How to Deploy an NFT with Remix IDE and Opensea

An NFT is a unique asset with different values and properties. A unit of an NFT can not be valued as another unit of the same asset, as they are not mutually interchangeable. <!--more--> This article will cover and illustrate from a hands-on approach how to deploy an ERC-721 token.

Table of content #

• What is an ERC-721 Token
• How to Deploy an ERC-721 Token
• Installing Metamask
• Getting Test Ether
• Installing IPFS
• Writing the NFT Smart Contract
• Adding the Custom Token in Metamask
• Listing our NFT on OpenSea
• Setting up Unlockable Content with Pinata
• Conclusion

What is an ERC-721 token #

Prior to the development of the ERC-721 standard, ERC being Ethereum Request For Comment(ERC); there was ERC-20. Which was used when minting NFTs that do not offer unique id functionality. The ERC-721 token allows creating a unique id for a token and the individual creation of the NFTs collection.

How to deploy an ERC-721 token #

To deploy an ERC-721 token (our NFT) the following is required:

• Metamask
• IPFX
• Remix IDE to deploy and compile the smart contract.

Installing Metamask #

For this tutorial, I will be using the Microsoft Edge browser to install the Metamask wallet. To install MetaMask, follow this link and install Metamask for your browser. The install button on the web page will redirect you to the browser add-ins store to install the extension.

With Metamask installed, create a wallet and enter the new password for your wallet.

Note that the wallet created will be used for practice purposes. Once your Metamask wallet is live, you will be assigned a secret key to be kept safely.

Next, we need to click on the Ethereum Mainnet and select the show/hide test networks label. This will navigate you to the settings menu, then toggle the Show Test Network button to ON.

Click on Ethereum Mainnet, and you will see the list of all test networks. In this tutorial, we will use Rinkeby Test Network, so click on Rinkeby Test Network.

On the Rinkeby Test Network, we should have 0 ETH in our wallet, so we proceed to get some test ether.

Getting test ether #

To get some ether for us to run transactions and deploy our NFT, we visit google.com and search for Rinkeby Faucet alternatively, follow this link

Next, we go to our Metamask wallet and copy our address. Under account 1, as illustrated in the image below, should be our wallet address, we can copy it.

We proceed to the Rinkeby Faucet Page, paste our address there, and click send Rinkeby ETH. This process could take a while for the Ether to reflect in your wallet due to the processing queue alongside other developers requesting test facet on the network.

Once the request is completed, there should be a deposit of 0.1 ETH in your Rinkeby Test Network wallet, as illustrated below:

Installing IPFS #

IPFS stands for Interplanetary File System. It is a decentralized cloud storage system, and we will utilize it in storing our NFT art. You can follow this link to install IPFS on your desktop.

Next, we launch the application and we navigate to the files tab. This is where we upload/import our digital artwork. So, if you have a graphics design or a picture you would like to use as an NFT, simply upload it.

For the sake of this article, I will be using this painting image below I downloaded online, it may be subject to copyright, and I claim no ownership of this artwork.Strictly for testing purposes.

Next, we import this file to our IPFS. At this time of the writing, you can access this image on IPFS cloud via this link

Writing the NFT smart contract #

To write our smart contract for our NFT, we will leverage this GitHub library. We are utilizing this library to avoid writing certain components from scratch.

Next, we head over to Remix IDE and create a new solidity file and name it NFT721.sol and we input the following code:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity 0.8.0;

import "https://github.com/0xcert/ethereum-erc721/src/contracts/tokens/nf-token-metadata.sol";
import "https://github.com/0xcert/ethereum-erc721/src/contracts/ownership/ownable.sol";

contract newNFT is NFTokenMetadata, Ownable {
 constructor() {
   //define nft name of choice and symbol
   nftName = "SectionTest NFT";
   nftSymbol = "STNF";
 }
 
 function mint(address _to, uint256 _tokenId, string calldata _uri) external onlyOwner {
   super._mint(_to, _tokenId);
   super._setTokenUri(_tokenId, _uri);
 }
}

Once that is done, we can click on Compile. If we get no error, we should see a green check button on the compiler button.

