How to Develop Your NFT Smart Contract? Crypto Business Show Episode 6
Video Transcript:
Rob: Crypto business podcast, brought to you by token mines I’m your host Rob Eijgenraam, director at TokenMinds, a full-service crypto agency that provides marketing development and strategy services for blockchain and nft projects. In this podcast, we will discuss any blockchain topic that is relevant for businesses and entrepreneurs. Today we’re going to talk about how to develop your nft smart contracts I have in the podcast with me Josh, and among Josh is an experienced blockchain development manager working on various projects and Hemang is a junior blockchain developer which is involved in a lot of testing of smart contracts so Josh let’s start with you what kind of things do projects need to keep in mind when developing their nft’s projects?
Josh: First of all thank you for having me here Rob again this is our second episode together so I will just give some insights to the audiences and their listeners and reviewers about nfts, but first of all before anyone would start developing an nft they need to determine the blockchain where they will want to make their nfts honestly there are dozens of blockchain out there and I’ll just dive in into the most popular ones namely Ethereum, Polygon and Solana. First one is ethereum of course this is the most famous blockchain globally for nfts and smart contracts in general because of its higher adaptability it has high liquidity and higher number of developers so less knowledge in creating smart contracts so most of the time if businesses or entrepreneurs would like to build an nft it will be easier to find developers who are adept in working on smart contracts based on ethereum however the problem with ethereum is it does slow processing that can only handle 15 to 35 transactions per minute thus this will incur higher gas fees and transaction fees so since it has higher gas vision transaction piece most of the time it’s not profitable for low cost transfers which makes small time nft reselling and flipping not that profitable most of the time people who are investing in reselling and if these needs to have at least a thousand to two thousand dollars to make it profitable because of the gas fees in ethereum second popular one is polygon or matic which is basically has the same pros as the ethereum network because it’s basically an ethereum level layer two however with the lower gas freeze it’s also highly dependent on ethereum as in general so if ethereum loses values if there are issues in ethereum, polygon will also have issues on its blockchain the third one is solana this is a fairly new blockchain that promises to process around 65 000 transactions per second and low gas and transaction fees after are developers and people who are adopting Solana at a fast pace however since this is a fairly new blockchain it has low adoption rate and fewer developers thus if you want to build something on solana you will have a hard time finding someone to build it for you with low adoption rate comes with low liquidity aside from this, aside from finding the blockchain that you want to make to an nft.
Rob: Yeah so you’re mentioning Solana right I think one thing that comes to mind is that they actually had quite some altitudes right and they seem to keep coming back so it is something a little bit more experimental right now I guess and polygon the other thing is maybe important for our listeners to know is that polygon is similar to Ethereum that people need to still pay gas fees so they still need to have a certain amount of magic points in their wallet in order to mint or transfer their nft so this is like right it’s kind of a liquidity as well because most people will own Ethereum and with Ethereum, you can obviously interpret them by fds from the Ethereum blockchain so yeah I just wanted to mention it as well but you wanted to say something else right so sorry here’s a good thing.
Josh: Yeah so as you mentioned Solana is a fairly new blockchain and it’s mostly in its experimental stage at least because when Ethereum started it actually has faster transaction processes before but since it’s being adopted by millions of people right now it slows down in terms of handling transactions per second but with regards to this they are promising Ethereum 2.0 in the future which promises to reduce these gas phase issues for Ethereum and hopefully it comes out anytime soon.
Rob: Alright although at the end of the day, it’s still kind of like a market right so if there are more nft projects it will still drive up the gas fees in the end I guess.
Josh: Yes definitely. Okay, so aside from this choosing your blockchain you also have some third parties that you need to integrate with most of the time those are marketplaces like opensea and rarible where if you integrate your nft minting on those platforms it will be easier for your community to sell auction, sell and auction the nfts that they minted using your smart contract there are actually a lot of this marketplace out there but I’ll just leave it to the listeners to research about it. For smart contract development in general this is done using solidity for Ethereum.
Rob: Hold on. Sorry, one question about the marketplace as well right like yeah like you said this comes back to the liquidity as well there is most liquidity definitely if you look at the trading volume we are gathering some stats as well about this on a regular basis and you know for sure opensea has the best kind of trading volume. Projects like looks rare and stuff like that are starting to kind of be more active but there’s a lot of wash trading because they have some device programs there and maybe also one other thing may be interesting to mention here is the royalties right you’re probably going to mention this right now but it links up to the marketplace as well right because if you develop your own nft smart contract and don’t use the minting function of those marketplaces the royalty won’t always work right.
Josh: Yes that’s right. So it will depend on the marketplace that you will be integrating so those are the pros and cons it’s actually a very broad topic that maybe we can discuss in the next episode, yeah. So with this third party you can start developing your smart contract using solidity mostly for ethereum these blockchains there are important options that you need to develop in your nft on one of this is the airdrop airdrop whitelist and mint so airdrop is basically free and allowing your community to get free nfts for marketing purposes, these are basically for promotion while these are pre-approved minting for early adopters and supporters like your investors and then last year meant so basically the public say where people can meet their interview at the specific price that you allow on the smart contract so terrific wrap this off i’ll just show you a sample of a smart contract here so you can see these are the functions that are usually in a basic nft minting smart contract you have your airdrop burn so basically burn is putting the nft on us a known wallet where it will be rendered unusable mint meant for whitelist, so statement say transform basically allowing allowing your smart contract to transfer one nft to another wallet, set 3 the fees for specific percentage for your charity if you have charity for royalty etc, the price you can actually change the price that will be great if you have this function.
