It’s been a wild ride, a 6 days walk through this amazing journey of minting your first token by leverage the power tool of Manifold.xyz

I’ve learnt so much on trying to sticking to the plan… but definitely this is not the right place where to talk about this!

Sticking to the minting, let’s go for the final round of how to mint your first token!

Getting back to our Manifold account and selecting the “Filippo’s Test” Smart Contract, we’ll be asked to move forward and deploy our contract on the Mainnet.

It’s of paramount importance to keep in mind that minting on mainnet means spending ETH (therefore money): make sure to have all the information correctly prompted so to avoid a re-minting of the contract (meaning spending more $$$).

By click on the deployment and of the contract, you will be asked to sign a contract to distribute the contract on the mainnet. In my case, this is how much I spent to do this:

If everything goes in the right way, well this is what happens 💎💎💎

YES, WE MADE IT 🕺🕺🕺

If you think our job is finished well… "Job’s not finished!” as Kobe Bryant once said. ⛹🏾‍♂️

Now it’s time to:

• create your page on OpenSea

• setup Royalties on-chain

• create a redemption page

I’ll jump on the third one as it’s the part that will help us create a real collection to be offered to our customers.

Getting back to our home page, if we click on Apps we’ll see there’s a chance to create a Claim Page:

Claim Page are of paramount importance as, from them, we’ll be able to create a dedicate sections where our users we’ll be able to fully mint our tokes.

Steps to follow are actually quite easy:

• you’ll be asked to create token to be redeemed and put all the information within it

• you’ll be asked to set rules, like the price of the token, the amount of tokens, any potential airdrops or csv that will receive tokens etc.

• you’ll be asked to customize your claim page

• last but not least, you’ll review, publish and pay a cheap price to create your Claim Page

Once done, you’re good to sell your NFTs on the outside! This is how my claim page is looking (even though I’ve decided to sell my first 49 NFTs from tomorrow 22nd of October)

Okay, that’s been a wild ride but I really hope you’ll enjoy it! I do think that there are some takeaways from this project we’ve went through and this are:

• web3 is something powerful and creating huge incentives. If you’re building, you have to take into consideration that you’ll spend money;

• you can do whatever you want to, just unleash your imagination;

• make sure that, once launching, you have to have a community to address

See you soon for more articles to navigate into this web3 space! 🕺👀

Because, actually, creating a token is an opportunity that is wildly underrated so far. In the first episode of this project, I’ve tried to make some examples on how you could leverage the usage of NFTs. If you still think it can’t work, let’s have a chat and I’ll be happy to give you my hints on this.

Getting back to our project, we’ve seen how to deploy on Goerli your Smart Contract. Let’s make a step ahead and we begin minting our token! Clicking on our Test page, we will see this view:

By clicking on “mint a token on Goerli” you will be directed to the following page:

You know now that “these tokens aren’t gonna mint themselves”, uh? So let’s test on how to Mint them on Goerli! We’ve already explained in the previous lesson on how to ask for fake ETH on the Goerli test network, in case you’ve missed it have a look at the previous one.

Now hit the “+ Create” button:

You may see that, in this new page, there’s only a “Single Token” section.
Who knows why?

The answer is easy: because yesterday we’ve decided to test how to mint a ERC1155 token, a fungible one. In case we’ve tried the ERC721 one, Manifold would have shown another option on how to mint in batch multiple tokens.

Anyhow, by clicking on “single token”, a new page will appear:

Here’s where you will actually put all the information about your token as:

• you can upload the image of the token;

• you can insert the title of the artwork;

• you can insert a description of the token (as for example what it will enable or what stands behind the token);

• you can put a link to redirect to your website;

• you can add multiple information as metadata of the token itself

By putting more properties, you will be able to add more filters to the description of your NFT once it get listed on a marketplace (like OpenSea, Rarible, Gem.xyz etc…) therefore add as much properties as you want to make everything more clear.

