Rarible

How Much Does Minting an NFT Cost?

Posted on May 29, 2022August 11, 2022 by Pastel Network

Bull or bear market, 2020 and 2021 will forever be cemented in NFT history.

Reports have shown that NFTs garnered the most profit ($17.7 billion) in the crypto space in 2021 – the market exploded by over 20,000 percent from the year prior. The total value of transactions jumped from $82.5 million to over $17 billion.

However, the times are changing– namely, the technology behind NFT platforms and various mechanisms is improving significantly.

Today, we’re going to explore NFT minting– how much does it cost to mint an NFT today, and how will this be different in years to come? Read along as we explore what “minting” an NFT is and more.

What Does Minting an NFT Mean?

A common misconception about NFTs is that people often confuse minting NFTs with buying NFTs. There’s a fundamental difference. Minting an NFT means creating something completely new on the blockchain.

It’s ‌converting a digital file into a digital asset that lives on the blockchain, whether that asset is digital art, music, or collectibles like sports and trading cards. However, it’s not like the blockchain is hosting the files for the NFT itself– that would cause the blockchain to become incredibly bloated and inefficient.

Remember, an NFT is just a token; this token represents the ownership of a specific digital asset. It’s not the screenshot of the Bored Ape Yacht Club that’s valuable; it’s the token.

Minting an NFT means publishing your unique token on a blockchain to make it purchasable by other people.

NFTs are minted on a blockchain. Ethereum’s blockchain is very popular for minting NFTs, including Solana, Cardano, Tezos, and more.

You can buy NFTs on a marketplace like OpenSea– and sometimes, these platforms will also allow creators to mint their NFTs.

However, many projects will first launch on a third-party site dedicated to the minting of the project; the fees you can expect to pay are usually only those for the network, which can be a princely sum themselves.

How Much Does OpenSea Charge for Minting NFTs?

OpenSea is the most popular NFT marketplace. Primarily for Ethereum-based NFTs, OpenSea announced the addition of Solana NFTs to their marketplace in Q1 2022.

OpenSea requires users to pay two fees before minting their digital assets on the platform. These minting prices aren’t fixed: they can be higher or lower depending on the function you seek to perform.

The first fee you’ll pay as a first-time creator is used to initialize your account. As of April 2022, this fee typically costs $70 to $300.

The second fee used to grant access to your account costs $10 to $30.

You can avoid high gas fees if you spot days when gas fees are lower using tools like Etherscan.

Then, OpenSea charges 2.5% for first-time sales of your minted NFT– it’s a multi-billion dollar company for a reason.

How Much Does Rarible Charge for Minting NFTs?

With ‌400,000 NFTs created and 1.6+ million users, Rarible is another of the most popular NFT marketplaces globally.

Most users choose Rarible over other platforms because it is a multi-chain platform, has easy-to-use tools, a decentralized governance system that’s more advanced than what you’ll get on most platforms, and a flexible royalty management system that allows creators to set up to 50% royalty fee.

Minting on Rarible is straightforward compared to other NFT marketplaces. The platform itself doesn’t charge a minting fee. You have to pay the gas fee for minting on three different blockchains available in the marketplace (Ethereum, Tezos, and Flow).

After paying the gas fees required for minting, Rarible charges a 2.5% fee for every NFT buy and sell transaction.

What Are Gas Wars and How to Avoid Paying High Gas Fees when Minting

If you’re active in the NFT space, “gas wars” are something you may have sweaty nightmares about. Gas, or the computational power needed to verify transactions on a blockchain network, can often cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollar-worth of Eth.

Since “minting” an NFT to the blockchain is a much more computationally-heavy process, the network charges more than typical transaction fees.

A gas war is an auction to get front row seats in an upcoming block of transactions to be validated on the Ethereum blockchain. If there is a surge in the number of people waiting for their transactions to get validated, the price gets too high, which triggers a scuffle.

Almost like a bidding war, people pay more so they can get their transactions processed quicker, ‌driving the transaction costs up. Gas wars are the main cause of high transaction fees on the blockchain. They’re prevalent on the Ethereum network, ‌infamous for its performance and scalability setbacks.

