HOW TO SELL ON A SECOND MARKETPLACE? – PART 5
Now let’s buy one of the projects that say minting coins on art blocks. We just wanted to look at the ERC-721 casting process, and you will find it very similar to the casting in the ERC-1155 that we just reworked. Here we can see there are three different types of collections for which the art block has a curated collection, and that is the most prestigious of the three.
It usually sells out very quickly whenever something drops. You can cash out now because these collections are specially selected by Art Blocks. It’s been an exclusive waitlist for many months now, and only one set comes out per week. But there are two other collections. There’s one called Playground on Art Block and Playground art block pieces are pieces that are created by previously curated artists on Art Blocks. So these are still the same artists with the same kind of quality of art that you’ll expect in the creative collection, but they’re a bit more experimental because it’s a free playground for them to essentially put out a new piece of little less curation behind them.
Then finally we have the Factory. Now, the Factory for art blocks is a little more experimental than the curated or playground collections. The Factory collections are by artists who haven’t made it into the curated collections yet, it’s a way for them to start releasing some of their better art pieces before they ever make it into the curated collection, and so those pieces often don’t sell out immediately.
Here we can see there is one by Cooper Jamieson called Placement.
If we click on this, it’s only minted 188 out of 500, so we can buy one of them and see the price right now is 0.1 ETH.
That’s not cheap, that $430, but it’s not the craziest thing in the world compared to some of the prices we see for Art Blocks Curated pieces. For example, if you recall, the Chrome Squiggles are now $35,000. Almost a hundred times more than this one. Let’s do the same process. We will click connect right here. It requires you to connect your MetaMask Wallet.
In this case, it asks you to sign the message to connect. It is a bit more secure to prove that you own this wallet. It’s the same process you see right here.
You’re connected. Now you’ll see the ‘Purchase’ button.
Usually, this is the popular type you’ll see on these websites, where it says you can’t purchase until you connect. Once you connect, they can talk to your MetaMask address, talk to your wallet, and allow you to purchase. When you click the ‘Purchase’ button. It shows
Lots of people try to mint all at once. Once the collection drops, that is what happens. We’ll talk about advanced strategies to guarantee that you can buy and set the best NFTs quickly. But for this case, these are things that you will be concerned about when you’re minting a very high-demand collection. If you think a collection will sell out in the first 30 seconds and lots of people want to buy it. You’ll want to understand gas very well, and you’ll want to understand how you can stay ahead of the others. For this case, this will sell out before the one that has been around for more than a day with only 188 out of the 500 mintings. We will continue, and it will pop up on the Meta Mask trading screen like before, and we will see.
0.1 ETH and the price of this gas is very high. Gasoline is $326, and that’s why it’s so much more expensive than the ERC-1155 we’re buying. So there are two reasons for that if we click the ‘Edit’ button again and see gas prices.
We can go to the quantity options and think that one reason is the different gas prices. The amount we pay for a gallon of gas at Gwei prices is a bit higher if we set that to 100.
It’s still $217. Let’s make this an exact comparison. Remember, the last transaction went through about 164 Gwei. Let’s make this 164 Gwei.
Let’s see how much it comes to $330 for this transaction fee. That’s a crazy number.
We go back and look at that other transaction that we did. We can see what it’s worth, and it’s $30.
How is that possible? Why are art blocks costing so much more money than this ERC-1155 token we got. There are two reasons for that. One reason is minting an ERC-721 token is a lot more costly than minting an ERC-1155 token, and that’s what fairly complex reason, but it’s a lot easier computationally for us to create one more ERC-1155 because it’s the same as all these other tokens in the collection.
Minting an ERC-721 token is requiring higher gas fees than other tokens because of more complex transaction process
Making a unique ERC-721 truly non-fungible NFT costs a lot more work because we need to create a whole new wrapper for just one unique token to increment the amount of these existing tokens in the collection. There is another reason why Art Blocks token works so much. Let’s go back to another point that we’ll talk about later in much more detail about On-chain versus Off-chain NFTs. On-chain means that the entire data for this NFT is stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Now if you recall the blockchain is a block of a chain of blocks. Every block has very limited space, a few megabytes every 10 seconds that can be stored on this global decentralized computer shared by everyone in the world. Let’s think about that for a second. How much storage space that your phone have? How many gigabytes that your computer has gigabytes? We have one computer shared by the entire world where storage is limited to just a few megabytes every 10 seconds. We may think that’s crazy. How is this thing not overloaded all the time because people put more data in here? If you try to store a single image worth like 5 megabytes? It’s taking out the entire storage space available on Ethereum for half a minute. It’s a crazy concept, and that’s why it’s so expensive to store things On-chain because if you try to store images or movies or anything else On-chain, you have to pay tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in gas fees to do so. Most NFTs don’t point to images, videos, or anything else stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The only thing you’ll store on the Ethereum blockchain is the certificate of authenticity that points to a specific image or movie, but that’s a bit less authentic and less secure for the long run than you could point to an image directly stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Because if you think about the Ethereum blockchain that must be hundreds of years like the Mona Lisa has been for 500 years. Now we can still say this is the authentic Mona Lisa, you can buy and sell it, and that’s what we would like to hope for the next 500 years. You point to the Ethereum blockchain, and this is still the true digital Mona Lisa. CryptoPunk 7804, you can still buy and sell it. But what if you are pointing to a website for that image, and that website makes the average life of a website a few years down?
