How to mint an nft: step by step guide

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Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are getting more and more attention. The NFT market is growing at a CAGR of 35.27% and is expected to be worth USD 147.24 billion till 2026.

A growing number of creators are venturing into the generation and development of their NFTs. They are being sold for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on various marketplaces and platforms and there has never been a better time than now to step into this market and figure out how to take advantage of this market and invest in it.

What is NFT Minting

Minting is the process of creating a non-fungible token and ā€œregisteringā€ it on the blockchain. To mint NFT, you need to pay a network fee. After that, information about the non-fungible token and its author will be included in the blockchain.

The most popular network for NFT minting is Ethereum. In February 2022, the amount of non-fungible ETH tokens used for minting reached a maximum.

Unicsoft has spent thousands of hours developing NFT marketplaces, and in this article we want to share some of the main steps to successfully mint an NFT. Before minting itself, there are several critical steps to follow to successfully launch and mint your NFT collection.

Step 1. Identify project goals

The goal of the NFT sale is simple ā€“ collect investment from the community. 

NFT community is a group of like-minded NFT collectors and investors who work on building their own culture and brand and thus promoting the future success of the project as a whole.

Thatā€™s why the first step should be identifying the main business goals that are consistent with the community of the project.

Having no community means having no future investors. In case you have no idea how you will be attracting buyers, there is almost no chance to sell the NFTs, even for free. 

So do you have a community on Instagram, Twitter, Discord or elsewhere? How do you develop your community? Are you ready to work on it yourself, or better to hire a professional team that will do it? Consider all these questions while identifying business goals of your NFT project. 

Note that developing a community costs on average 50-70k$ for 2-3 months of work.Ā 

Step 2: Design on the type of art

90% of the NFT projects use generators that simply randomize the traits. However, the main question is ā€“ how many unique traits do you want? 

In case you want a project that has unique art with each piece being unique, then consider that such projects require much more work from the artists/designers and are more expensive.

So first of all, decide on:

  1. What type of design do you need: custom or generated
  2. How many unique traits it should include
  3. Should the art be animated
  4. Are you ready to provide references
  5. Are there any pre-planned rarity features

Step 3: Manage the utility

Note that projects that aim to sell NFTs for the ā€œrarityā€ of visual features are doomed to fail, unless they come from world-known artists. 

Main concern here is what kind of utility is expected from the NFTs and what kind of benefits the holders will have, since NFT is usually a ticket or access to something bigger. 

During this step you should decide on what benefits will the holders of NFTs get and how do you plan to manage the utility in the future.

We at Unicsoft are always here to provide you with professional help and advice

Step 4: Mint

And finally, we are here, on the mint step.

99% of the NFT projects follow the same route: either mint on their own site, or premint on Opensea. 

Minting on your own site is cheaper since there is no need to pay gas fees for pre-mintint. However, people donā€™t really like to connect their wallets to random landing pages.

Minting on Opensea is more expensive but a little bit more secure. 

Projects that go with option #1 usually require admin panel to be able to control their white-lists and make changes to smart contracts (e.g. change prices for the NFTs or turn on/off certain sale stages). 

Here several points of consideration play a vital role:

  1. How many tiers will you have (Private sale, White-list, Public sale)
  2. How do you plan to collect wallet addresses? 
  3. Where do you plan to store wallet addresses? (on-chain vs off-chain)
  4. Did you consider premint.xyz? 

Whatā€™s next?

Note that creating an NFTs collection might attract more attention from art collectors or speculators than creating a single piece of the NFT art. Once you have decided on all mentioned above, you can finally create your NFT project. Start interacting with your community to support and sell your creations. Monitor activity on your creations, look for feedback, and keep creating more work for digital collectors to purchase.
We at Unicsoft are always here to provide you with professional help and advice. We have dozens of NFT marketplaces and platforms in our projects portfolio, years of blockchain experience, so we are the best partners to launch an NFT project.