A couple weeks ago my close friend and brother Steeve, sent me a video of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban discussing NFTs (non-fungible tokens) during an interview. Prior to this video I was completely oblivious to NFTs and the entire concept, however, Steeve knows that I am involved in cryptocurrency investing. Two key things that stood out to me in the video was the fact that a creator can tokenize (or convert) their content for monetization and have it resold by the buyer, with the original creator earning a percentage in royalties. The entire process is tracked so that no matter how many times an NFT is resold, the original creator will always be credited. This blew my mind instantly and within the next couple days I explored platforms such as mintable, rarible, nft showroom and others. I started with mintable because it was the first NFT platform that was mentioned in the video, then I moved to rarible shortly after. I listed my painting titled 'Sunzankh' as a 1/1 edition NFT through the mintable gasless store.
The setup of mintable is fairly easy to use, but what turned me off a bit was the high gas fee required to create my own store on the platform, the same goes for rarible in regards to minting an NFT. For those reading who may not comprehend, gas fees are payments made by users to compensate for the computing energy required to process and validate transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. In my case, I was being charged the equivalent of $800 usd in gas to complete the transaction to create my own mintable store. I came across NFT Showroom while scrolling through Twitter and took a deep liking to it. Through this process I found out about the hive wallet which is the token that backs NFT Showroom. To summarize briefly, NFT Showroom requires each applicant to include portfolio links to their art as well as any social media links they may have. Once the verification process is complete and approved, someone from the NFT Showroom team will contact the user on their social media to inform said user of the approval of their account. The process was fairly swift and I began setting up my hive wallet to make transactions asap. This part of the process can be slightly confusing for first time users, but lucky enough I have linked an article detailing the steps here: @stellabelle/ultimate-guide-to-nft-showroom
From my short personal experience with NFTs, I can definitely say that the possibilities are endless for any content creator, whether you are a painter, musician, sculptor, model, photographer, gif maker, etc. Not only are NFTs changing the way that art and music are presented, but they are also very much catered to the Gen Z population, whom practically live in the digital space.
To view my NFT Showroom account click the link here: https://nftshowroom.com/kwame89/gallery