If you have been in the NFT market for more than a couple of month, you must know very much about Foundation (FND) or at least you have heard of it. Foundation is one of the most prominent invitation-only NFT platforms so not open to everyone, this makes emerging artists so enthusiastic to grab Foundation invites – the only limited number of golden tickets! So, for those who are running on all the long way struggles, hopefully this article will help to increased the chance to get invited to FND!

Why is Foundation So Great?

In case you are very new to this culture and still don’t understand why so many artists are looking for invitation to Foundation, let’s start with a quick explanation on why being a creator on Foundation is so admired.

Invitation system has been successfully performing for lifting up the fame of Foundation, as it allows only eminent artists to join the community as creators, which maintain the overall platform quality. Unlike Opeasea or Rarible, where everyone (including even spams or other non-artist business marketers) can register and list works, Foundation is a haven for mesmerizing creative collections. So, we can say the invitation system is working as a quality filter.

On Foundation, collectors are highly motivated to by NFTs as you have greater chance to find your favorite art on this sophisticated platform, compared to other open markets. This means, if you are a creator on Foundation, you will more likely to sell your NFTs.

You also note that sales value often goes very high on Foundation. We got thunder shock surprised when Edward Snowben’s Stay Free NFT raised 2,224 ETH (values $5.4 million USD on 17 April) and this is the forth highest-selling NFT of all time as of April 2021. We are recently amazed again by Itzel Yard’s Dreaming at Dusk NFT reached 500 ETH ($2 million USD on 20th May) which is historically the highest female artist’s NFT as of May 2021. These might be a mere dream only for one in a million, but there are many other NFT works which are collected for more than 10 ETH.

Also, any sales on Foundation, or even only being a creator on Foundation, will decorate you with an honored medal. So once you are on Foundation, you look greater, more appealing and convincing to collectors and this will lead to your sales on different platforms as well.

How to Get Invited?

Sounds very fascinating right? But it’s not so easy to get the invites out of a flooding number of enthusiastic artists. Invitation is only sent by creators who are already on Foundation and sold their works. There is no other way (except community upvote). If you want to get invited, you need to get connected with one of them and appeal you creativity to make them feel like inviting and welcoming you as a new member of Foundation. So Let’s look on some tips to take the lead in the competitive invites-begging race.

1. React to “Shill Your Work” Tweets

Twitter is a giant tool for all NFT creators and this is the most common and basic tactics to appeal your creativity to existing FND artists. There is a trend: when FND artists have sold their first work and get a few invite codes available, they often start invite giveaway campaign on twitter by tweeting like, “I sold my first piece and got some Foundation invites Shill me your work and I will choose one to invite!”. As this works for the organic growth of the number of registered users on Foundation, probably majority of the artists have got invited in this way, by reacting to those tweets.

The rule is very simple, you basically only need to shill (show) your NFT art in a reply to the original tweet and sometimes they ask you to do some extra (typically retweet and follow). So what we would recommend is, keep yourself updated by some trend search with hashtags like #Foundationapp and #FoundationInvite and react to as many tweets as you can.

2. Show Your Portfolio

To stand out, not only does a catchy artwork draw their attention. If you have any social media accounts, business accounts, homepages or other NFT marketplace accounts, shill them! Artists often put their Linktree link in their Twitter profile to make it easier to browse their artist profiles and portfolios. Preparing a website to exhibit your own works as well as your self-introduction as an artist and connecting it to Linktree, This would give a magnificent professional image on you as an NFT artist.

3. Make Yourself Look Bigger

Well, if you are a newly born artist and don’t have many to show off, then go with this one. Theoretically on social media, the more followers you get, the bigger name you appear to have. If you are the one who has invites, you probably choose to get more famous creators being connected to you on Foundation, rather than small names.

As Rome was not built in a day, normally it takes history to create a Twitter account with 1000+ followers. But as you already know it while being in the waiting line of FND invites, tweets with some trend hashtags often get engagements by many and it helps to trigger a great chance to rapidly grow the social media followers. Our previous article The Easiest Guide for NFT Artists: Get Connected to Your Potential Patrons describes some strategic tips to gain your followers quickly.

It’s also good to get connected with curators (LIKE US!) and let them exhibit your NFT works on their platforms, so that you can be confident to show your portfolios with external links (FYI, if you would love to exhibit and promote your NFTs, submit your works from our Submission Page!).