As an example, this is how I completed the information about my token:

Right after, I’ve generated with Dream Studio the image of my token and here it goes:

Now we are good to mint our token on the Goerli Network before going to the Mainnet. This is very important, as when minting to the Mainnet you will still be able to make changes but you will have to pay the gas fee everytime… and we don’t like to lose money, uh? ;)

So, let’s push the information and click on “Mint to Goerli”…

Wen Mint, then? NOW 👇

The process will begin…

… and that’s it! You’ve minted your first Token on Goerli! Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy 🍋

Hope you’ve like this second part of the token minting, now prepare your wallet with some ETH (not much, a 0.08 ETH should work) and get ready to mint tokens… FOR REAL!

LFG 🚀

⛏ Minting: the action of writing a Smart Contract or a token into the blockchain, making sure this will stay there forever 🤝 Staging: the test environment when developing a program 🔔 Mainnet: the public environment that users will see and with which they will interact (aka a website) 🤝 Testnet: the test environment (similar to staging) 🪄 ERC721: an Ethereum standard for Non Fungible Tokens 🪙 ERC1155: an Ethereum standard for Fungible Tokens

We’ve seen stuff so far, uh?

In the last 3 days, we’ve been talking about something like:

• why you should estabilish your presence in the NFT space

• how to setup your first Hot Wallet on Metamask

• how to generate images with AI

Now it’s time to get our hands dirty and discover the power of our go-to tool for the minting experience: Manifold.

A quick and fast recap of the tool it’s worth to make sure we understand what we are going to do in the next few minutes.

Manifold is an all-in-one tool that helps anyone to create a footprint into web3 by easily create a smart contract, test it in staging, deploying into the mainnet and ensure a minting experience for customers.

All for free (except for gas fees) and without knowing how to write a SINGLE LINE OF CODE.

At the very beginning, I thought this tool was just for newbies that don’t know how to write code but then… well, I’ve seen the partners 👇

That’s pretty sick all of this, right? 👀

I’ve tested the tool many time to understand the potentiality and currently minted my very first collection to start using another tool I’ll show you on another post! The purpose of today, though, is to understand how thing works when it comes to create everything on the Test Net (right before publishing everything for people).

First of all, there are few things that we need to understand:

👉 TestNet we will be working is the Goerli one. Do you remember our very first Metamask wallet? Now try to do one thing: click on the chrome extension in the top right corner, insert your password and look on the banner, in the central part. You will see that you are on “Main Ethereum Network”, but if you click on the drop down menù you will see that there are different new nets you can connect:

All the ones called “Rete di Test” (the Italian for “Test Network”) are, of course, Test Network through which you can play. Today, we will use the last one, the Goerli one;

👉 minting your own Smart Contract and your own NFT collection, either on the testnet and on the mainnet, will require you some ETH to pay for gas fees. While for the Goerli Network we will use a specific webiste from where we will redeem “free” (fake) ETH, for the main network you will be asked to go on an exchange, buy some Ethereum and transfer them to your Metamask account. In case you don’t know how to do it, just raise your hands 🖐 and write me on Linkedin so I can help you out!

👉 make sure to understand that TestNet is a thing, while MainNet is another thing. If you want people to interact with your contract, you have to be in your MainNet.

Ok, let’s move forward! First and foremost, go on https://manifold.xyz/ and start exploring. Once you’re good, click con “Launch Studio” on the top right corner and the to “Connect Wallet”. You will be asked to sign a transaction:

Welcome to your new friend, now! Here’s an example of the image you will see (don’t mind my previous test, I did it for fun and left if there but we will start on something else from scratch).

In order to better understand the image:

• on OVERVIEW, you will have an overview of your Smart Contracts, which type of tokens you’re going to mint and on which network you’re currently working;

• on APPS, you can crete some more apps to be added to your contract, as for example a new landing page where to create the minting experience;

• on COLLECTORS, you will see the full list of wallets that have currently collected your tokens;

• on SETTINGS, you can change the setting of your profile;

• you will see a ⛽️ symbol on the right corner on the top, and it shows the cost estimates to deploy the smart contract. It’s constantly updated, based on the congestion of the Ethereum network

Now, let's get our hands dirty and see how to deploy the Smart Contract on Goerli Testnet. On the page, click on New Contract. This is the page that will be shown:

First of all, let’s put some moolah on our Goerli Test Net! Go on this link https://faucet.paradigm.xyz/, signup with Twitter and copy your wallet address. In a very short time span, check your Goerli Test Net and you will see some ETH charged!

