All right. 1
So there's a really big and exciting project that's coming up. 2
We're going to be building an NFT marketplace where we can mint, list and sell non-fungible tokens on 3
the Internet computer. If you don't know what nfts are, 4
this is a really simple explanation. 5
They're called non-fungible tokens because one NFT is unique and can't be exchanged for another. 6
For example, if you have a $100 bill and it doesn't matter what markings you've got on it or if it's 7
scratched up or if it's a little bit wrinkled, it is exchangeable for another hundred dollar bill. 8
It's completely identical in the eyes of anyone who holds it or the bank. 9
For example, the other day I was traveling in Costa Rica and I had a 10,000 Costa Rican colones bill 10
which got caught onto my jumper, and when I tried to tug on it, it just ripped in half, which was 11
really sad because it's actually worth quite a lot. 12
So I was thinking, is this the end of my 10,000 colone 13
bill? Well, actually, I could just go into the bank, give them my two pieces, 14
and once they verified that it was not some sort of counterfeit that I produced, they gave me a new 15
10,000 colone bill. 16
So they're completely identical to each other. 17
Now, the concept of an NFT is, well, okay, we've created all these tokens, right? 18
We've created the Ethereum token, we've created Bitcoin. 19
Well, you've created that DANG token or whatever it is you called it, your own custom token, but they're 20
all interchangeable. 21
What if instead we created tokens on the blockchain that were unique? 22
So they had unique identifiers, they had unique features. 23
And here we have these files, most commonly images, that artists have created which are completely unique. 24
So if you went into the lourve and you saw the Mona Lisa, there is only one Mona Lisa. 25
It doesn't matter how good a replica-- You could completely, you know, clone all the atoms and all of 26
the molecules in the Mona Lisa and create another one, 27
it still won't be the original Mona Lisa and you won't be able to sell it as the famous Mona Lisa, 28
right? 29
So I think you get my point. 30
And recently the NFT craze has hotted up and it's completely gone out of control. 31
The most recent sort of mainstream news is Christies, which is a famous auctioneer selling pieces 32
by Picasso or by Leonardo da Vinci, sold a collection by Beeple who is an NFT creator. 33
And he had a collection called Everydays, where he created a piece of digital art every day for 5000 34
days, which is actually pretty impressive achievement. 35
And this collection was auctioned at Christies and was sold for over 69 million U.S. dollars. 36
So the NFT craze is definitely real. 37
Now, you might have thought about creating an NFT yourself, especially if you're a good artist. 38
But as developers we can do even one step better. 39
We can create the marketplace where people can mint, list and sell the NFT. 40
One of the most famous marketplaces, one of the largest marketplaces as well, is something called 41
OpenSea. 42
And on Opensea you can list and you can sell NFTs. And you can see that the NFTs on here are not cheap. 43
So if you're looking at a collection, for example, really famous group called the Bored Ape Yatch Club 44
have 10,000 items on Opensea. 45
And if you look at the prices for them that people are bidding on, they're sort of averaging 46
around the sort of 100 eth mark right? Now, 47
if we take a look at how much 100 ETH is actually worth in dollars, at least at the moment it's worth 48
something like 335,000 U.S. dollars. 49
And that's just a single one of these pieces of digital art. 50
So that's not even like a collection or anything. 51
And for every single piece of art that's sold on Opensea, the platform will charge a 2.5% transaction 52
fee. 53
So as always, if you're not Bored Ape Yacht Club and you're already super famous, it's always better 54
to be the platform than to be the individual creator. 55
The project that we're going to be building is a NFT e-commerce site that's inspired by Opensea as can 56
be built with React on the frontend, 57
Motoko and Internet computer supporting the backend. 58
And the best part of it is while most current NFTs are sold and bought for large amounts of money, 59
when you actually look at the actual item, most of the original files are actually stored on a third 60
party server. 61
So let's take this NFT, for example, number 5465. 62
If you take a look at its details on Opensea, it's actually got a contract address which if you click 63
on it, will take you to Etherscan. 64
And here you can actually take a look and read the original contract, which includes a link to the 65
token 66
URI. 67
So we pass in that ID 5465. 68
It'll show us the identifier for this item on ipfs. 69
Ipfs stores 70
a lot of the NFTs that are currently in circulation. And we get hold of the actual URL of this item 71
by simply going to it in the browser bar like so. 72
And here it is. 73
This is the actual hosted URL of this original NFT, which anyone can access, by the way. 74
You don't have to own it, and you can access it in its original size, original format. 75
But when we're creating our version of Opensea, all the NFT minted on there will be created on the 76
Internet computer blockchain. 77
And that means that the NFT data, as in the actual bits and bytes themselves, will be stored on-chain. 78
And that's quite different from just having a smart contract with a URL that points to Ipfs or worse 79
still, a single company's private server. 80
Now, the website and collection that we're going to be creating is inspired by one of the original 81
NFT, which is called the Cryptopunks. 82
And that is really cute little pieces of pixel art where each cryptopunk has some unique features. 83
For example, some have hats, 84
some have these cool 3D glasses, and depending on which feature you like or you want, then the price 85
really varies accordingly. 86
And you can see that some of these were sold for really crazy prices like this one here. 87
This guy with blue eyeshadow was sold for a whopping 124,000 ether, which if you want to know how much 88
that is, it's something crazy. 89
Like I don't even know how many zeros there are here. That's currently worth like $415 million, which 90
is absolutely insane. 91
So to save you from having to spend millions of dollars acquiring these pieces of art to be able to 92
build your own NFT marketplace, I have very helpfully created some for you using a website called pixil 93
art.com. 94
I've created some of these pixel characters inspired by the original Cryptopunks. 95
This is what they look like. 96
I've got a collection of six, which you'll be able to download in the course resources in the Udemy 97
course once we get to that stage. 98
So I drew these from scratch and they're obviously not as great as, you know, a real artist or whatever, 99
but I think they're kind of cute and I think for our purposes they'll work just fine. 100
The final website that we're going to be making, the OpenD is going to have a lot of features. 101
This is actually quite a big project. 102
So we've simplified down a lot of the OpenSea features and we've pared it down to just the core functionality 103
that we need to wrap your head around. 104
There is a section where we can view the NFTs that the logged in user owns, and the user can sell these 105
NFTs by clicking on sell and then setting a price in DANG, the Angela coin, which anyone can claim from 106
the previous project that we created. and once these items are sold, 107
then you'll be able to see them on the Discover page where they're listed for people to buy. 108
Now, you obviously can't buy an item that you've listed, but you can buy items that other people own 109
that they've listed. On this Discover page, 110
you'll be able to pay in DANG coins. 111
This one costs two DANG and you'll be able to purchase these individual NFTs which you'll then see 112
in your collection. 113
Now you'll also be able to mint NFT on here. 114
And this will create a unique canister on the Internet 115
Computer blockchain that contains all of the data for your image file that you've just minted. And 116
once they're minted, you'll be able to see them in your collection as well, 117
ready for sale or just simply for you to keep and to hold. 118
So I'm super excited about this project. 119
It took me a really, really long time to figure out all the nuts and bolts of it and to simplify it 120
to a point where we can build it relatively quickly and learn all the important stuff around NFTs, programmatically 121
creating canisters, buying and selling NFTs through the transfer of a third party token, such 122
as the Angela coin that we created early on, and managing all of the e-commerce requirements of this website. 123
So it's a really fun project and I'm so excited to get started. 124
Once you're ready, head over to the next lesson and we'll get started building up this project.