How to Mint Your First NFT on OpenSea? A Step-by-Step Guide

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are becoming an essential part of the digital landscape. They are unique and non-interchangeable crypto assets issued on the blockchain, and the most popular ones are on Ethereum and Solana. As of 2022, their market has grown from $350 million to roughly $15 billion in just one year.

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Unlike standard tokens, NFTs are non-interchangeable. They serve as digital representations of items, such as artworks, images, videos, or anything that can be tokenized.

We’ve seen brands of all kinds, from fashion to sports, and even real estate companies jumping on the NFT bandwagon. Just recently, Nike acquired NFT collectibles RTFK as part of its digital transformation. Just like Nike, RTFK produces shoes, but digitally.

What is NFT Minting?

Minting is the process of tokenizing a digital file with cryptography. Tokenization is the process of turning an asset into a digital token that can be moved, stored, and recorded on the blockchain.

Anybody can easily mint an NFT. But while there are many NFT marketplaces where you can start minting, we’ll focus on the largest decentralized platform for NFT collectors and artists – the OpenSea marketplace.

How to Make Money Selling Your NFT on OpenSea?

OpenSea is an NFT marketplace where sellers are connected to potential buyers on the other side. There are currently millions of NFTs up for sale on the marketplace. However, don’t be left with the wrong impressions – the huge demand created an even higher supply.

Millions of NFTs are desperately waiting for a buyer that will never come.

So, if you are here “only for the money,” you better think twice, or instead, better think deeper how to position yourself in this fast-emerging industry.

So before we start, it’s important to note that the below won’t teach you how to make money from your NFTs. It will guide you to mint your first NFT and place it for sale on OpenSea in a step-by-step way that anyone can easily do.

How to Mint Your First NFT on OpenSea?

NFTs are unique digital assets issued and are stored on the blockchain. To start minting NFTs, you need a wallet that can be connected to OpenSea. There are a few options here, but we’ll recommend and use MetaMask as it’s the most popular one.

First of all, you’ll have to link your MetaMask wallet to the OpenSea marketplace. MetaMask is a wallet available both as cold storage (when integrated with a physical HD wallet like Trezor or Ledger) and as a browser extension for Google, Chrome, and Brave. If you don’t have it, go to metamask.io and download it for your browser. Next, add it as an extension – you’ll see a tiny orange fox on the upper right side of your browser.

Important: in case you install the wallet for the first time, beware of phishing attempts and double-check you visit the correct website URL, read here for more security tips.

Once installed, you can easily access it anytime you want to check your balance or send and receive funds.

On MetaMask, you can store ERC-20 tokens such as Ether (ETH) – the currency you’ll likely be using to buy and sell NFTs on OpenSea.

In addition, you receive royalties in ETH, too: when someone buys an NFT from you and resells it, you receive a percentage of that sale, and it goes to your MetaMask address.

Beware: there are more security risks when using web wallets if they are not integrated with hardware wallets. So far, MetaMask hasn’t suffered any major hacks, but users should be wary about ongoing phishing attacks and related scams.

This is why it’s always advisable to use a hardware wallet. MetaMask supports the two most popular HD brands – Trezor and Ledger.

Before we start, you need to have some ETH in your wallet to pay transaction fees. As mentioned, ETH is the base currency, and it’s used to pay fees for every transaction and confirmation on OpenSea using MetaMask.

Connecting MetaMask

First, go to opensea.io and navigate the top right bar – click on Profile. A new page will appear, prompting you to connect your wallet. Choose MetaMask.

You’ll go to multiple prompts for granting OpenSea the necessary permissions to use your wallet and funds. Next, a signing request will appear, and following the signing in, a “Connecting” screen will pop, which will link OpenSea to your wallet.

Proceed by accepting the Terms & Conditions. You can easily access your funds in the wallet icon at the top right corner.

If your wallet is empty, just click on “Add Funds.” From here, you can either make a crypto deposit or buy using a debit/credit card.

Easy, right? Now you have to create your first collection on OpenSea.

Creating an NFT Collection

Now that your account is ready to process transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, it’s time to build your first NFT collection.

Go to your profile and select “My Collection,” hit “Create” to start a new one. Your new collection will be composed of the logo image, the featured image, and the banner.

Below you’ll find different properties to fill in, starting with the URL of your collection on OpenSea, the description, category, and links to your website and social networks.

You will be asked to insert your payout wallet address. Go to the wallet icon and click on your address, it will automatically copy it, then paste it on the required field.

Next, we have Royalties – which means that you collect a reward every time somebody resells an item you originally created, and it’s paid out monthly to the wallet of your choosing. Royalties are programmed to allow creators to be rewarded for their work -you can set the percentage fee as shown below, up to 10% in royalties.

New items will be stored on the blockchain of your choosing, in this case, we’ll use Ethereum, but you can also choose Polygon. This is a sidechain, a Layer-2 blockchain that takes off workload from Layer-1 blockchains such as Ethereum and executes them separately, resulting in higher throughput and lower gas fees.

Next, choose the payment tokens to buy and sell your items. After you’re done, click “Create.”

Your collection is now set! Now you have to add some items to it – which is the actual minting process.

Minting your NFTs on OpenSea

The process is straightforward. The AI will take care of all the technical aspects of it, so don’t worry about how it’s actually minted.

1. Go to your collection and hit “Add Item” at the top right bar.
2. Upload a new piece of art this can range from images, audio, or 3D models.
3. Add details to your item: name and a description.

4. Next, choose the collection in which your NFT will appear, which in our example, we chose the sample collection we made earlier.
Fill in the properties of your NFT, like the eyes, color, ticker symbol, the artist name, etc.

5. Fill in the levels. For example, your NFT has a 5/10 strength or speed level.

6. Add some stats to your NFT. These are numerical traits that show as numbers.

7. Choose whether it’s unlockable content and explicit or sensitive content. This means that someone might win the special contents hidden in an NFT. For example, you might set up a lottery in your NFT and put the winner hidden in unlockable content.

8. Finally, choose the supply, which is the number of copies that can be minted, and the issuing blockchain.

9. Click on “Create” and your new item will appear as a new NFT in your collection. You are free to offer it for sale at a set price or to the highest bidder.

It’s important to keep in mind that OpenSea’s revenue-generating model is relatively simple but taxing. The platform takes 2.5% of every transaction that happens on it.

Closing Words

As you see, minting on OpenSea isn’t as hard as most people think it is. You just need your digital wallet set up, connect it to the platform, and start creating your collection. The process is similar to other marketplaces – you just have to check out what marketplace suits you best.