Now, we can start creating the Smart Contract. You have to decide few things here:

• the name of the Smart Contract, the one you like the most

• the type of token you will be minting, either ERC721 either ERC1155

• a symbol, a simple symbol that will represent your token. My suggestion is to keep it short, up to 5 characters tops

• an ASCII Mark, that would be your visual representation of what you want to create, a sort of stamp from the creator

Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to DEPLOY ON GOERLI! Something will start brewing and you will be asked to sign the contract, like this:

It could take some time, but don’t worry! Your good to go now!

Ok, I have to say CONGRATULATION as you’ve deployed our very first Smart Contract on the TestNet 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

We’ll catch up tomorrow to make the second step and deploy the all collection into this!

LESSGOOOOOOOOO!

AI - Artifical Intelligence: Intellectual Property: Metadata Rarity

AI: stands for Artificial Intelligence, demonstrated and built by machines, different from the human one Metadata: the simplest way to represent NFTs by highlighting their own main characteristics Rarity: NFT’s collections have different type of rarities within their single items. The more a NFT is rare, the higher (usually) is the value of itself

Let’s get our hands dirty then: let’s build on AI!

AI will help us create the very foundations of our NFTs (or at least the foundations for those ones unable to draw as me).


 There are many different types of AI and I’m definitely not the person who can go in details about that but, for the sake of our needs, we will focus on just one: prompt-to-image AI.

What does it mean? It’s simple:

• You think about something by leveraging the most powerful tool you have —> you brain

• You write this somewhere on a laptop

• A software will do its job

• Will give back to you an image (or a set of images) representing your text

Stop. That’s it. Easy, uh?

Explaining this a bit better, an AI model that is prompt-to-speech is a model that is trained by natural language, where developers make sure the model is pre-trained by some words and that then it continuously retrains everytime users use it (by asking if the information provided is a good one or a bad one). By introducing a neural network behind, the system make sure to generate images that represents your prompt.

What is fundamental for our use case then?

• Having great creativity

• Being as specific as possible

• Waiting few seconds before the machine give you the information

So far, there are many different tools we can leverage to do this, and all of them allow us to create images that can be used even for commercial rights! This is wildly important when it comes to Intellectual Property, as it allows us to use them everywhere. There will be plenty of time to talk about IP, in the meantime look at this image created by A16Z about this environment and read their amazing new categorization of this important topic.

So getting back to AI Tools, the ones I’ve tested (and they work pretty well) are:

• MidJourney

• DreamStudio

• Dall-E

You can try all of them (just click on the link posted above), but remember that MidJourney is currently running on Discord.

For our use-case, I’ll use DreamStudio because:

• It’s very easy to log into it

• It’s the best one for creating art-based AI

• It helps you create more than 1 image ad a time

• Last but not least, it’s from Stable Diffusion, on of the first company into the prompt-to-image environment

Ready? Let’s try it!

First of all, go to https://stability.ai/ and go try the Beta Access of Dream Studio.

You can try to log in anyway you want, I do think that Google is the best fit!

Once logged, start dreaming! There are few things you can keep in mind:

• In the box in the bottom, you can write whatever you want! I suggest you to give the input “by [name of the artist]” to make the image looks as good as possible

• You can adjust the height or the width of your images, making them bigger or smaller! For our purpose, let’s stay with 512x512 (minimum settings)

• By increasing the CFG scale, you’ll make the image you want closer and closer to your inputs

• The more STEPS you add, the more layers and details your image will have

• Increasing the Number of Images, well… produce more images! (9 tops)

Now you can start playing with your AI to create images! It will be very fun, and I suggest you to shape your creations more and more by testing all the possible options at the beginning!

If you want to create an NFT collection, you have to keep in mind that:

• NFT collections have limited supply

• NFT collections have metadata

• NFT collections have rarity

Once we have decided to create our images, we will focus on this!

