NFT 101

In 2020, OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, had a trading volume of $4.76M for Q3 2020, vs $6.57B in Q3 2021, i.e an increase of 141,847%.

This massive influx of money made a lot of money to a lot of people:

• NFT traders.
• NFT creators, like Beeple who sold an NFT for $69M.
• NFT entrepreneurs, like OpenSea who earned $162.7M in trading for Q3 2020.
• NFT developers, who work for the fast-growing NFT companies

Some people just don't get it. They think NFTs just a fad. They don't understand why someone would be willing to spend so much for NFTs. After, you can just copy paste these jpegs, right?

But no matter what they say, the NFTs revolution is upon us, and it's going to change the world forever. For the first time in history, artists can monetize their art, on a large scale. Digital art is just one use case, and there are many other, like representing in-game assets.

How to get started in NFTs as a developer?

There are 3 possibilities for developers in the NFT industry:

• Work as an employee, for an NFT company, and make a great salary (up to $200-300k yearly salary for senior profiles)
• Work as an NFT creator, using generative art for example. In this case, sky is the limit.
• Work as an NFT developer, building your own NFT marketplace. In this case, sky is the limit too :)

But no matter what you want to do, you need to understand how NFTs work, at a technical level.

And for this, you need to understand:

• The architecture of NFTs (smart contract
• How to create NFT smart contract
• How to create NFTs frontend
• How to deploy the smart contract + frontend to visualize the NFT

And this is what you will learn in this course.

What will you learn in this course?

In this course you will learn:

• The ERC721 standard, i.e the gold standard for NFTs
• The ERC1155 standard
• How to create NFT smart contracts using these 2 standards
• How to mint NFTs
• How to host the metadata on IPFS using Pinata
• How to visualize the NFT image + metadata in the frontend

We will use:

• Hardhat
• Solidity
• OpenZeppelin
• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• Ethers
• React
• Polygon network
• (This is an Ethereum-based Blockchain - the procedure is the same for all other Ethereum-based Blockchains)

IMPORTANT: We will not spend too much on the creation of the NFT image itself. This will be for the next course on NFT (NFT 201). Instead we will focus on the mechanics of the NFT (smart contract + frontend).

Let's start your NFT journey :)