4. Don’t Disturb Artists Too Much

You are now gradually understanding that strategic uses of Twitter is a powerful dream catcher for FND invites. But you need to be aware that impertinent action on Twitter might be considered as a harassment and let you miss the boat! If you are trying to directly contact to some of the FND creators by direct message even though you are not followed by them, don’t to that.

It might have worked couple of months ago, but now too many users are rudely asking a limited number of invites so the artists are unwilling to communicate with those, rather it possibly encourages them to report your action to Twitter or Foundation for harmful attitude. Obviously this would degrade yourself and does not make any good to your career.

5. Connected with Foundation Discord Channel

If you want more fields to appeal yourself to FND artists out of Twitter, take part in their Discord community. Foundation is officially running a community Discord channel where creators, collectors and emerging artists who are waiting for invites can join, discuss and get inspired by each other.

If you are not a gamer Discord is not very familiar to you but it is a mainly chat-based online communication tool. In the Foundation Discord channel, FND artists are allowed to shill their NFTs as well as having a discussions on some technological topics, while also the non-invited artists can communicate with the FND artists under their guidelines and learn some topics each other.

Also you can find useful resources in the channel, such as breaking news, technical updates and report of server error. So if you are an NFT artist who wants to join in FND, keep yourself posted by subscribing it.

Extra: Our Foundation Invites Capsule Toy

There is a great news for you! We are offering a brand-new campaign called “Foundation Invites Capsule Toy“! This capsule toy (a.k.a. Gacha) randomly drops Foundation invites in a small proportion. Of course this won’t charge you at all, but it only gives our exhibition’s partnered artists more chances to get exposed.

This is supported by the donation system, as Foundation creator’s kindness helps us to operate this system. As soon as we receive Foundation invites donations from artists, we add the invites to this capsule toy. The odds are very small, like 1 in 1,000, but we hope we still have at least a great chance for you.

Again, this service is completely non-profit and you will never be asked to pay anything. Please feel free to play the toy and find what other artists create, and if you are very lucky, you will get invited to Foundation!

https://nftartexhibition.net/blog/2021/07/06/foundation-invites-capsule-toy-beta/

Go Easy and Spare Your Time for Creation

Now 5 (and an extra) tips are given to you, but my final advise for you is, go easy and spare your time for creation rather than sticking to a Twitter timeline whole day. It cannot be more painstaking if you are sending lots of replies to random artists and have got no invite after all. As well as being strategic on the social media side, cherish your time and energy to fuel your creativity and make new beautiful works. This may be the standard, but also the most effective way to reach out an FND invite.

When you are at the minting stage for the first time, you probably notice that you may manually set the two parameters “Gas Price” and “Gas Limit” to determine the Gas Fee. Can we set those amounts as low as possible? Unfortunately, no. If we set the mount too low, your minting will not go successful due to errors, or might take forever to mint only a single image file.

So, let me concisely explain what Gas Price and Gas Limit are and what they do.

Gas Price

When you ask the Ethereum block chain to proceed your request, you need to pay some fees for miners on the network. This fee is called Gas Fee and this is calculated as Gas Price x Gas Amount (We previously explained the overview about Gas Fee in the article The Easiest Guide for NFT Artists: Budget Plan for Minting an NFT).

So Gas Price is one of the factors that determines the final amount that you need to pay, and you might already know that Gas Price is always changing dynamically along with how busy the network is. The thing is, although the standard price is shown by Metamask, you are able to customize the Gas Price as you like.

When you open “Customize Gas”, you notice there are three price options labelled Slow, Average and Fast. It shows the higher price you pay, the shorter time you will take to mint your NFT.

And these price options are synchronized with Etherscan’s Gas Price chart too. So you can know what is the standard price as of now.

Customizing Gas Price

You can choose one of the three options, but also need to note that the “Slow” option might take several hours sometimes. So what I suggest you is, set more specific values manually by yourself.

So, open the “Advanced Tab” instead of Basic one on Metamask and you will find the two windows where you set the value. Here you can name your Gas Price as low as possible until a message “Gas Price Extremely Low” comes up.