 Now, for the next 24 hours, go there and start experimenting!

Let’s say we want to create now a collection of 99 NFTs divided in:

• 72 Common images (9 images x 8 iterations)

• 18 Rare Images (9 images x 2 iterations)

• 9 Epic images (9 images)

Going back to our tool, let’s use a bit of imagination and start creating our images! My suggestion is to start from the common images and give an input that contains what are called “traits”. These can be whatever, but say that we use the following:

• a background

• an element of distinction

• an full image

• an art style

You can do, as an example, something like this:

By approaching the creation in this way, you can repeat over and over some information to make “common” images aka those ones that have some common and repeated traits.

These will be fundamental for us later on.

So, if you have understood the assignment, you can start creating the overall collection by repeating this over and over and creating your Epic and Rare images.

IMPORTANT: for the rare ones, instead of creating 9 images all together, try to create 1 at the time. We are looking to create our 1/1, as called in the NFT term.

Have fun, and we’ll catch up tomorrow to start experiencing how to mint our collection!

LFGGGGGG 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

An easy and simple explanation on how to open your first MetaMask account?

First and foremost: what is Metamask?

Metamask is an hot wallet, based on the Ethereum blockchain, that helps you buy, sell, send or receive Ether or other tokens based on the blockchain.

Moreover, what is an Hot Wallet?

It’s an online custodian service that allows to receive, sendo or maintain digital assets, either they are cryptocurrencies or NFTs

Important to say that every single blockchain has its own wallet, therefore make sure always to interact with Wallets of different blockchains.

How to setup your first Metamask account? Easy Peasy Vitalik Squeezy! (Sorry for the joke)

First of all, head to http://metamask.io and click on “Install MetaMask for [your browser]”

Once that, enable the extension for the browser

If properly downloaded, just click on the icon of the puzzle on the top right and enable the “Metamask” extension

Now let’s setup the account!

First and foremost, you can either create a new Metamask or even import an old one. Make sure to use your seed phrase (look later for more info) to import your previous account. If opening a new one, just “create a wallet”!

Ok, web3 is good but still a password to access is needed! Use a solid, robust and not-hackable one please 🙏 

Now, stay with me as this is FUNDAMENTAL. You will be given a “Secret Recovery Phrase” and this will be the ONLY WAY to recover your assets if you forget your password.

Store in the safest place possible, way better if you simply write it somewhere and keep it with you!

Now, you will be asked to confirm you seed phrase and….

…you’re good! You have your first account!

See under “Account 1”? Now you have your first Ethereum address, an alphanumeric number of 42 characters to which you can send ETH or from which you can withdraw them!

The Metamask account will be useful later on to mint our tokens, and it will be important to sign contracts and access to web3 pages… but we’ll see this!

All good? See you tomorrow to start interacting with AI! LESSGOOOOO!

As usual, if you have questions, please keep in touch 🙏 

GM Frens and welcome to this 6-day long formation on how to launch your first NFT collection!


Rather than using Linkedin, this time I’ve preferred moving myself into Mirror.xyz . Reasons are different:

• This is a web3-based platform, therefore you know… it made totale sense;

• If you want, you can click on the top-right corner and subscribe to this channel so, anytime I’ll post it, you will receive and e-mail. Differently from any newsletter, though, you have to have a Metamask Wallet (here an simple yet powerful explanation on how to open it in 30 seconds for my Italian frens)

• I will leverage the power of this tool to reward my followers with real tokens in the future, therefore feel free to subscribe and collect them all!

Glossary

As some of you may not understand all the terms hereby presented, here a small glossary of what I’m talking about in here:

• Magic The Gathering: first worldwide collectible cards game, widely famous in the 90s

• Blue Chip: NFTs that increased in price over time and, so far, are considered as the best projects in the environment

• Supply: as NFTs are non fungible (therefore not interchangeable), every collection as a maximum number of items (and we call it supply)

• Metamask: wallet for cryptocurrencies and NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain

Why understanding more about web3 makes total sense?

Well, let me tell you this: I hate NFTs.

