Drum rolls. We get to the heart of the matter: the creation of the famous NFT. I am about to approach this part with serenity. The most difficult seems behind me: I overcame the legal obstacle linked to the ban on selling an intangible object in a public auction by accompanying the digital work with a
offset printing plate specially designed for the occasion. It will contain the first four pages of the supplement The Roaring 2020s that has never been printed.
I sing like an Odile Deray in The City of fear : “Nothing terrible can happen to us now.” What naivety. I am going to discover the hard way that the world of NFT is the jungle. If you believe that there are turnkey technological solutions in the crypto world, you are seriously wrong. “Obviously, if you had an integrated website and everything was managed by the same actor, it would be easier, but the basic principle is decentralization”, explains Manuel Valente, scientific director at
Coinhouse, a benchmark player in France.
Keep the seed phrase in a safe place
As a connoisseur of the crypto world, Aurélien Capdecomme, technical director of 20 minutes, takes part of the file in hand. Considering the scale of the project, I don’t want to be wrong. He accompanies me on all the technical stages of the creation of the NFT. The first: create the wallet (portfolio, in French) of 20 minutes on the blockchain. ”
MetaMask is the most famous tool for administering a wallet on ethereum. It takes 30 seconds, ”he explains. The equivalent of MetaMask for bitcoins would be Coinme for example. The wallet will make it possible to pay the gas, that is to say the transaction costs, for the creation and for the transfer of the NFT. It will also keep the non-fungible token in the digital wallet until the auction.
“When you create a wallet, you get a public address called a ‘hash’, it’s a string of letters and numbers. This is what you can communicate to people so that we can send you tokens, for example, details Aurélien Capdecomme. You also get a private key that must not be shared, it allows you to sign digital transactions ”. To find your wallet from one computer to another, MetaMask generates a “seed sentence” made up of 24 words that you should never lose and never give away. It allows you to find the contents of the wallet. If you have an NFT at 5,000 euros and you lose that sentence, it’s screwed up. You will never get the work back and you will never be able to prove that you own it.
The tough ordeal of buying cryptocurrency
To keep assets, there are three options: use software on your computer or on your phone. “The advantage is that you control your NFTs, but if your computer is hacked, it becomes relatively easy to steal the contents of the wallet”, points out Manuel Valente of Coinhouse. The second solution for keeping assets, such as cryptocurrencies, is to entrust them to a company whose business it is, such as Coinhouse. It is the same principle as entrusting your assets to a bank, you take the risk that the bank will be robbed.
“It can happen that platforms that keep crypto get hacked, they are targets. Even if, until now, this has never happened to us, ”he says. However, for the time being, Coinhouse does not allow keeping NFTs, only virtual currencies. Last option, keep your assets yourself. It would be like hiding his bundles of banknotes under his mattress. “The best way is to use a hardware wallet like that of the French company Ledger. It is the same principle as MetaMask except that the cryptographic keys which protect your assets are stored on a smart card ”, continues the specialist.
For the NFT of 20 minutes, Aurélien Capdecomme used MetaMask and to ensure his back, he added a password of 60 characters to the seed sentence. Once the wallet is in our pocket, we need cash to pay for the famous gas. And there, it thickens. As an individual, buying virtual currencies on Coinbase, Kraken or Coinhouse, to name a few, is pretty fast. It takes approximately 24 hours for the platform to analyze the identity document and proof of address.
OpenSea or Rarible?
For a company, “the platforms require many administrative and financial documents, such as Kbis, tax package. I had to find the proof of address of the president of 20 minutes [Frédéric Daruty], his passport… ”, details Aurélien Capdecomme. The administrative burden is part of the fight against money laundering. Coinhouse applies exactly the same rules as traditional finance for setting up a business account in a bank, for example. As a result, it took three weeks to collect all the documents in the file and be able to buy ether. We did well to do it early.
The time for the creation of the NFT has finally come. It was time. I join Aurélien Capdecomme in a virtual meeting with screen sharing to create the token of 20 minutes. We have the choice between several platforms for the creation of the NFT, of which the two best known are
OpenSea and
Rare.
If OpenSea is the most used, especially for NFTs which are part of series, such as CryptoKitties, we rather turn to Rarible which accepts heavier and better quality documents. Bad luck, the platforms do not accept the PDF format. However, the digital supplement The Roaring 2020s is obviously a PDF. In desperation, we stack the six high definition pages into one single jpg document (see photo above) and enter all the information (title, description, ownership). One last click on the “create” button, we pay the fees, we sign the transaction with the wallet, and the NFT is born. I discover with joy that Rarible and OpenSea are linked, the NFT is accessible on both platforms
here and
here. The speed of the exercise is a little disconcerting after three months of struggles.
In conclusion: the world of crypto-arts is hermetic. It is difficult – even impossible – to venture alone into this virtual universe and it is quite annoying to feel so idle. But, this is only the beginning. “In the 1990s, the Web was complicated to use, you had to be familiar with it and gradually it became easier,” Manuel Valente puts into perspective. The NFTs exploded a year ago. Making interfaces is the last wheel of the coach, it takes time for that to develop ”. In five years, we might create NFTs like we post photos on Instagram, who knows. Until then
see you on October 19 at the house of
Piasa to see a sale of NFT IRL.
In the next episode, we tell you how the NFT killed the game in contemporary art. See you next week, dear crypto-addicts.