Guide to minting NFTs using Manifold

Being an NFT creator means not just making good art but also finding a fruitful way to sell it. Although there are a number of NFT marketplaces out there, creators are now looking for more autonomy and control over their assets. So, in order to fill this market gap, a number of platforms allow NFT creators to mint their own smart contracts or build their own creative platforms.

In this article, we’ll discuss the step-by-step process of how you can mint a smart contract of your own using Manifold.

Step 1: Visit the official website of Manifold and click on ‘launch studio.’ You’ll see the option to connect it with Metamask, Coinbase or any other wallet to get started.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll land on this screen.

Step 2: Naturally, you have to click on ‘New Contract’ here. Then, you’ll have to fill in 4 things:

• the contract name
• the symbol (such as BTC, ETH, etc.)
• the contract standard (ERC 721 or ERC 1155)
• and lastly, the ASCII mark (a text-based symbol or art that will serve as your contract’s signature). You can create it automatically using any art generator online or have your own signature turned into an ASCII symbol.

Note that these details can’t be changed again once the contract is deployed.

Step 3: Now it’s time to deploy this contract on Rinkeby. It’s a test net that allows you to get a preview of how things will look in an actual marketplace.

To do so, first, you’ll have to switch from ‘Mainnet’ to ‘Rinkeby’ from the top menu and then get some Rinkeby ether. The manifold documentation has listed some faucets that you can get it from.

Then you can just click on ‘Deploy on Rinkeby.’ You’ll also have to sign a transaction on your preferred wallet during this process.

Once this process is finished, you have officially created your own smart contract and you can take a look at it on Etherscan. If you need to change anything, you can do that by going back to the dashboard and clicking on ‘edit contract.’

If you think the contract is good to go, you can proceed to mint a test token by going to the ‘tokens’ tab.

Proceed to upload your artwork and add details like the artwork title, creator’s name, etc.

Then choose the number of editions and sign the transaction to mint your token. This can either be done on the Rinkeby test net again or directly on the main net.

Either way, you’ve now minted your NFT collection on a custom smart contract without any coding skills. Contrary to a marketplace’s third-party minting contract, Manifold allows creators to deploy one of their own on their own terms. It also benefits collectors by helping them verify if a collection is authentic or not.