“Extremely Low Price” alert is an indicator that you should not go further low otherwise your minting might take more than a few hours. So the best value that we recommend you to name is, just one or two Gwei higher than this threshold. It typically takes only a few minutes so you would have an affordable transaction as well as acceptably speedy processing.

Gas Limit

Then, you might wonder what value you should put in the “Gas Limit” tab. Although you can manually set Gas Limit you like, we strongly recommend you to leave it unchanged from the suggested value.

Gas Limit is a maximum gas amount that you permit the network to consume for minting your NFT. If the network use gas more than the limit you set, the minting process will immediately fail and ultimately you might waste your money minting nothing.

Gas consumption varies depending on the transaction and it does not always consume the 100% maximum amount that you set. So to make your transaction smooth and to avoid unnecessary expense, just setting it as suggested is the best way to minimize your payment.

Be Flexible!

So now I hope you understand how to set the right Gas Price and gas Limit manually! It is always nice to be flexible for setting value with some margin because Gas Price goes dynamically up and down. Minting multiples and experiencing trials and errors would be the key to success!

After you get used to the whole process, you start to feel minting and listing NFTs is not very difficult as expected. And you will notice the hardest part is promoting your listed NFTs to potential collectors. Some NFT marketplaces have function of “searching” so technically collectors can organically find your pieces out. But realistically, the chance is very small.

So what you need to do is create your own channel to get connected to potential collectors who might be interested in your creation. Your social media, especially Twitter will play this role if you are aware of the trend and some cultures that NFT artists and collectors get interacted with each other.

Follow the “Shill Your NFT” Culture

There are many collectors active on twitter and some of the enthusiasts are often tweeting typically like, “Today I have 2 ETH to spend! Shill your art by reply!”. These collectors are trying to find new collections by interacting with NFT creators. If you have something to appeal (shill), sending them a reply with the link to your NFT and a short description to attract collectors at a glance.

Use Trend Hash Tags

Collectors often seek for new collections with some trend hashtags, such as #NFTcommunity #NFTartist #NFTart and so on. Follow some top NFT artists and carefully observe what hashes they frequently use and get engaged by collectors with. Tweeting with unnecessary hashes too frequently might cause Shadow Ban on your twitter account, which results in less exposure to public. So be sensible to use only relevant hashes in appropriate frequency.

Promote Other Artists’ Artworks

Maybe you are full with your own NFT promotion, but sometimes helping other artists also helps your promotion too. As well as you, many artists are looking for chance to appeal their works and they are actively reacting to some twitter accounts who support their promotion. So, creating a tweet like “Follow me, RT this tweet and Shill your work. I will retweet your artworks for more exposure!” will help you get more engaged and the growth of your tweets and account.

Don’t Waste Your Time with Fake Collectors

But you also need to be careful about fake collectors when you follow the “Shill Your NFT” culture and interact with a tweet which asks you to follow and retweet. Some of them are not real collectors, but fake accounts which just looking for more followers. This is not very harmful, but it is nothing but a waste of time. Do not randomly interacting but pay your sensible attention to their single tweets and profiles and check if they are really collecting artworks or having any promotion to support artists.

Twitter Is a Strong Channel for all NFT Creators

Although it doesn’t always work perfectly, Twitter and other social media are string channel for you to promote your works and get connected to potential collectors. Strategically using these channels will give you a bigger chance of sales!

As we previously discussed in the last article The Easiest Guide for NFT Artists: Budget Plan for Minting an NFT, every artist needs to prepare budget typically amounting over 100 USD for the first minting. Probably, you want to cut it down as much as possible to be honest, don’t you? Don’t worry, it is a common pain every artist holds at the beginning. But if you are aware of some technical tips, you are very much likely to half down the cost with no painstaking hard work!

Wait until Ether Goes Low

You will pay all the fees in ETH, so why don’t you wait until the ETH goes down? Crypto downfall is a nightmare for investors, but not really for creators. When ETH is low, it is time to mint your masterpieces as well as collectors are highly motivated by the lessen bidding gas fees. Although the timing cannot be precisely anticipated, but ETH always go up and down as well as other cryptocurrencies. Keep yourself always updated with trend charts would be the key to catch the wave!

