With NFTs taking the crypto world by storm in recent weeks, you may be wondering how to create your own 'tokenized' art or how to go about collecting them.

Yesterday one of my friends asked me to help send an NFT to his brother for his birthday.

My friend's brother works designing games and the two of them had been talking about the exciting possibilities of creating NFT elements within a game, such as skins, weapons, items, and banners, that could be used in both games and platforms. Imagine for a second that you could show your awesome collectibles to your friends and save items that you could use in all your games, instead of starting to collect them in each new game, as gamers do today.

Running short on time, we decided to stick with current fad and 'tokenize' a JPG file, specifically a photo of your family dog (a collectible that I think will only grow in sentimental value for now, but who knows!)

My friend had never used cryptocurrencies before yesterday, which shows the potential of NFTs to attract new users to the market, so while the process is still fresh in my mind, I will explain how to create your first NFT token.

This is what you need:

• 1) A MetaMask wallet

• 2) Buy / send ETH

• 3) Sign up for OpenSea

• 4) Create your NFT

• 5) Send it to the blockchain to validate it and voila, you will have your own NFT

MetaMask

First things first, you will need to download a MetaMask wallet.

Meta Mask is an online wallet that offers advanced dApp integration, allowing users to make purchases through DeFi applications using its Chrome extension.

Remember to save your passphrase for seed recovery and you are good to go.

Buy / send ETH

NFT shipping uses the Ethereum blockchain, so while creating an immutable record of your image is free, you will have to pay gas fees to send and validate the token.

You can send ETH that you already own to your new MetaMask wallet or buy some using the built-in Wyre platform.

Sign up for OpenSea

After doing some research and ruling out some of the more expensive options for creating NFT (one site we found charged a whopping $ 1,500), we found OpenSea.

OpenSea, the "largest NFT marketplace", offers a free NFT token creation service, although the token will need to be validated on the blockchain to be transferable and "real".

Create your NFT

When creating the NFT from a JPG file, you can choose the commission that the creator will receive each time it is transferred between users.

Users can also add information to the image, such as hyperlinks, how many copies to create, and secret messages that can only be accessed by the owner of the NFT.

Send it to the blockchain

Since the blockchain is essentially a transaction record, it stands to reason that your NFT token must be transferred in order for its existence to be validated.

And that's it! Now you can create NFTs to give to your friends or create a masterpiece that someone is willing to pay millions for. All up to you.