Next, we will deploy the NFT. To deploy our NFT, we need to switch the environment to Injected Web3. Once we do that, we will click on the account menu, and it will redirect us to our Metamask wallet to connect our account:

We need to accept all prompts and connect to our test account. Once connected, we should be able to see the wallet address and the balance on Remix IDE. Then, we select deploy. To deploy, Metamask wallet will ask to confirm the transaction with a Gas fee.

In remix IDE, under the deployed contracts, we should see an arrow with the contract name ‘NEWNFT’, toggle the menu to expand. We turn our focus to the mint function and expand the menu.

Under the mint function, we add our Metamask address, which is where we want to mint our NFT. We also input a unique token id (anything random works), and we can input the URL of our NFT, which is the URL of the file we uploaded on IPFS.

Once inputted, we can click on transact. We should see a notification icon on our Metamask within our browser, click on it, and confirm the transaction.

Next, we will focus on the terminal. Once successfully minted, we can view the transaction details on Etherscan. By following the above steps with no error, you should have successfully created an NFT. But hold on, we can’t see it in our wallet yet.

Adding the custom token in Metamask #

On the Metamask wallet homepage, if you don’t see your NFT token, we import it by clicking the import tokens. Metamask will request our token contract address and symbol.

To find our token contract address, we will head back to our Remix IDE terminal and view the mint transaction on Etherscan. We should have something like this on Etherscan:

In Etherscan, we focus on the token transferred section, and we can click on our token name and input the NFT name "STNF" as saved in our smart contract. Once we click on the token name, it will redirect us to a page that shows the details about the NFT and the transfers/holders.

In the profile summary section, we can see our NFT contract address, so we copy that and paste it into the token contract address on our Metamask. In our wallet, we type in the token symbol we defined in our code and set the token decimal to 1, and then we add the custom token, and we should be able to see it.

Now that we have successfully minted our NFT, how about we go ahead to list it on OpenSea.

Listing our NFT on OpenSea #

We need to navigate to the OpenSea marketplace. Once ther we can click create, then we need to connect our metamask wallet. By default OpenSea will know we are running metamask on a test network, hence it will pop up a menu telling us to use the testnets.opensea.io URL, which is exactly what we will use.

So, head to the testnets, and repeat the process. It will ask us to create a new item for our NFT, so we proceed by clicking the required fields, we upload our NFT image, and filling in the details. You can explore here and fill in as many details as you wish.

Within this page, an important section is the settings on unlockable content to set the original version of the NFT. You can skip this process if you have no need to set up the unlockable content.

Setting up unlockable content with Pinata #

On the details page, we can enable unlockable content. What this does is that it allows only the owner of the NFT to view the original version of this file and to enable it, we simply toggle the button.

It will request the access key, and to get this we need to use pinata cloud. Create an account on Pinata Cloud.

Once we have an account on Pinata, we simply upload the same NFT image we uploaded, except we are stating figuratively that this is the original version of the NFT. Once uploaded, it creates a CID to the image which is basically the hash of the file.

Next, we click on the image name in Pinata, and it will open it up in a new tab, we simply copy the URL, here is the image, and we paste it in the enter content of the unlockable content section on OpenSea. Then we click on create.

Once we are done, we click on create. Once done, you should be able to share the NFT, you can access the tutorial version on OpenSea.

Once complete, we can click on the sell button to sell our NFT in the marketplace. We can set the amount we want and fill in the details as we wish. Once done, it will load metamask to confirm the transaction.

Then voila your item is listed for sale:

Conclusion #

This article walked the reader through a step-by-step process on launching your own NFT from start to finish. The only difference is while we are running on a test network, you would have to spend real Ether to sign and confirm the transactions executed in the process of creating an NFT.

Now, go out there and launch some test NFTs to dazzle your friends or contribute to the marketplace.

Happy coding!

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Peer Review Contributions by: Mohamed Alghadban