I recently did an interview for WXYZ News Detroit with Peter Maxwell and he asked me to explain an NFT with a caveat of keeping it simple for their viewership. Man…it was a struggle because I’m so use to talking with people that kinda know what it is. I can’t be the only one that can’t clearly articulate what a NFT is without saying it’s a Non-Fungible Token and start rambling off a whole bunch of technical jargon, which probably confuses people even more. So, in this article I will attempt to explain NFT’s in very simple terms. Let me know how I can improve it by sending me a message @machinemaker on Twitter.
Definition of a NFT
A NFT is a unique digital asset thats created by a single entity and registered on a distributed ledger. The creator of the asset can define a contract that specifies the royalty amount to receive each time the asset is resold. The royalty amount is for the lifetime of the asset.
Graphical Representation of a NFT
In the above definition we specified that the digital asset is registered on a distributed ledger. A distributed ledger means that information about that asset isn’t stored in one location, but multiple copies of the data is stored in different locations to ensure no lost of data. Also, copies of this data is kept in sync across these different locations. This is commonly known as a Blockchain.
The image above depicts a person uploading a digital asset to a NFT Marketplace and defining some information about the asset. This information includes defining a royalty that you would like to get paid each time the asset is resold after the initial sell of the asset. The purple bull represents the NFT if you were wondering 🙂 The NFT Marketplace handles all of the hard work of deploying information about the digital asset to a blockchain. This includes something called a Smart Contract. It’s a computer program that runs on the blockchain and it’s responsible for ensuring you get paid your royalties. Note, the royalties will be paid to your Crypto Wallet and there are multiple NFT Marketplaces. One of the most popular ones is Opensea.io
We have our 3rd Annual Hacking With The Homies Developer Conference on Feb 25 & 26, 2022. We have a hands on workshop where we walk people thru the process of creating their first NFT. The workshop was designed for creatives. Also we created an NFT collection for some of our conference tickets. The featured picture is one of the NFT’s we created for the conference.
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