Content creators on social platforms who have built a community around their content and have gone further to produce their content and services by selling courses can benefit from the underlying technology behind NFTs.
They can do this by creating an NFT collection and offering their digital products as a utility to those who buy their NFTs. And since NFTs are programmable smart contracts, it is possible for creators to assign themselves a royalty percentage whenever their NFTs are sold by one user to another.
NFT royalties could provide a continuous stream of income to such creators. NFTs are only a means to an end and so it is of no advantage to anyone if they require complex tools or specialized knowledge to make them.
Therefore, the NFT space has seen a number of no-code platforms built with the sole aim of enabling anyone to easily generate and sell their NFTs.
Creators with zero to little coding experience can leverage any of these platforms to build an NFT collection.
While the entire process to launch an NFT takes place in these 3 easy steps:
- Generate the art or collection and Metadata. Your metadata is a file description of the art and what the art represents.
- Upload art and metadata to IPFS. IPFS is a decentralized file storage system used to share and store files,( this generates a URL that is a unique identifier of the data you have uploaded) this URL would be added to your smart contract
- Generate a smart contract and deploy smart contracts to blockchain.
A smart contract is a set of codes that self-executes when triggered by a transaction from an external account. They are used to set rules around how your NFTs are to be sold.
The platforms differ in how much you can do in each step while on the platform without needing any external tool or platform.
Basic Term Definition
Art collection generator:
An art collection generation tool uses the provided layers (background, features, and symbols) to create an art collection.
Layers:
Layers are images that are used to generate your art collection, they are the elements or parts that will be pieced together to make your final art.
Let's assume you want to generate a collection of frogs that your layers will include.
- background colors,
- A base layer (frog body)
- Features (eye, nose, and mouth)
- any accessory you like your art to have hats, sunglasses, walking sticks, etc.
To create your layers you can use any image editing software like Photoshop. The number of variations in each layer you make will determine your collection size
In the example above, if we create five variations of each layer (base layer, background, eyes, nose, mouth, and accessories) this could give us a collection of over 10,000 images. It is calculated by multiplying the number of variations in all the layers. In our example that will be (5*5*5*5*5 = 15,625).
Smart contract generator
A smart contract generator is a tool used to compile and deploy smart contracts to the blockchain.
Deploying a smart contract simply means sending out an Ethereum transaction containing the compiled code of the smart contract without specifying any recipient, once deployed the contract will have an Ethereum address on the blockchain.
A smart contract is a collection of code that resides at a specific address on the Ethereum blockchain; it is a type of Ethereum account, similar to a user account. But unlike a user account which is solely controlled by the user, a smart contract account is controlled by its own code, and this code is triggered by transactions from another account.
“Another account” can be an account of someone buying your NFT. So these contract generators allow you to set rules (codes) around how your NFTs can be bought, sold, or transferred, who gets royalty when your NFTs are sold in the secondary market, and what percentage of the selling price gets to that person or persons.
A smart contract would contain information relating to your NFTs, including the IPFS storage address. It is only after the smart contract has been compiled and deployed that you can be publishing your NFTs on the blockchain (minting).
Here are the platforms that allow you to easily generate art and smart contracts and sell your services and products as a utility.
The NFT generator
The NFT generator is an art generation tool that you can use to make a collection of up to 10,000 unique art. The platform allows to upload your layers and it generates your collection and metadata with the click of a button. Here are the steps to follow.
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First, upload your layers one after the other starting with the background colors, then the base layers and the features like eyes, mouth etc. Each layer typically will have a number of images that are a variation of the same thing, like the eyes layer could have 3 different eye colors.
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After uploading the images, you have for a specific layer, you can set the rarity for the different variants. You have the option of making a variant common, rare or ultra-rare. It depends on how often you want the specific variant to occur in your final collection, using our 3 different eye colors example, let’s say the colors are red, brown and green. If you set the green eyes to ultra-rare very few arts in your final collection will have green eyes.
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The Next step will be to enter the name of the layer and click save before moving to the next layer. naming the layer is useful for generating your metadata
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when you have uploaded all your images and entered all the required information, you then choose your collection size (the number of NFTs you want to generate) and finally, with the click of a button your collection and the metadata will be automatically generated.
GENIFTY
The Genify platform is a 10,000 NFT generation tool. This allows you to generate an NFT collection, generate a smart contract, and mint your NFTs in the following steps
- Upload a file containing your layers or add your layers one by one.
- Set rarity for any layer; this has to do with how often a specific layer will occur in the collection. Then with the click of a button you generate your art collection, your metadata is generated alongside the NFT collection, and you can upload it to IPFS, the next step is to generate a smart contract.
- Compile your smart contract by entering; the name and symbol of your NFT, the maximum NFT supply, the maximum mint amount per user, the no of NFTs that would be minted when the smart contract is deployed and the cost of your NFT.
- However, you cannot deploy your smart contract to the blockchain directly from the platform. You can rely on external tools like remix.eth from where you can deploy your smart contract and mint your NFTs.
NFT ART GENERATOR
The NFT art generator platform lets you upload your layers, generate a collection, generate a smart contract and mint your NFT in the following steps:
- Create your desired layers and upload the images you have made using image editing tools like Photoshop into those layers and set the rarity for any of your layers.
- Generate your collection and metadata with the click of a button.
- Create a smart contract for your collection; by first deciding which network you want to launch on. The platform supports Ethereum and cheaper options like the polygon network.
- Selecting one of their smart contract modules, the platform offers different smart contract modules with different complexities which could affect the cost to deploy to the blockchain. The different modules contain one or more of the four types of NFT minting contracts offered by the platform the fur minting contracts include; regular minting, airdropping, mint now reveal later and white-list
- When you select any of their contract modules you then enter your collection information and upload your images and metadata to IPFS. When you are done setting up your smart contract you can easily deploy it to the blockchain from this platform.
- After the contract is deployed you get access to a minting button which you can embed to any website from where anyone can mint the NFTs
Moonwalk
The Moonwalk platform helps brands and creators facilitate the creation of generative NFT collections and also launch a web app called the moonwalk wallet to sell their NFTs, engage their community of users, and offer their services and products as a utility.
They make it easy for all creators to build unique community experiences using NFTs without having to code. All of this is handled by the Moonwalk team.
ZERO CODE NFT
Zero code is a no-code smart contract and mint page builder
Zero Code is only an NFT smart contract platform so you would generate and upload your art collection and metadata to IPFS using an external platform.
The platform supports several networks including Ethereum, Solana, polygon, and avalanche.
You can compile your smart contract by entering general information such as the IPFS URL that points to your images and metadata, collection size, name, price, symbol, collection description, and project URL then you can set features like; delayed reveal, whitelist, etc.
The final step is to deploy your smart contract with the click of a button. One advantage of this platform is that from here you can deploy a mining website that will be associated with your smart contract from where anyone can mint your NFTs
UNLOCK
Now, if you have created your NFTs, you can make them serve as access keys to paid walled content on your website or online communities on platforms like discord or telegram.
The unlock protocol allows you to create a locked contract and maps the lock contract to your NFT collection contract making your NFT keys to these locks.
You can place these locks on your website or select a platform and only users who hold a key which is any of the NFTs in your collection can gain access.
Conclusion
This is not exhaustive of all existing non-coded NFT platforms. Several other platforms exist and more are being built to make NFT generation easier and faster, besides that most of the platforms are still in the alpha and beta stage and a lot more features will be added with time.