Let's do this NFT thing, introducing Galactic Toonz

Continuing down this crypto road lead to a fork in the road called NFTs.  I have a very good friend who is an amazing designer and I had told him about NFTs after I got into crypto and asked him to look into in.  He declared, after a little research, that it was to difficult to get going and perhaps he was right.  So we joined forces with him doing the designs and me doing the crypto side of things to form our digital agency called Spicy Ink.

So I asked him to come up with a simple design and then I would figure out how to put it up for sale.  Guess I drew the short side of the straw in that one! 

We first had to come up with a concept and we decided to go with a "galactic" theme which would give us endless opportunities to expand on whatever starting point we came up with.  The designer had three images in mind and explained them to me, we decided to do the "bad guy" first and soon enough Ugly Bobo's PNG file was produced and sent to me.  That was easy enough...  We decided to target OpenSea, the largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, to sell our goods and become gazillionaires in the process.

So first I opened an OpenSea account by connecting to my Metamask wallet.  I had already downloaded Metamask to my Brave browser so this should be easy.  Wrong!  The Brave Wallet was the default and trying to change that to Metamask brought challenges but eventually I got it to connect to OpenSea.  I got the collection page set up and was ready to upload our first NFT image - Ugly Bobo.  For some reason I was logged out and could not for the life of me sign back in.  This was an omen of things to come.  

I would try other browsers such as Chrome and Edge, but each required adding the MetaMask extension and then would create different addresses thus creating a new OpenSea account.  So back to Brave, after much effort and consternation (not all that unusual in the world of crypto) I finally logged in again and uploaded the PNG file.  To get a NFT ready for sale, first you have to mint it and then list it.  Well, the Ethereum fees are pretty insane right now so we decided to go with the Polygon option which meant setting up a new Network - thankfully Youtube videos are helpful in these situations...

Well this caused all sorts of problems and given that Ethereum and Polygon were not working together well the day I was setting it up apparently.  OpenSea acknowledged this fact later in a message on the top of their page but little did I know at the time I was fighting a battle I would not win in the short run.  Determined I continued on but I couldn't get it working with MetaMask so I abandoned ship and reset up everything the next day with my Coinbase wallet.  This actually was a bit easier since it always points to the same place in terms of address on every browser. 

The minting process and to put it up for sale still cost some MATIC, something I didn't own in any of my wallets.  I bought a little in an exchange that I had some left over fiat in but found out that the minimum to transfer it to my Coinbase wallet was 40 times what I had purchased.  There is ALWAYS some damn issue.  I eventually was able to get enough into the wallet using a process that included using the Polygon Technology page to create a bridge - yada, yada, yada.  I'll skip many of the painful parts of my NFT life thus far to keep this article at an easily absorbable length.  Regardless, I eventually got everything up and running and set an initial sales price of .01 ETH and 30 days on the sales block.

Putting up our next two characters, Captain Albert III and Crazee Mart was a breeze on OpenSea.  

The whole point of this exercise was to understand the process of creating, minting, listing and eventually selling an NFT.  The problem is that it is way to complicated for most designers, etc. to figure out the process as many are new to crypto and don't know what the difference between a blockchain and crypto wallet, let alone ETH from MATIC.  And this is the issue for many in terms of cryptocurrency in general and honestly why it is a great time to be in the space because mass adoption will really happen once things are easier.

If you ever decide you want to list an NFT don't hesitate to reach out to me and I'll try to save you some time in the process.  I've got a lot of helpful tips now to share...

So here it is the Galactic Toonz NFT Collection

Let me know your thought on the NFT space in the comments below, I'd love to hear them.