HOW TO SELL ON A SECOND MARKETPLACE? – PART 6
If you point to a website 500 years in the future chances are that website won’t exist, and that’s going to be pretty risky if you buy an NFT that points to a random website? So there are lots of solutions to solve this problem that we’ll talk about in more detail. One of the most obvious solutions, but also one of the most expensive ones, is to store images or at least code that can generate images on the blockchain itself. If you do that, you can trust think that as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists which could be much longer than the actual image or on the internet hosted on another random centralized site, then you can trust your image that the NFT points to will always exist. That’s what art blocks do. If we recall, the art block is the website that creates the artwork done with computer code. They guarantee the code that can generate your images will always be stored on the blockchain, which will cost more money. So that’s why you can see for different things that you mint, you get very different gas prices. Here we can see this.
The gas limit is 500,000. If we go back, we remember that the gas limit for another transaction is $52,000. We only used 41,000 of those gas units.
You can see this deal we’re trying to do. Now it can cost ten times more gas. It’s like the difference between driving from Chicago to New York and flying from New York to London. That’s a big difference between these two because you’re doing something much more complicated. You are storing more data which will cost you much more when you try to do something On-chain but comes with a lot more security that your NFT will last for a long time.
So it’s up to you to decide if it’s something you’re interested in or not. That’s the trade-off where you want to pay a little upfront right now for a lot more security than you think could exist, and if we confirm, this transaction is the same as before. We see a total of $690.
It’s $700 because gas prices have changed.
That’s a huge amount of money. 50% of it is not even to pay to buy this NFT. It’s almost all gas. That is 0.06 ETH gas and 0.1 ETH equal to what we are paying for this token. You have to decide if you’re interested in it or not or if it’s worth it. You can get rid of this if you use another blockchain like Zevalo, which we talked about earlier. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later.
And now, let’s continue. Let’s set this gas fee at 140 Gwei, then click the ‘Confirm’ button.
Now we see that the transaction is done. Let’s look at these transaction details like we did with the first transaction. You can see the website says ‘Purchase’ completed, that’s great.
If I go to my Meta Mask extension, the purchase shows it’s no longer in the queue, no longer pending, and completed. So again, we click this button to go to Etherscan and look at all the details. We see, Mint of art blocks, there is 1 Token with this specific unique ID number.
It is a long ID number. It is unique, and the value was 0.1 ETH which is $432.
We look into the gas fee is $200, which is a large amount of money compared to the other one.
Remember, ERC-1155 is only $30 in gas. But this is On-chain, so it’s worth a lot more. We can see it gave us 500,000 gasoline.
Same with our website where we gave you 20% profit. It also has a good profit. We only used 388,777 units of gas, which is 77.76% of the overall limit we have, so they gave us a good profit there. The maximum fee we would like to pay, in this case, is 140 Gwei, which is less than what we paid for the small transaction.
In fact, in this case, the transaction went through only at the 120 Gwei price.
We paid less than the max we were willing to pay, and despite that fact, it’s still $200 for this transaction versus the other one. We paid only 3/4 of this same amount in the gas. In the price for a gallon of gas we spent. But we spent more of the total gallons of gas used because this transaction is more complicated.
HOW TO SELL ON A SECOND MARKETPLACE? – PART 7
Now we see all those details. We can go see the Unchained mint we just created. This is the first time anyone has seen such a work of art. Because it is generated at the time we mint, in code at the second, this is generally not the case for most NFTs. But in the case of art blocks and art blocks like NFTs that are generated with code, this is the most unique type of NFT mechanism you can create through your minting. Take a look at OpenSea and review all the NFTs you’ve bought. We go to profile.
We see this created on my Meta Mask account. Let’s make sure that I’m connected. We can see here this is the latest piece. I made it’s called ‘Placement’
Number 188, and we found it in the collection of the art block factory.
These pieces aren’t as minted as ones on the curated or the playground collections. These are still very legitimate artists.
Here we can see some details. It is a one-of-a-kind piece, the number 188. There is no other factory product in this collection like this one. If we go to an art block factory, we can see all the other NFT works in this collection.
The art block factory we can see on the side, instructions on how to navigate the site, there are a lot of assets here. You can search for what you are specifically looking for and navigate there. We will learn more in the next section, where we talk about advanced buying and selling strategies. But for now, we are looking for the name of this collection as ‘Placement’. It is all in alphabetical order. Here we can see ‘Placement’, then select all placements or filter by a specific property.
We’ll talk a little bit about those attributes. First, we click on ‘All Placements’. It gives us all the slots that exist, and there are 188.
Remember, if we go back to the art block site, only 500 of these will ever exist. It is their limit that they guarantee that they can earn more. This code can make millions if you want, but the value is not something to be feared. They limit it to 500. So in the world, only 500 people own it. If you are one of those 500 people, if there are more than 500 people in the world who want this, the price can go up a lot. That’s how these work, and if you look at all the other placements out there, we can see every single one is unique. This single piece of code is very flexible. It’s made all these different art pieces. An done of this was controlled by a human, which is a kind of a crazy idea, it is all just done by code. It is one of the most popular kinds of use cases of NFT today because it is a kind of the first native digital art form that only existed with NFTs. You can’t have this in the real world, there’s no physical analog to a generative piece of art made by a piece of code on a physical piece of painting. Finally, what a lot of people like in NFTs is this new kind of art form that never was possible before, but now for the first time, you can record value thanks to the power of NFT.
Now, if we dig a little deeper into this. We look into what it means to have something have all these different properties and so forth. Let’s take a look at placement number 179
You can see there’s a properties tab here.
If you look at the properties tab, it tells you a few different things. In the factory of all these different items. It is only 0.26% of all the factory items that are placement NFTs. This particular collection has different types of features for this one piece of art. It has dividers, and you can see this artwork different from other artwork in the placement gallery because it has dividers, it has ‘Palermo’, ‘Mode: Dark’, ‘Invention: True’
We’ve minted our first ERC-721, NFT and ERC-1155 NFT. Let’s learn how to buy and sell this on the secondary market.