Rob: Then just to learn how only the config owner can edit those right?
Josh: Yes, transfer ownership if you kind of get tired of the energy smartphone that you wanted to transfer to one of your co-founders you can easily transfer it if you have this function and lastly we draw so withdrawal will allow you to basically get your Ethereum balance so, in this case, you have 0.3 Ethereum and if you withdraw, this will withdraw this to the wallets that you designated as your team wallet charity wallet and they will just play the pizza based on the percentage you set on the set fee so anything smart contracts are pretty broad topic but hopefully I was able to give you guys some insight about it but yeah if there I think Rob you have some clarifications with this and I’ll be happy to answer those.
Rob: Yeah sure, so just for the listeners out there, so Josh is walking in for the ether scan UI of particular smart contracts and this particular one has like 27 like editable functions I guess like just a handful of those are actually must have right for the complementing and the other ones are really for special functionalities that you might want to consider as a project owner like you know the royalty fee function or the wide distribution air function etc., no but that’s i agree we should probably have another podcast as well to do a bit to maybe particular functions about the development approach process so let’s move on to Hemang about the testing, because it’s of course one thing to develop your nft smart contract but you want to make sure that it’s fully tested and you want to use the right tools to test it before you deploy the domain net especially when you use something like Ethereum because it will cost you a lot of gas to deploy but even if you use another blockchain of course it’s immutable so it will be quite some hassle if you do have to change it later. For example, this is what happened to crypto bins and there was a little thing in the news about that last week that there were some slightly shady things going on with their old smartphones because they have multiples as they needed to do an update later so you want to prevent those issues so Hemang maybe you can walk us through some of the testing processes that one should apply when developing an nft smart contract?
Hemang: Yeah sure thanks Rob and thanks Josh that was a fantastic I mean explanation about the whole contract like what it includes and what are the functionality at least so to easily understand about the smart contract testing we have to know these like what functions are gonna contract so now like you might be wondering then its name is smart contact so why cannot so why does it even need to test it so as you said that it’s on the ethereum blockchain so once it is on the ethereum blockchain it is immutable, that means you cannot tamper with it I mean if it is gone and hence we really need to test it or if you i mean if you encounter a bug if the contract is there on the minute then it’s just better to call it a feature that’s not a bug so that’s a thing so now so to give whatever smartphone like testing is we need to understand what tools can be used for the testing so there are various tools which we can use some might say truffle some might say harder so we’ll dive deep into that you know the solidity space and blockchain page it’s still very volatile every now and then it is changing so the earlier developers the older developers who have been doing smart contact development they are really familiar with kafka and they use tuple for their testing and deployment and same goes to the heart it’s really migration so and the one thing best about it is it’s documentation anyone can understand about the documentation even a new developer like for example people know how to write it how to write the code but some might not know how to do the testing part so i mean movie or rookie developer can just go through his documentation and learn easily so you can see that it’s really easy to adapt to the hard environment and that’s why audit is really good so you can and especially the documentation and even its discord community any if you have any queries you can just go on the on the discord and within two or three hours they are going to solve it third one is brownie, brownie it’s a really cool thing because brownie is integrated with the python lovers and python lovers are gonna love company so what they can do is they can write the test in ethereum and they can learn it on the python so it’s a really cool tool to just test it and everything but what we prefer is I really mean I usually prefer harder development your contract is deployed so there are two as Josh was showing you there are two test nets one is a tesla and one is called me net pnet is where you really deal with real etm and test net where you just eat with gas fees and all which is which are not real so it’s better to deploy first one testnet and after on test net you have to just go through all the code do a regression testing of all and just give it a good look, and
what we do here is then we just write the code according to the condition that are most probably going to pay like if the address is not set like if someone calls from a wrong address if a sale has already surpassed the sale and if the maxim supply is not limited so we do all these stuff to just make sure like once the contract is deployed on the main net then it is not going to be changed so deploying on test net and doing the regression test it’s a very great way to overcome any kind of error and vulnerabilities that we are going to encounter in during the process and if any issues are going to come then it is better to pilot your document and send it to your development team so your development team might take a look onto it and so like these kinds of documents I mean these kinds of documents errors you won’t be getting while you use traffic or harder so for these kinds of errors you really have to look it onto the test net so that’s how the process works basically.
Rob: Okay thank you so much Homang I also think this is probably another topic in itself to go through but we are out of time so I want to thank you both really appreciate your time and sharing some information with all of us and to the listeners see you in the next couple of days when we are going to do another podcast about the news update in crypto so thank you, everybody, for listening bye-bye.
Josh: Thank you bye.
Hemang: Thank you, have a great one, bye.
