it into your wallet. There are various wallets you can choose from, such as:
   • Metamask (https://metamask.io/) - most popular
   • Coinbase Wallet (https://www.coinbase.com/wallet)
   • Trust Wallet (https://trustwallet.com/)
   • Ledger wallet - hardware (https://www.ledger.com/blog/nfts-are-coming-soon-to-ledger-live)

Some NFTs, such as Axie Infinity, requires you to use a specific wallet called Ronin Wallet but I'd say it's the exception and I will be more than happy to help you set it up if you write me on ivanaATvenopiDOTcom.

Depending on the marketplace, you can connect and transfer the crypto from your wallet to your NFT marketplace account. Some marketplaces, like OpenSea, allow you to purchase crypto directly using a credit card on their platform. 

3. List and Sell your NFT

When you have minted your NFT, you're ready to sell it on the marketplace. All you need to do is to click on the "Sell" button on the page. 

Conclusion

Venopi aims to enable our event vendors to do these three steps on our dashboard. We will add these features to our already existing marketplace, we will enable our event vendors to upload and sell their NFTs on Venopi. We are a bootstrapped company with a small team, therefore your support means a lot to us. If you are an event vendor or event organiser and want to be able to create, collect, buy and sell NFTs on Venopi, please let us know by signing up on this page (https://venopi.com/event-future-web3-blockchain-cryptocurrency/) and sharing the words to your friends, customers, colleagues, and partners to join our growing community.

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