One of the hottest phenomenon in cryptocurrency is now non-fungible tokens (NFT). Over the past few weeks, NFTs have exploded in popularity, fueled further by VISA when they announced that they purchased their first NFT for $150,000.

OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace also saw volume skyrocketing as more and more users rushed to acquire some of these early digital assets. Earlier in the week, the marketplace hit $3 billion in transaction volume, and is showing no signs of stopping.

Many influencers and even companies have also started buying NFTs:

My first NFT minting experience: Cat Shit Crazy

With NFTs blowing up, the fear of missing out got to me, and I jumped on the opportunity to mint my first NFT when I saw it in my feed.

For the unfamiliar, NFTs are generated in a process called minting. Similar to the way that metal coins are minted and added into circulation, NFTs are also tokens that get “minted” once they are created.

The digital artwork is represented as an NFT after it is minted, and can then be purchased and traded in the market and digitally tracked as it is resold or collected again in the future.

Most NFT collections have a theme and preset attributes that will be randomly generated to for your unique NFT. The project that I had a chance to mint was Cat Shit Crazy. Here’s the NFT page:

This collection has a total of 10069 unique cat NFTs that will be generated and available for NFT collectors to collect and trade. The cost to mint a NFT is 0.042 ETH, or around US$134 at the time of writing.

Starting to mint is quite easy. Simply connect your wallet, choose the number of NFT you want to mint, and confirm the transaction on your digital wallet or Metamask.

Once you have confirmed the transaction, the NFTs will be minted onto the blockchain and you officially become the owners of the randomly generated NFTs. Each NFT has certain attributes and the rarer the attributes, the higher the chance for you to sell it to another collector of the collection.

Upon confirming the transactions, the minted Cat Shit Crazy NFTs appear on my OpenSea profile and I am able to display, sell or transfer them.

Here are the NFTs I managed to mint, and it appeared automatically on my OpenSea:

What I learnt from my first experience

Prior to this, I have to admit that I did not really understand the hype behind NFTs.

However, money aside, after I purchased my first collection, a part of me wants to keep on building up my digital NFT portfolio in a more thoughtful manner.

Just like how collectors are collecting luxury watches, or rare pokemon cards, NFTs are now the new digital collectible that allows you to define your digital identity.

NFTs allow crypto enthusiasts to “flex” their status especially if you are the owner of rare and expensive NFT collections (which obviously I cannot afford), as you are unable to “flex” how much crypto you own.

NFTs therefore acts as a digital flex or a status symbol for a new class of consumers, but unlike the traditional markets of wealth and status, they are open to anyone, anywhere with verifiable scarcity.

Stephen Curry, a professional basketballer with over 15.4 million followers on his Twitter account, simply uploaded a photo of his rare NFT, and got instant “acceptance” into the world of crypto enthusiasts.

Spending $1,000 to better understand a future trillion dollar industry better is worth it to me, even if I might never recuperate the cost of my NFT mint.

Minting my first collection also made me realize that you need to do more research before jumping into a collection. Some questions that people new to NFTs should ask: how desirable is the NFT collection? Are there a lot of available NFTs for minting? Are popular crypto influencers also looking at the collection?

However, a lot of it also comes down to luck — as the NFTs you mint are randomly generated, you may end up with an NFT that is either rare or more common.

The rarest NFT that I managed to get from this collection only had a rarity score of 240, whereas the rarest collection has a rarity score of 763.

If you are interested in minting the Cat Shit Crazy collection, you can visit their website as there are still available NFTs to be minted at 0.042 ETH.

Also Read: NFTs Are Booming In Popularity: 6 Key Metrics Investors Can Use To Evaluate NFT Projects