Kachi Ogbonna

OpenSea is by a thousand miles the most popular marketplace for buying and selling or to even to mint NFTs. As the NFTs market continues to soar (now worth $23 billion) more persons are seeking the best platforms to mint theirs. And if you are considering to mint your first NFT on openSea but don’t know how it works, this article is your guide. So today we are going to look at how to mint an NFT using this popular platform called OpenSea.

What is NFT Minting?

In crypto terminology, minting is the process of creating new coins by authenticating data, creating new blocks and recording the information unto the blockchain. One can also describe it as the process of tokenizing a digital file using cryptography. Through tokenization, digital files/collectible are converted into a token that can be stored in an online wallet.

To be sincere, not much was known about NFTs till of late. In fact, the market is worth $23 billion today but it was $350 million just 12 months ago. So you have over 6500% growth in a year. That is a testimony of how popular it has become in a short while.

One special feature of minting an NFT is that the cryptography that tokenizes the digital art registers the name of the owner in a blockchain in an indelible format.  By so doing it endorses the exclusivity of such art to the original owner in the entire network.

Anyone can easily mint an NFT. In fact, there are many young Nigerians who have hit millions through NFTs. But in this post we are going to restrict our discussion to how one can mint NFT on OpenSea and not other platforms.

How to Make Money Selling Your NFTs on OpenSea

OpenSea is an NFT online marketplace where sellers and buyers come together for the purpose of exchanging digital arts. At every time ‘t’ there are millions of NFTs up for sale on OpenSea. But you can only imagine that why there are such huge supply is because buyers are regularly making demands.

However, there are several NFT sellers that have been hanging in there for years and buyers are not coming. For that reason we are not going to talk much about how to buy and sell. It will be more worthwhile to teach you how to mint your own NFT on OpenSea. The truth is that minting NFT on OpenSea is not as difficult as it sounds when you have not been there.

Just hang on and follow the step by step guide on how to mint an NFT on OpenSea and you will discover that it is easy.

Advantages of Minting Your NFTs on OpenSea

OpenSea is not the only marketplace or platform for NFT minting. There are other ones like Raribles, Mintables, etc. But there are few advantages I think you will have if you use OpenSea.

1. As the largest marketplace in the world OpenSea offers you unprecedented visibility.
2. You keep actual ownership of your work
3. You receive commission each time someone resells your work, no matter how many times it is done or how many years it takes
4. OpenSea has the lowest fees (2.5% for sales made on their platform) compare to what other platforms charge.
5. OpenSea allows you to change the cryptocurrency you accept when selling your items. It must not be ethereum.
6. It’s possible to bundle up to 30 items and sell them in one go. Only few marketplaces allows that.
7. OpenSea has the longest-running safelist of NFT collections, dating back to December 2017

Disadvantages of Minting Your NFTs on OpenSea

OpenSea is the biggest marketplace for minting NFTs but it does have at least one known disadvantage. Here is the main disadvantage of minting with OpenSea:

1. Unlike Mintable OpenSea offers you no free gas fee.
2. They only allow royalties up to 10%  for artists. Rarible allows up to 50%
3. It has no messaging features
4. OpenSea does not run a decentralized governance system
5. No support for fiat currency such as dollars, pounds or euros

How to Mint Your First NFT on OpenSea

There are four major steps to mint your NFT on OpenSea:

1. You need to buy ethereum

2. Create and link your Crypto wallet to your OpenSea Account

3. Create an NFT Collection

4. Upload your NFT

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Step1: Buying of Ethereum Coin

Bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency in existence and it has been so for a while. It also command the highest value. The second most popular is Ethereum. But when it comes to buying and selling NFTs Ethereum is by a thousand mile the number one. Not even Bitcoin nor Solana comes close.

So if you ever want to deal in NFTs you need to have Ethereum. And in order to acquire Ethereum you need to create a crypto exchange account. If you don’t already have one then you need to head than to step 2 below.

Step 2: Create and link your Crypto Wallet to your OpenSea Account

After you buy some ETH, the next step is to create and connect a crypto wallet. Just like a physical wallet or your bank account, this is where you keep (store) the money you intend to use for crypto transaction. If you see any crypto you want to buy, you simply open your wallet and transfer from there. It is the same thing when you sell, the buyer will transfer to your wallet.