Choose the Right Day and Time

Besides the ETH price fluctuation, gas fee is also changing dynamically along with real time network traffic. As we explained in The Easiest Guide for NFT Artists: Budget Plan for Minting an NFT, you need to pay higher gas fee when the network is busy. This means you don’t need to pay much gas fee if you mint in a time range less people are active in the ETH market. Now you can somehow imagine when it would be, right? Yes, it basically works the same as the stock market.

There is a typical weekly tendency. If you are in the EU, that gas price gets lower in the midnight and gets higher afternoon to evening. Typically the gas price goes the lowest in Sunday’s midnight (early morning on Monday). Friday and Saturday are relatively better days compared to other days of the week.

All these trends can be checked in the report Ethereumprice provides and easily anticipated by yourself. Also, you can check the current gas price at etherscan.io. Go nocturnal might bring you a lucky!

Be Aware of Schedule of Ethereum Update (Hard Fork)

If you are not an investor, you don’t need to follow tech news related to crypto so keenly. But being aware of Ethereum Hard Fork will definitely help your financial strategies.

Hard Fork is scheduled technical updates of Ethereum, to make future ETH transactions smoother and safer and to provide more customer oriented transaction with lower gas fees. So theoretically, ETH price goes high before a hard fork and then gas price goes low when the hard fork is complete.

The schedule of hard forks is open to public, so keep yourself updated and be ready for the next upcoming hard fork.

Choose the Right Platform for You

You should note the pricing structure varies on each marketplace platform. Some platform charges more gas fee and commission than others. If you are looking for the cheapest option, you will want to sign up on Mintable. This platform offers an affordable option called “Gas-less” so you will not be asked to pay any gas fee at minting and you will only be charged the commission fee after your works are sold.

Go Financially Sensible

Even though your main duty is creating art, artists need to be financially sensible in the NFT world. The more money you save, more resource for creating you will grant. I hope a penny you save in the old days would lead to your future tremendous success…

NFT is a great tool for artists to monetize their creativity and some of the top talented creators are earning pretty high amount on every NFT listing. But you also need to be aware of the cost that artists pay to mint and list their works onto the NFT marketplaces. So, to get your NFT career started, let’s quickly look at all the cost that you need to pay for one NFT listing, and hopefully it will help you calculate the necessary budget for your successful debut in the NFT world!

3 Types of Fees

The key to being familiar to NFT in financial terms is understanding what types of fees will be charged. When you convert your money into ETH on crypto exchange services or sending your ETH to your Metamask wallet, you will need to pay some transaction fee. And then, another fee called Gas Fee will be charged when you are in a NFT marketplace and are minting and listing your NFT art pieces.

Depending on NFT marketplaces but before or after your listing, the NFT marketplace asks you to pay commission fees to use the platform as well. So, you need to simulate the total estimated costs gathering those three types of fees and prepare the relevant budget would make your smooth first release.

Transaction Fees on Crypto Exchange Services

Let’s look at the transaction fees for crypto exchange service first. The cost varies depending on service providers, but let’s say if you use Binance, generally 3% to 4.5% of trading fee will be charged when you buy ETH using your credit card and 0.003ETH (as of May 2021) will be charged when you transfer your ETH to your Metamask.

Gas Fees at Minting and Listing Your NFTs

When you mint and list your NFT for sale, you need to pay gas fee for the network service. This varies depending on marketplaces as well as other factors.

Gas fee is calculated by a multiply by Gas amount x Gas Price. Gas amount varies depending on the action you are taking (for example, if you mint your image data, the amount would be around 200,000 to 500,000, while if you send ETH from your Metamask to Your friend’s Metamask, it would be only around 20,000) and gas price is determined by the real time network traffic and roughly ranges 30 Gwei to 200 Gwei (Gwei = 0.000000001 ETH).

Let me demonstrate a fee calculation example on Opensea. Let’s say you are trying to mint and sell your first NFT on Opensea at a fixed price, a typical required gas would be like, 300,000 x 60Gwei = 0.024ETH

When you mint your item, this calculation is automatically demonstrated on Metamask and you can easily check the payment amount in USD. So you don’t need to calculate like above every time.

This is the total required gas fee on Opensea but some NFT platforms, like Foundation, separate this fee into two different fees, minting fee and listing fee. So in this case you would need to pay gas fee twice.