As I hate metaverse, blockchain, tokens, web3, cryptocurrencies and everything else to come.

I hate them because they look like something complex, not accessible to everyone, just for the nerds (as me) or for some very skilled and high professional people. 
 Actually they were something like this at the very beginning, but most of them can be embedded in our everyday life without calling them with fancy and complex names.

And this is my today’s post about: helping you understand how NFTs can be leveraged from your business, side hustle or ordinary life!

When I first met the word “NFT”, the only thing I thought to myself was “oh look, it’s like Magic The Gathering but online!”.


That’s it, a simple and pure comparison to card games and collectibles, one of my childhood passions.

That was the trigger: something I’ve already experienced and loved, enforced and enhanced by leveraging web and blockchain.

That was the moment I met NBA Top Shot, a marketplace that was converting NBA highlights into digital cards on the blockchain (or maybe you can call it NFTs, if you want). The idea behind was very simple:

• Focus on the 3rd sports for revenues

• Recording highlights from NBA players

• Put them on the blockchain and assigning them a supply

• Aggregating into packages to create the “opening” experience

• Creating a secondary market where users can sell or purchase cards

A simple yet powerful marketplace that reached 210 million $ in sales in March 2021 (not aggregated, those were the sales of just 1 month 😅).

But that was the story of jpegs and NFTs in their very beginning:

• Based on collectibles

• No real perceived values (at least the beginning)

• Full of traders and people that were there either for fun either for money

What happened then? Well, here’s an image: the monthly sales fell down dramatically.

Despite this, 2021 was really the year of NFTs, with hundreds of collections launched and (very) few of them becoming “blue chips” on the long run. The ones that were able to resist the ups and downs of the market focused on few key elements:

• Build a powerful and innovative art

• Build a solid community, with a long term vision

• Grow a skilled team, with powerful skills and a solid stack

• Define a roadmap that could bring the collection to become a company

The switch happened: from funny images to be traded with high value to great arts with powerful utilities and a go to market strategy as a company.

But this is not a post about history of NFTs but, rather, a post about how they can be leveraged from you for your personal purposes. To better understand this, let’s make some real life examples to give you a glance on why you should leverage them:

• Your name is Chiara, you are an Account for one of the most important Brand Experience Agency in the world. By leveraging the powerful technology beside NFTs, you can propose your brands to focus on a way to retain and engage customers by giving them exclusive perks, accesses to amazing events or even the key to leverage some particular products or services;

• Your name is Simone and you’re a doctor. In a (not so far) world, you will be able to convert each clinical file of your patients into an NFT and send it to they digital clinical folder. Non transferrable, unique and blockchain-based, avoiding loss and potential manumission of data;

• Your name is Antonella and your role is Sales Executive for a big corporation. By converting your business card into an NFT, you can simply make people scan a QR code and receive the business card into their wallet, personalizing it with an introductory video or something that could catch the attention of the customer

I could go on indefinitely (well, if you have doubts, I encourage you ask it to me via DM) but the point here is: whether is your work, if you understand the power of web3, you can build unimaginable opportunities for you and your customers.

Tomorrow, at 6 PM CET, we’ll setup our MetaMask account, fundamental before moving forward in setting up the project!
 LESSGOOOOO!

_____________________________________________________________________________

If you’ve like this very first post, join the Newsletter by subscribing to it on the top right corner 🚀

Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter here on Mirror.

This is the very first post and I’ll keep it short: I decided to open this new communication channel to share with you more in-depth analysis about web3, crypto, NFTs and DeFi.

I’m working about this on a daily basis and I see that there are lot of things we don’t put into the bigger picture of this world but they are really making a huuuuuuge impact like:

• macroeconomics

• corporate decisions

• new worldwide trends

• growth of social media/internet coverage

All of these things are of paramount importance when building your new venture in web3, and I’ll do my best to share with you the knowledge I’m gathering on a daily basis about this world.

I’ll try my best to put this into my content creation editorial plan, making it a weeky newsletter. In case I won’t make it, please beg my pardon!

I’ll see you on the other side of the web space then 🚀