There are different crypto wallets out there. Some of the most popular ones are WalletConnect, Trust wallet, Metamask, Coinbase, AlphaWallet, Phantom, Glow etc. But to mint on OpenSea I will recommend you go with MetaMask.  It is among the most straightforward wallets to use. And what more, it seems to work perfectly with OpenSea.

How to Create a Crypto Wallet

As mentioned above you need a MetaMask wallet. And it is available as a browser extension, and works best with Google Chrome, Firefox and Brave. Once you install it, you can use it to store Ethereum and Ethereum-based tokens like NFTs.

So to create a Crypto Wallet using MetaMask is pretty simple and just takes 4 simple clicks:

1. Just click on MetaMask  and you see the image below

2. Click on the download button and it will open to the image below

3. Click on “Install MetaMask for Chrome” (I am using a Chrome browser for this demostration)

4. Click on “Get Started” to create an account with a username and password

How to Connect Your Wallet to OpenSea

You can connect your wallet to OpenSea with another 3 simple clicks:

1. Visit OpenSea home page.You will see an interface that looks like the image below

2. Click on “Create” it will bring out the options of different wallets that are compatible with OpenSea. You will observe that it even recommended MetaMask as the most popular. So don’t do pass yourself by trying any other wallet here.

3. Select the MetaMask option. It will bring you to MetaMask again. But since you already created an account all you need now is simply to import your wallet below.  And that is all. Just accept the terms and conditions and enter your secret recovery phrase. And you have successfully  connected your wallet to OpenSea.

Now that your wallet is connected to OpenSea it is now time to mint your first NFT on OpenSea. But first you need to create a collection.

Step 3: 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.

But you may be asking, ‘Why create collections when you can simply upload one individual file’? Well, you can actually upload an individual file, but don’t do that. NFTs receive the most visibility and are best sold as being part of a collection. So even if you don’t have many digital arts to put together to form a collection you can still do it with that single art you have.  Just make different variations of one NFT with individualized colors, shapes, and more. But make sure it forms a collection.

To create a collection, follow the steps below:

1. Go to your profile and select “My Collection.”

2. Hit “Create Collections” to start a new one.

Your new collection will be composed of the logo image, the featured image, and the banner. But at this point you can now add anything you want to mint. And that is the beginning of the actual minting process.

Step 4: Mint (Upload) Your NFT

Once you make your first collection you have done the difficult part of the job. The rest is easy. It is just as simple as uploading a JPEG file. And that is all the talk about minting that you have been hearing. So just follow the steps below:

1. Open the collection you just created.
2. Click on Add Item.
3. Upload an NFT and give it a name.
4. Fill in the properties, levels, and other descriptions for the item (they are all safe explanatory)
5. Click Create when finished

That’s it! You are now a proud owner of NFTs in one of the most popular marketplace in the world. You can see your NFT in your collection. And others on the platform can see it as well. You could choose to keep it for display or sell it to the highest bidder.

How Much Does It Cost to Mint an NFT on OpenSea?

The amount of Ethereum you’ll need to get started with minting an NFT varies based on the gas fee needed at the time. In case you don’t know what we mean by gas fee, it is how much Ethereum you need to pay the miners of the cryptocurrency.Someone said you can think of gas fee as the tip you give to your waiter at the end of the meal. Or the commission you pay to use certain platforms to carry out your service.

Unfortunately, the gas fees aren’t controlled by OpenSea. Rather they are set by based on supply and demand for the computational power of the network needed to process smart contracts and other transactions.

So, the amount of money you’ll need to invest initially depends on the two gas fees associated with registering your account and allowing access to the item. The current service fee in OpenSea is set at 2.5%. And the good thing is that you don’t need to pay that upfront.

Conclusion on How to Mint an NFT on OpenSea

OpenSea is the leading marketplace for buying and selling NFTs. Minting your first NFT on OpenSea has some advantages including more visibility. This visibility in turn translates to more chances of closing a deal. That’s why most sellers feature their best work on this platform.

Fortunately as you have seen us do above, minting on OpenSea isn’t as hard as you may have been thinking it is. You just need your digital wallet set up, connect it to the platform, and start creating your collection.

The process is not too different for other marketplaces. So just check out which of them that  suits you most.

Share with Me

Have you used OpenSea before? Are you having any challenges with it? Do you need help in resolving anything? Which other platform have you been using for your NFT needs? Share your experiences in the comment section below.