Commission Fee

Commission fees are charged when you list your NFT for sale or after your work is sold to somebody, depending on marketplaces. Amount also varies, but let’s say you are using Opensea for now, the fee would be 2.5%. This would be deducted from sales you made, so the rest 97.5% will be your profit.

Simulation of Total Cost for the First NFT Listing

Now all the fees are explained. Let’s calculate the estimated cost you need to pay for your first listing. So the cost would be like:

(Gas fee for minting a NFT on Opensea 0.024ETH + Binance transfer fee 0.003ETH) / (100% – Binance credit transaction Fee 3.5%) = Nearly 0.028ETH = Approx. 110USD.

So, 110 USD is the typical budget that you need to prepare for your first minting and 2.5% commission fee will be deducted from your sales price after the successful sale.

Prepare Your Budget with a Margin

Here is one more important thing. It’s always better to have some extra budget. As explained, the gas fee is dynamically changing based on the real time network traffic so you might not be able to pay enough if you cut down small pence. Maybe you can add 15-20% margin to your budget just in case, otherwise you might need to repeat all the steps to add extra ETH to your wallet with extra expenses for the additional fees.

It’s always better to keep you updated with the latest standard gas price. You can always check the real time gas price on etherscan.io.

If you want to look into the more strategic financial scheme, please subscribe our twitter and you will be posted with our latest resource for financial lessons for artists!

If you are a talented artist, you have a big chance to monetize your creativity in the NFT market. But you don’t know how the NFT market works and have no idea what to prepare before you create your first NFT?

So, this article will explain the basic required and recommended preparation before you are getting into the NFT market, by as easier language as possible!

Understanding How NFT Works in the Market

As previously explained in our article The Easiest Guide for NFT Artists: Understanding the Basic Concept of NFT, NFTs are not just single digital image files. Every NFT links to Ethereum Block Chain and has different token IDs. This is why NFTs work as digital properties which can never be copied by anybody but the owners. In order to alter your creative art pieces into NFTs, you will need to register for one or more of NFT marketplaces and go through the “minting” process.

To get you ready to mint your artworks, let’s look at everything that you should prepare!

Prepare Ethereum Wallet (Metamask)

Ethereum, a.k.a. Ether or ETH… one of the major cryptocurrencies, is the main tool to buy and sell NFTs, which works as something like US dollar in the NFT market. In order to buy their favorite art pieces, collectors firstly convert any fiat (like USD, EUR, GBP… any currencies, which we use in our daily market) to ETH. The price of NFTs is shown in ETH (For example, 0.1ETH… this is almost equivalent to 400USD) and collectors pay or bid on the auction based on the proposed price.

So, every transaction is in ETH. When your work is sold, you will receive the profit in ETH. And you will pay the transaction fee to the market, this is also in ETH. This is why you need to prepare ETH and a virtual wallet to send and receive ETH.

There are many virtual wallets, but I strongly recommend Metamask, the most widely used crypto wallets for NFT creators. Because almost all the marketplaces are supported with Metamask, you will have no struggle of troubleshooting or any crucial errors by using it.

Buy Ethereum

After preparing your wallet, then you need to buy some ETH to pay your minting and listing fee. The system asks you to pay a little amount of network fee (called as Gas Fee) when you get your image files minted and listed onto NFT marketplaces. You will need to sign up an account of a cryptocurrency trading service to convert your fiat money to ETH. The international famous services are Binance and Coinbase, and you maybe find domestic service providers in your country too.

Get Your Twitter Account Active

As well as ETH preparation, you need to get ready on the social media side too. Often collectors seek for NFTs on Twitter and there are many chances for creators to show and appeal their creativity, I highly recommend you to create an active Twitter account. Some NFT marketplaces require an active Twitter for verification on sign up process too. Linking yourself to collectors and other creators are a great key to success in the NFT world!

Sign Up an NFT Marketplace Account

Once everything is ready, get yourself registered as an NFT artist! You will want to sign up an account of any NFT marketplace websites, such as Opensea, Rarible or Mintable. These three are the most common gateway for emerging NFT artists because anyone can sign up your account for free and will not require any additional contests. There are also some NFT marketplaces that asks you to submit your portfolios, like SuperRare. On this platform the moderator strictly assess the submitted portfolio and only a limited number of talented artists can join as creators.

Foundation and Makersplace are the platform that only invited artists can join. So starting your NFT career by using one of the major 3 and challenging to those exclusive platforms will be the best strategy!

