NFTs came from nowhere to being the tech-talk of the town in 2021. Collections like the Cryptopunks from Larvalabs or Bored Ape Yacht Club are now trading for millions of dollars. But it’s not just digital collectibles making the headlines, brands like Asics and retailers like Macy's are also taking their first tentative steps in the world of digital products and artwork.
Asics’ digital sneaker collection can already be found on the thriving NFT marketplace Opensea.
But it won’t end with snazzy sneakers and arty collectibles. There has been an unexpected and sustained surge of interest in high-end goods such as expensive watches and jewelry. It seems that the fully digital Millenial and Gen Z generations are keen to buy and collect digital products.
Each of the watches in the picture below is unique and would fetch somewhere between one and ten million dollars.
Big tech has also seen the writing on the meta-wall, and the leading brands are now scrambling to get a foothold in the NFT space. Take Shopify, for example, who announced in July that merchants could sell NFTs directly through their storefronts. The Chicago Bulls was one of the first to seize the opportunity and begin selling NFTs via Shopify. Rather than going to an NFT marketplace like Opensea, Bulls fans can now purchase digital art directly from the team’s online store with a credit card.
Low tech transactions mean average consumers unfamiliar with Blockchain or NFT Wallets like Metamask now have easy access to what was once a niche and highly technical process.
For another sign of how mainstream NFT interest and adoption has become, look at Adobe’s new Photoshop function which supports NFT verification on marketplaces. This is going to be big.
What exactly are NFTs?
NFTs are tokens that offer proof – represent ownership – of unique digital items. NFTs are used to tokenize everything from consumer goods to art and collectibles, or even real estate. Just like an original oil painting, NFTs can only have one official owner at a time. This ownership is secured and authenticated by blockchain technology provided by companies such as Ethereum. It’s impossible to modify ownership records or to copy/paste a new NFT into existence.
As you probably already know, NFT stands for non-fungible token. Non-fungible is an old-school economic term usually used to describe things like your furniture, a song file, or your computer. Non-fungibles aren’t interchangeable with other items because they have certain unique properties.
On the other hand, fungible items can be exchanged because their value defines them rather than their unique properties. To explain this from a trading perspective, standard and digital currency units – for example dollars or Ether – are fungible because 1 unit is always exchangeable for another unit of the same currency.
Productsup and your NFT journey
The complexities of Generative Art
The process of generating a NFT collection and then minting it on a blockchain like Polygon is still a very technical process and it requires expert tech support to realize.
It all begins when you create an artwork. Because most NFT collections feature thousands of individual images, the artwork should be created in a way that will support a whole collection.
In the NFT space, this art is often described as Generative Art. Generative Art typically requires artists and developers to work together to come up with a collection, and then automatically generate thousands of pictures.
No-hassle artwork generation with the Productsup Image Designer
But is there an easier way to generate art? Researching the mechanics behind NFT Collections and the artwork, I discovered that generating art follows a similar process to building creatives for ad campaigns.
Productsup developed a technology some time ago to allow brands to automatically generate large collections of images for their advertising campaigns.
Our Image Designer module lets you automatically replace background color, overlay captions, create transparent and semi-transparent layers, merge multiple images into one, or inject dynamic content from a spreadsheet.
Image Designer is the perfect platform for a Generative Art project that doesn't require developer resources.
Getting your NFT artworks into Opensea in bulk
The ability to ‘Bulk upload NFTs’ to Opensea is a misnomer. With NFTs, you first need to mint your collection on the blockchain.
Once your NFTs are minted, they will appear in the Crypto wallet of your choice. You can also view, sell, or trade the NFT on OpenSea in your account – if you minted to your own wallet – or at NFTPort collection.
Minting a large amount of NFTs typically requires a lot of knowledge of Solidity, Web3.js, GraphQL, nodes, IPFS, and smart contracts.
To simplify this process, Productsup developed a solution that allows you to “upload” a large collection or catalog of images to the Ethereum or Polygon blockchain.
Our Image Designer will:
- Mint NFTs on Polygon’s sustainable blockchain (no Ether needed)
- Provide a NFT name
- Provide a NFT description
- Provide the wallet addresses to mint your NFTs
- Provide a file URL for the files you want published as NFTs. The tool supports all file types: binary, images, GIFs, videos, audio, documents, text etc.
Discover how NFTs fit into larger industry trends
Watch our P2C trends webinar on-demand to learn more about how NFTs and the metaverse will shape the retail landscape in 2022, as well as the other industry trends to look out for. You can access the webinar here.