SimpleMint

Create NFT's on the Hedera blockchain in a few clicks. Hedera uses Hashgraph ledger technology similar to blockchain but designed to provide increased speed, low cost, and minimal energy consumption

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Inspiration

NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens are a new form of digital assets stored on blockchains. One particularly popular usage of NFTs is to record ownership of digital art. NFTs offer several advantages over traditional forms of art including:

  1. The ledger of record which is a globally distributed database, meaning there is persistent, incorruptible verification of who is the actual owner
  2. The art can be transferred electronically and stored digitally, saving storage and maintenance costs while simultaneously providing a memetic vehicle that can be seen by billions of people over the internet
  3. Royalties can be programmatically paid out to the artist whenever the NFT is transferred between parties leading to more fair compensation and better funding for the creative industry

These advantages resulted in, the total value of NFTs reaching $41 billion dollars at the end of 2021. Clearly, there is a huge market for NFTs.

However, many people do not know the first thing about creating an NFT and the process can be quite technically complex. Artists often hire developers to help turn their art into NFTs and businesses have been created merely to help create NFTs.

What it does

SimpleMint is a web app that allows anyone to create an NFT with a few clicks of a button. All it requires is for the user to upload an image and give the NFT a name. Upon clicking ‘mint now’, an NFT is created with the image stored in IPFS and automatically deposited into the creator's blockchain wallet. The underlying blockchain is Hedera, which is a carbon negative, enterprise grade blockchain trusted by companies like Google and Boeing.

How we built it

  • React app
  • IPFS for storage of uploaded images
  • Hedera blockchain to create, mint, and store the NFTs

Challenges we ran into

  • Figuring out how to use the IPFS js-sdk to programatically store & retrieve image files
  • Figuring out wallet authentication due to the chrome web store going down for the hashpack app which rendered the one click process to connect wallet useless. Had to check on Hedera’s discord to find an alternative solution

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a working MVP in a day!

What we learned

  • How IPFS works
  • How to build on Hedera with the javascript SDK

What's next for SimpleMint

We hope that both consumers and creators will be able to conveniently turn their images into NFTs to create art that will last forever and partake in the massive financial upside of this new technology.

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