How to begin a NFT project?

[Stevo]

Hey guys and good morning!

First off, I’m new to this community so I believe a short introdcution is in place! My name is Steven and I literally have had 0 education in IT/software/crypto or anything else… but this community got my interest! I’m a quick learner and autodidact, so everything I’ve picked up so far about programming, smart contracts, blockchain etc. I’ve done by myself through the many videos/fora/tutorials etc. you guys provided, for which many thanks! So here it goes and my apologies in advance if I’m not using correct terms or misinterpret something !

I’ve managed to complete the NFT and marketplace tutorials and got some more insight in the technical aspects of creating a dapp and running it and how the smart contracts and the flow blockchain work. Now, I have this great idea to begin an NFT marketplace here in Belgium, but I’m a little sceptical whether it will be a succes or not. I’m willing to try and convince a major player in Belgium to get into the project, but I’ll need all the preparation I can get. Don’t worry about the technical aspect, I’ve surrounded myself with way more capable people than myself to handle the programming, back- and front-end developping etc.

I’m trying to get ahead of the questions the key player will ask us, when we approach them with our project. Here are some I can figure out, but feel free to add to it if u notice anything is missing!

1. How much will this cost us?

To this question I can answer them there will be a minimum amount of costs for creating accounts, which was handled in this topic. Is it maybe an idea to start a closed beta (with a maximum number of accounts) to provide them a maximum cost at start up for creating accounts? It might also be a way to find out if the NFT market can set foot on Belgium soil.

Other than storage fees there are also processing and computing fees, but documentation on this will be updated in the near future? For now I can guarantee them they will be kept to a minimum in order to help grow the FLOW community?

If we we’re to use the FLOW blockchain for our project will there be any additional fees other than the storage and transactions fees? Let’s say our projects grows to a national scale here and we have several hundreds of thousands of users, will there be more ‘unexpected’ costs?

2. How can we earn on this?

First off I’ll bring them to mind that this an enormous way to grow the community they represent and bring their fans closer to the sport they have been missing the past few years due to COVID. For me that is the most important aspect in ‘earning’. But since it’s a bussiness and we tend to convince people to invest, they’ll need to have an insight on money earnings as well. I’ve read up on the NBA Topshots contracts, that Dapper Labs earns 5% on any transaction made on the marketplace, whether it’d be buying packages or trading on the marketplace. So I’m guessing this 5% fee is programmed in the smart contracts? The 5% is then divided between Dapper Labs, NBA, NBPA and sponsors? Is this also in the smart contracts or is this just in ‘paper contracts’ ?

3. What do you want us to do in order to make this work?

Here I think the role for the key player is to provide us with the license materials for the videos and make a selection of videos as well. Since they run the community they have most insight in which sport actions are common/rare/epic/… So I guess it’d be their role to decide which videos should make the packages and how many certicates we have to mint?

In regard to this they would also the go-to party to fill in metadata, but here I was wondering that once an NFT is minted, can the metadata be altered or added to or do we need to start over once again?

Also the NFTs are stored in collections and if we wanted to create games or account statusses, these are linked to these collections and thus the blockchain or do these work via transactions through the chain and the back-end user interface? (not sure if I’ve formulated my question with the right terms but I hope I made myself clear )

4. Environmental issues?

Not sure this would be a question they’d ask, but hey we’re anticipating! I know the blockchain technology can be energy consuming, but is there any documentation in respect to how consuming the FLOW blockchain is? I know businesses in our country would appreciate it when we could inform them about this and if we could give them insights on future developments like getting the energy from renewable sources.

Next steps

So I’m guessing our natural way of order now is to find a key player, start developping and deploying to the testnet and if there’s enough traffic and the contracts are ok, eventual deployment to the mainnet can begin?

Thanks in advance for reading through my extensive post and I’m looking forward to read up on any comments you can provide!

Kind regards Steven

[flowjosh]

Hello @Stevo! Welcome to the Flow community! It is great to have you here.

I’ll try to answer some of your questions:

1. You are correct that the main costs are storage fees and transaction fees, and I don’t expect that you’ll have any other Flow-imposed costs with your project. We aren’t completely done designing transaction fees yet, but we expect them to consistently be on the order of cents or less so they remain affordable.
2. The 5% fee is just a flat fee taken in the smart contract, and the division between the different stakeholders happens off-chain. You could do it similarly, or you could do it all on-chain. It is really up to you.
3. Since you’ll be the one running the collectibles experience and game, you’ll need to be the one who is primarily designing the scarcity mechanics and minting quantities. Whatever entity you work with will likely want to review your proposals for approval, but you’ll probably be primarily in charge of those things. You’ll also need to construct and add the metadata yourself, with their approval.
   If you want to link games and such to users’ collections, you can do it any way you want! You could query users’ accounts with scripts on chain for the games, or you could keep and off-chain database for the games to query.
4. Flow uses proof of stake consensus, so it is orders of magnitute more enery-efficient than proof of work blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum and has a very minimal environmental impact.

Yes, start developing and testing your contracts and stay in touch! We’re happy to assist you with any questions!

[ahmad]

Hi @Stevo ,
I enjoyed reading about your venture. Looking forward to getting updated about this innovation.