To avoid paying high gas fees, ‌learn how to track gas fees. Etherscan’s Gas Now is a handy tool that can help you to minimize gas prices.

How to Mint an NFT for Free on the Blockchain

Popular marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible allow you to mint NFTs for free on the platform.

Recently, Rarible announced that you could mint for free on the platform (yes, no gas fees). The downside is that your asset goes on the Rarible collection and not your collection. This means Rarible has more control of your digital asset, and also, the buyer pays for your minting fee.

You can also mint for free on OpenSea. The new collection manager launched in December 2020 introduced a lazy minting feature, allowing creators to list NFTs paying no gas fees until they make the first purchase. Since the NFT isn’t transferable on-chain until they purchase, creators can list without paying a dime.

However, this is not applicable for first-time listing. If this is your first time listing on OpenSea, you still have to pay the gas fees needed to initialize your account.

The Polygon network also allows creators to “mint NFTs for free at the speed of light.” All you have to do is connect your Polygon account, upload your digital art, select the Polygon network during the minting process, and you’re good to go.

Final Thoughts: What to Expect for NFT Minting in the Future

Although the NFT market went ballistic in 2021, the 2022 bear market has many reconsidering their sky-high purchases.JPEGs– if not at least the hundreds or thousands of dollars they spent on gas fees to simply purchase the art.

In this article, we learned what NFT minting is, how to mint your project on popular marketplaces, and avoid paying very high gas fees.

However, increasingly more creative and consumer-friendly innovations are being built to make the creation and selling of NFT art a much more profitable endeavor.

How and Where to Buy NFTs: A Beginner’s Guide

Posted on April 1, 2022August 11, 2022 by Pastel Network

Few predicted NFTs would suddenly become the talk of the town in 2021 when they were first introduced in 2014. Reports show that NFT trading volume was around $10 million in Q3 2021, a massive 704% increase from the previous quarter. This was just the start.

To many, NFTs add a visually appealing and creative element to the crypto world often perceived as excessively techy and complicated.

Afterimage, audio, and video NFTs too hold, with NFT shards on their way, crypto investors are scrambling to jump on the fast-moving NFT bandwagon in time.

If you wish to become an NFT investor, this article will explain the steps of how to buy an NFT and where to buy them, introducing you to the most popular marketplaces.

Where to Buy NFTs

There are different marketplaces to buy different types of NFTs and each levy a specific fee for transacting on their platform, so you should aim to choose a cost-effective platform for buying your NFTs.

OpenSea

OpenSea, established in 2017 by Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer, is the biggest marketplace to buy, sell, and trade different types of NFTs across marketplaces and Blockchains. The company is based in North America and has its headquarters in New York City.

The platform hosts around 30 million NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn blockchains. Apart from providing a platform to trade in NFTs, Open Sea aims to provide an integrated marketplace where developers can build and launch their NFTs. It supports Ether and around 150 other crypto tokens.

So you can use the OpenSea marketplace for buying a range of NFTs such as art, game NFTs, sports and music NFTs, utility NFTs such as keys to own gaming collectibles or gaming DAOs, enter particular Discord communities, and so on.

Binance NFT

Binance is a crypto exchange as well as a popular NFT marketplace. It was established as a crypto exchange in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao and was based in China. Later, the company headquarters moved to the Cayman Islands.

People can buy, mint, and trade NFTs with the Binance NFT marketplace. It hosts some top NFT creators such as X-Metaverse, Big Time Studios, NFT_Pride, NFKings, and Seek Tiger. You can access different NFT collections such as Mafia Land NFTs, DinoX World Avatars, GiiiO role NFT, X-Metaverse Box, and Atlantis Metaverse Genesis NFT. Binance NFT also hosts features such as the mystery box feature from time to time where players get a chance to win rare and unique NFTs.

Aside from Gaming NFTs, the platform also offers NFTs from categories like Art, Sports, Entertainment, Collectibles, E-sports, and Premium NFTs.

