DeFi Market
Disclosure: Robert Stone owns a Liquid Genesis NFT, which pays a royalty into his wallet. He is also Deputy Editor of Crypto Magazine, which is published by CMC Group, the company that runs Liquid NFTs and issues FUSD. DeFi Market Journal is not owned by CMC Group. Some Liquid links on this page are affiliate links. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy.
Minting a first NFT collection takes six decisions: prepare your files, pick a blockchain, pick a marketplace, set supply, price and royalties, mint a test piece, then tell people it's coming. The minting itself is a five-minute click-through. The decisions around it are what decide whether anything sells.
1. Prepare your files and metadata
Work from full-resolution masters. You can always compress down, never up. Every piece needs a title, a description and any traits buyers might filter by. That's your metadata, and it travels with the artwork, usually on decentralised storage like IPFS. Settle your naming and trait structure before you mint anything, because changing metadata afterwards is awkward and sometimes impossible.
If you launch on Liquid, you also need a logo at 500 by 500 pixels and a banner at 2000 by 667 pixels, in JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG or WebP. The platform can generate the metadata for you. Upload your own JSON only if you have traits, rarity values or need the pieces to mint in a set order, and keep metadata file one with image one, file two with image two, and so on. If several NFTs share one image, you need a separate image file for each.
Prefer to watch? The short version in under a minute.
2. Choose a blockchain
The chain sets your costs and your crowd.
| Chain | Cost to mint | Who's buying there |
|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | Highest, swings with network traffic | The deepest-pocketed collectors |
| Polygon | Usually a fraction of a cent | Newer collectors, gaming, brands |
| Solana | Very low | Fast-moving, trading-heavy crowd |
| Base | Low | Growing, Coinbase-linked audience |
If your audience is new to crypto, a cheap chain means you're not asking them to pay more in fees than for the art.
If you plan to launch on Liquid, check the chain is offered there first. Its Create Collection page lists BNB Chain, Polygon, Ethereum, BESC and Roburna, and Roburna isn't live yet. Solana and Base aren't on the list.
3. Choose where to list it
For a first collection, use a marketplace's own minting tool rather than writing a contract. On Liquid, loading a collection is free apart from gas: the platform deploys a smart contract for your collection as you upload it, and you pay only the gas on the chain you pick. Compare three things: the fee, whether its audience buys your kind of work, and how it handles resale royalties, which most big marketplaces now treat as optional (our royalties explainer covers why).
Marketplaces also differ in where the mint money goes. Most take a small fee and pass the rest to you. Liquid NFTs works differently: half of every mint is locked as liquidity behind the NFT, which a holder can later redeem by burning the piece. That gives buyers a floor to fall back on, and it means you receive less up front.
Which is better depends on your plan. If you need the cash from the first sale, a standard marketplace pays more. If you want collectors to feel safer buying and you expect resales, the liquidity model is built for that. Just remember that the floor is held in FUSD, a token issued by the same group, so it's worth understanding FUSD before relying on it.
4. Set supply, price and royalties
- Supply. A single 1-of-1 and a 10,000-piece drop are different businesses. For an individual artist, a small, deliberate edition usually beats copying the big profile-picture projects. On Liquid you also pick a token standard: ERC721 for collections where every piece is unique, ERC1155 for copies of the same NFT, such as tickets or passes. And you choose whether buyers can mint one at a time or several.
- Price. Look at what comparable artists with a similar following actually sold for, not what they listed at. It's easier to raise prices next drop than to cut them this one. On Liquid the mint price is set in FUSD, and buyers can pay in FUSD, USDC or the chain's native coin.
- Royalties. Set one, but plan as if it might not be paid, unless your marketplace enforces it. On Liquid the default is 10%. You can lower it and send part of the resale revenue into your collection or to a charity.
- Liquidity. On Liquid, 50% is the minimum. Sliders let you take a smaller share of the mint and lock more. Taking 35% instead of 40% raises the liquidity in each NFT to 55%.
5. Mint a test piece first
Connect your wallet, upload, confirm, pay the gas. On Liquid, use a stable connection and a laptop for anything but a small collection, and connect through your wallet's browser extension: Wallet Connect isn't built for large uploads and can fail. Keep a cushion of the chain's gas token in the wallet. If you set the go-live time to start now, you only have a few minutes to finish the upload, and on desktop you may be asked to confirm on your phone. Do it once with a single cheap piece before you mint the whole collection. Check the image, the metadata and how it displays on the marketplace. Mistakes are cheap on one piece and expensive on fifty.
6. Tell people before, not after
A collection nobody hears about doesn't sell. Pick a date and time. Post it where your audience already follows you. For a bigger launch, a write-up on a crypto publication gives collectors a reason to turn up on the day. Our multimedia packages exist for exactly that. If you work in a specific medium, we have guides for music, video and books.
