What is a Solana NFT? 4 part series, from creation to marketplaces

What is a Solana NFT? (Part 1) Part 1 — What is the token standard in Solana? If you are already familiar with NFTs in other blockchains, like Ethereum, this might seem like a trivial question. When you look at popular NFT collections on Ethereum, you probably are looking at ERC-721 contracts, the current standard used by CryptoKitties, Bored Apes Yacht Club and other popular projects. Even the first Ethereum NFTs, called CryptoPunks, that used a different contract, are now wrapped in ERC-721 to be tradable in the most popular Marketplaces. Everything is now built on the same standard. CryptoPunk #4156The real question should be: What is the Solana NFT standard? It’s complicated… As we were coming from Ethereum, this was the question we wanted to see answered. But, after seeing a mix of information, we rapidly understood that it wouldn’t be as easy as we thought. As of the day I am writing this, Solana MainNet is in beta and many things that are already established on Ethereum are yet to be standardised on the Solana ecosystem. This is good for new developers that have a chance of being part of the shaping process of the blockchain, but makes things harder if you need to do things now and can’t really wait for tomorrow to be built. The last one was our status. We started researching by looking at the official Solana Token Docs. Quickly, we took some conclusions: Contract terminology is replaced by Program; The standard for Fungible Tokens (ERC-20 on Ethereum) is called SPL-Token program; The standard for NFTs is… Well, it doesn’t say, but we finally have a couple of hints. The docs have a part on how to create a Non Fungible Token, so we decided to perform those steps. 1- We are told to create a regular SPL-Token, but with 0 decimal cases. This means that we are creating a token that can’t be divided into parts (you can’t own 0.5 of that token). It returns us the mint address for our token. $ spl-token create-token --decimals 0 2- We have to create an account that will hold our token. This is a standard procedure on Solana, which is very different from Ethereum. You own an account for each different SPL-Token you own. The command returns the created account address. $ spl-token create-account <mint-address> 3- We mint 1 token to the account we just created. $ spl-token mint <mint-address> 1 <account-address> 4- We disable future minting of the token, to be sure that it will always be unique and the minting rights are disabled forever. This step is not required. For future steps, don’t execute it for now. $ spl-token authorize <mint-address> mint --disable So, is that it? Did we just create our first NFT? Technically yes, but it depends on the definition of NFT that you have. Does an NFT need metadata? Or is it just an FT with 0 decimal places? We would say that most people creating NFTs have the goal of adding metadata to it. The one we just created does not have metadata associated with it, like a name, URI or an attribute… This was our main problem with this official tutorial, that ends before explaining how to associate any Metadata to the token. What we did is equivalent to creating an ERC-20 on Ethereum with only 1 token and 0 decimals. The tutorial has no pointer to any place we could find information about this. Our second problem with the tutorial was that we wanted to create NFTs with metadata and multiple copies, like in Star Atlas and other projects. This was, obviously, easily solvable, by just minting more than 1 and disabling minting after that. After this initial investigation, we are now able to mint an NFT. So, the new question is: How can we add metadata to our NFT? We have to research a bit more… Part 2 will answer this question. Tune in for the next article in the series. A new article every week!