Foundation

The Foundation marketplace brings creators and collectors together on a platform to build and trade NFTs. It was established in February 2021 and is owned by Kayvon Tehranian hailing from San Francisco, California. Through Foundation, collectors can mint our buy images, video, and 3D artwork. A creator can create an art NFT on Foundation only through an invitation received by another creator, unlike other NFT platforms.

Rarible was founded by Moscow-based Alexei Falin and Alex Salnikov in 2019. It is headquartered in Delaware, United States. It hosts NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon, Tezos, and Flow blockchain and features a massive NFT collection ranging from art, photography, games, metaverse, music, domains, DeFi, Memes, Punks, NSFW, etc.

The software-giant Adobe partnered with Rarible in Dec 2021 to display content credentials of the listed NFTs to make it easy to protect and verify digital content.

SuperRare

This NFT marketplace was launched in 2018, where NFT lovers can collect and trade mainly art-oriented NFTs.

The platform introduced its token in 2021 when the artists and collectors in the community formed their DAO. Some of the prominent investors at SuperRare include Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, and Samsung Next. The company is owned by John Crain, Johnathan Perkins, and Charles Crain and is based in the United States.

Project Specific Marketplaces

You can also buy specific NFT assets from their respective marketplaces. For example, NBA Top Shot is the marketplace to purchase official GIFs from the National Basketball Association. There is also an NFL All Day market for limited-edition NFL moments. Music lovers can visit the Musician Marketplace to buy NFTs of music compositions and platforms like Async Art, explicitly meant for programmable art.

There are dedicated marketplaces for particular NFT-based game items, such as Axie Marketplace for items used in the popular ‘Axie Infinity’ game. It also has its own token, and the users should have these tokens to buy things from the Axie Marketplace. Mintable is another platform for unique music, art, games, animation, and media collectibles.

SolSea, another marketplace on Solana, lets creators mint NFTs with embedded licenses and display the Rarity Rank of the NFTs listed.

Other NFT marketplaces include Nifty Gateway, Thetadrop, etc. NFTs on the Rarible and SuperRare marketplace is also available on OpenSea.

Let us now move on to the steps to buy an NFT.

How to Buy NFTs

Buy Crypto Tokens from a CeFi or DeFi Exchange and Add Funds in the Crypto Wallet

First, you need to have the crypto tokens to possess your desired collectibles. You should buy the tokens supported in the NFT marketplace from where you wish to buy NFTs. Some marketplaces have their own tokens to transact. You can purchase these tokens from any DeFi exchange such as Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, etc.

Once purchased, you should send the tokens to your wallet, like the Metamask wallet, to be able to use them for the purchase. You can check here if you want to learn how to set up the metamask wallet. Remember to have sufficient units of the crypto token in your wallet to pay for the NFT and the Gas fees involved in the transaction; the Gas fee is the transaction charge for the computation effort involved in facilitating transactions on the Ethereum Blockchain. Gas fees vary according to the traffic on the network.

Open the Marketplace

You can now open your chosen NFT marketplace and register on it. You will then scroll through the different types of NFTs offered. You can filter through the various collections offered to hunt for the NFT you wish to possess.

Place Your Bid

You will find items under ‘Auction,’ where you can bid the price you wish to pay, or you can buy the item directly. NFT sellers auctioning items provide the Auction time, the previous selling price, and the cryptocurrency they are accepting from the buyers on the marketplace.

Payment

Link your wallet to the marketplace using the ‘Connect Wallet’ button to proceed with the purchase. Once the transaction is successful, you will see the amount deducted and find the NFT stored in your wallet. You can also store your NFTs on offline hardware wallets such as Trezor or Ledger.

The NFT value is generally determined by markets, with floor prices naturally setting the bottom-end range. Other factors could be the uniqueness and the artist’s reputation.

Final Thoughts: Keep Your NFTs Safe!

This should be about everything that you need to know for you to be able to buy an NFT. One last word of advice: if you are an NFT enthusiast and wish to mint and trade NFTs, you should be careful of NFT scams that can make you lose your crypto funds and NFTs through phishing attacks on your crypto wallets.

