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How To Create NFTs With Solidity
A glorious guide to building and creating NFTs, the ERC-721 standard for creating collectibles, art, and any type of unique asset on-chain.
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are the hot new up-and-comers in the smart contract space. If 2020 was the year of DeFi, then at least the start of 2021 belongs to NFTs. NFTs are a token standard similar to the ERC20.
A Non-Fungible Token means that it’s a unique token that has no other token like it. This is starkly different from the ERC20s, which are fungible. Fungible means “replaceable” or “interchangeable.” For example, your dollar bill is going to be worth $1 no matter what dollar bill you use. The serial number on the dollar bill might be different, but the bills are interchangeable since they’ll be worth $1 no matter what.
There are a lot of ERC20s, like MKR, AAVE, and SNX. There are not a lot of NFTs (or ERC721s). In fact, there is just one of each, hence its uniqueness. These can be built and programmed to do anything you please, just like with regular smart contracts, but they come with cryptographically proven authenticity since their history of deployment will always be guaranteed. This solves a number of problems — particularly for those in the art world —with deciphering the authenticity of a piece of art. This can also solve issues with royalties, create digital status symbols, allow gaming applications to be interoperable, and so much more.
Where Are They Now?
And they have a lot of value. Recently, Axie Infinity just sold nine land plots for about $1.5 million.
People are getting pretty excited about these. NFTs are a new venture enabled by the advent of blockchain and smart contracts, and people are building amazing things with them.
So let’s teach you everything you need to know about NFTs.
Standards
As we mentioned, NFTs start with the ERC721 token standard, which has a similar syntax to that of ERC20s — with a few tweaks.