So, This Is All You Need to Do Before Creating NFTs

Now, did you get yourself familiar with the basic steps to be an NFT creator? If yes and you want to look at the procedure more specifically, please visit other articles that give more technical information and instructions!

NFT is a new monetization option for any creators and artists and the NFT market has rapidly grown as much as the crypto market has become more public in the recent few years. But not surprisingly, still many artists did not take their steps into this “gold-rush” market and are hesitant to start their career as “NFT artists” only because of lack of knowledge about the concept, value or technologies of NFT.

Yes, NFT is truly difficult if you look at the deep inside. It has some relations with Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technologies. But you – as artists – do you fully understand the software architecture when you use any creative tools? Do you need to write any code when you are on Adobe Illustration? Well, basically creating NFTs is same as this.

When you are creating NFT arts, You don’t need to understand how blockchain technology works. Leave it as a black box. This article will try to give the quick, concise and complete guide for creating NFT arts by the easiest words. No difficult language. Clear explanation. No difficult concept! Yay!

What Is an NFT?

Okay, let’s get started. First of all, what is an NFT? Wikipedia might say, it is an abbreviation for Non-fungible Token. But who cares its real name? You only need to know that an NFT is a kind of online data, and each data file has their own “identities”.

We may think it is something like a shape of digital arts, encrypted data or whatever. But to go easier, we don’t need to think that an NFT is anything but a tradable digital art. People buy Gogh’s physical art pieces. Here the same, people buy your digital art pieces. This is what an NFT is.

Why NFT Is Valuable?

So, we understand an NFT is a digital art piece, but here is a question. If it is just a single image file, it would be so easy to copy the file and has no chances to be valued like Gogh’s artworks. What makes NFTs so valuable? The answer is related to the identity granted to each NFT file on the blockchain contracts.

What does it mean to have their identities? Okay, let me show an example.

Here is an image file of the NFTX logo. Do you think this is an NFT? Actually, this is not an NFT yet, because you can easily duplicate the image by copying or taking a screenshot.

When you create an NFT from a single image file (we call this process “minting“), your image file is uploaded to an NFT server and linked to Ethereum blockchain. Your image becomes an NFT at this point, by granting an identity a.k.a. Token ID.

On the blockchain, anyone can track the NFT, from the beginning to the end, so from the creator to the last collector. Even if you can duplicate the image itself, how can you duplicate all the tracking history, which is linked to the blockchain? This is how the value of NFT is ensured.

Why Do People Buy NFTs?

But still, you can’t image what drives people to buy NFTs, can you? You can’t imagine how come people buy such virtual and intangible properties, can you? Well, this might be the most difficult part to understand about NFTs, but let me explain the motivation of the collectors.

The reason for buying NFTs is basically same as the reason to buy physical art pieces. Why people want to buy art? Collectors want to own pieces when they are moved, impressed, inspired by the story or aesthetics that the art has. People just want to possess it because they like it. This is purely an instinctive motivation that belongs to any human beings.

Physical art collections can be displayed as an interior decoration, or exhibited in their galleries to show off when they welcome their guests. NFTs might not work as decoration (or possibly works if you equip digital displays), but if you build your online gallery, it would be much easier to “show off” your collections to more audiences compared to physical gallery.

Also there are financial reasons. Some people buy art to invest, expecting the value of the art will be increased years later. Or investing in art is a good scheme for tax saving. When it comes to NFTs, it works completely the same. Furthermore, as the value of cryptocurrency is steadily growing, the value of NFT will be correspondingly getting higher, many investors thinks.

Anyway, there are many ways collectors are motivated, even though it is not a physical property.

How to Create NFTs

Then, how can artists sell or deliver their artworks to collectors, as NFTs? Simply uploading an image file to your homepage would not work at selling NFTs. You need to go through “minting” process when you alter your image file to NFTs. Minting is a process that links your uploaded image files to Ethereum block chain and give a token ID. This is done by NFT marketplaces systematically, so individual artists don’t need to make any technical effort, such as coding.

Got Along with the Basic Concept of NFT?

NFT is a tradable digital artwork, which is connected to blockchain and its value is guaranteed by the technology. This is all you need to remember! If you got more interested in creating your first NFT, please check more articles on NFTX!