Keep in mind NFTs and cryptocurrency is very new and they can be volatile– you should never invest more than you can afford to lose in a volatile market such as NFTs.

Are NFTs Truly Decentralized Art?

Posted on November 22, 2021August 11, 2022 by Pastel Network

There are quite a bit of misunderstandings around NFTs. Many people think NFTs are minted on the Ethereum blockchain through a platform like Rarible and — voila! — the art is non-fungible and lives forever in a decentralized manner on the blockchain. But that’s not entirely the case. NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens” are really only non-fungible to the extent that it refers to the actual token, not the underlying artwork or rare asset itself. As such, the token and the “asset” it represents are two completely different things.

Huh?

Okay, let’s rewind a bit here. Although NFTs are often associated with digital art or GIFs these days, the reality is that they are better understood as a class of assets that are non-fungible. The $10 bill you used to pay for the coffee this morning? Fungible. The fingerprint you left on the bill when paying? Non-fungible. But is your fingerprint an asset? Debatable, depending on how much fingerprints go for on the black market these days (a joke, relax). But a key thing to remember is that non-fungible does not classify an object as rare, nor does it ensure that it is ‘rare’ or even decentralized.

This concept was probably best illustrated with a recent “rug pull” stunt conducted by one clever sculptor on the OpenSea platform. The artist exchanged the original JPEG images that the collectors thought they were purchasing with random pictures of rugs after the sale concluded. The intent of the stunt was to highlight the inherent problem of the current NFT infrastructure — which is mostly built on the Ethereum blockchain. By purchasing the NFT, the buyer would simply own the token to authenticate the JPEG listed on OpenSea, which at the time of purchase was a dope piece of art. But because the underlying digital asset itself is not decentralized, and might be stored on a central server somewhere such as on AWS or GCS, the buyer has no control in terms of what the NFT itself represents.

In other words, the non-fungibility is currently applied to the token representing the transaction of the purchase — not necessarily the owner of the physical (or digital) piece of art.

This is a common problem in the NFT sphere, as buyers often misunderstand the underlying infrastructure of the art they are buying, which can be problematic when there isn’t a physical equivalent of the purchase, ie: a digital GIF.

With most NFT marketplaces being built on Ethereum, another key problem is raised. The Ethereum network is often congested by other sectors such as DeFi, which eat up the majority of the bandwidth and exponentially raises the prices for minting and transacting NFTs. When compounded with the previously outlined problem, it is easy to see why the NFT art space is not the perfect picture it is painted to be after all.

This is where a platform like Pastel can paint a brighter future. Unlike Rarible or OpenSea, Pastel has built its own layer 1 blockchain to compete with Ethereum based platforms. This brings with it an innate advantage because the underlying architecture is designed to be perfectly outfitted and purpose-built for the sole use case for digital art and other rare digital assets, rather than being a do-it-all blockchain like Ethereum. With fewer projects demanding bandwidth, minting and trading NFTs on Pastel is significantly lighter on your (digital) wallet as well due to very low gas costs

In regards to the main problem of preventing “rug pulls”, Pastel ensures that the art (or other NFT) itself is uploaded, verified, and registered on the Pastel blockchain — rather than just the token it is minted with. Through a series of smart tickets living on the Pastel ledger, artists can store their masterpieces in a distributed fashion across a variety of Supernodes as opposed to just ensuring the token is non-fungible. This sophisticated storage layer, leveraging the RaptorQ fountain code algorithm, ensures that each asset is broken up and stored in a series of redundant, fungible chunks. These sets of chunks ar ethen distributed across the network using the Kademlia DHT algorithm. So what does this really mean? In short, even if over 90% of hosted instances suddenly go down, the remaining information can be reconstructed quickly and there is no possibility of the artwork disappearing.

So the next time you purchase an NFT, make sure you understand how and where your rare digital asset is stored — so that you won’t have the rug pulled out from underneath you.

Learn more about Pastel Network, and join us below!

Tag: Rarible