Creating Collections with Rarity.Garden

Today we’re going to go through a quick rundown on how to setup a new NFT collection and create your first NFT, then we’ll sell it!

We’ll start on Rarity.Garden using the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet, it works like Ethereum but the tokens are free. You can get some here: https://faucet.rinkeby.io/

If you’ve not already done so, you’ll need MetaMask installed on your desktop browser (I’m using Brave but MetaMask works with Chrome and Firefox as well). Make sure that it is connected (if you open MetaMask you’ll see a little green light and the word “connected”), if it’s not connected (no light and the words “not connected) you can try refreshing the page and/or clicking to connect manually.

First thing we’ll need to understand is a bit about how NFTs work. Rarity.Garden uses the standard known as ERC1155 (equivalent to BEP1155 on Binance Smart Chain), this is a newer standard of NFTs, and is not compatible with ERC721s. For the time being Rarity.Garden doesn’t support ERC721s.

Note: MetaMask users will notice that MetaMask does not natively show ERC1155s, you need an external wallet like Rarity.Garden or Opensea, Rarible or any other ERC1155 compatible viewer for the best experience.

ERC1155s can be thought of using the analogy of a book. A collection is like the book itself, the cover and structure. Inside a book you have chapters and pages. Similarly inside of a collection you have NFT IDs (these are the chapters) and individual NFT tokens (like how each chapter in a book can have one or more pages). Don’t get too caught up in the details, or the analogy, what’s important is that we have collections which can hold NFT IDs, and each ID can have a number of NFT tokens.

The best way to understand this is to see it in action, so we click on the “Collection Manager” button on the left toolbar.

It may take a few seconds to load, we directly read to/from the blockchain and rely on a lot of decentralization. We’re improving this experience but in the meantime welcome to decentralized freedom! When it loads up you’ll see a couple of options “Add new collection” and “Multi Batch Transfer”, we’ll select Add new collection. This pops up a form that we can fill out to tell other people what they need to know about our collection, this is the cover for your book, make it look nice.

There’s a few options in here, remember that this isn’t an NFT yet, just the cover for them. We should give it a name, a ticker (this is like token tickers), a text description, we can also add an image and a link for a website that will be displayed on Rarity.Garden and will tell users where they can read more about the collection. Usually this external URL is your project’s website (https://mywebsite.nft).

A few notes here, only name and ticker are required, everything else is optional. Usually for descriptions you want to keep this high level. For collection images most projects tend to choose a simple version of their logo or something representing the underlying collection.

You can also see the fees written here. In the case of Rinkeby, the money is free so not a huge concern, but have a look and make sure you are happy with the collection before proceeding. These fees are one-off, once you have created a collection you can create as many NFT IDs and NFT tokens as you want, you just need to pay gas fees to the blockchain network. There’s an important distinction between Rarity.Garden and other providers, you create the collection, you own and manage it. That means once it’s on the blockchain Rarity.Garden no longer has any control, we can’t add fees or force you to upgrade.

When I’m happy with the details of my collection I hit the create button and verify the details in the MetaMask pop-up.

That then gets sent to the blockchain, and once confirmed I can close the New Collection form and see my fancy new collection on the collection manager. I’m using Rinkeby so transaction speeds are very quick, but if you’re using Ethereum, BSC or another live network it may take a bit longer.

Now that’s done I can check out the options for collections. Hovering over the ℹ on the top right of my collection shows the description of the collection. Clicking on the pen 🖊 gives me a number of options, including adding new NFT (IDs and Tokens), managing my NFTs and editing the collection.

Clicking the “Edit Collection” brings up another form that lets us change and fix data about the collection itself. Note that while most things we saw earlier cannot be updated, the ticker cannot.

We can also see the contract address for this collection above the name on the card, we can copy that, or click on it and go to the block explorer (Etherscan) to see details about the collection.

We’re going to add a new NFT, so we select that, which brings up a new form to setup our NFT ID (chapter) and setup our NFT tokens (pages).

We have lots of options on this page, again not everything is required only the things with a pink asterisk * next to them. Let’s talk about them.

• Supply is the number of NFT Tokens we want to create right now, it could be 0. You can always mint more later, up to the maximum
• Max. Supply does exactly as it sounds, it’s the upper limit of NFT tokens that can be created for this NFT, once and cannot change it later
• Name be creative
• Description NFT buyers often tell us that the description is as important as the content, so put some thought into this, but also try to be concise
• Content (Choose Image, Video, Audio, Interactive File) you can choose one or more types here, this data will be saved on IPFS and is accessible to anyone, so consider copyrights and don’t infringe on the rights of others
• External URL exactly the same as for the collection, this shows up under the NFT
• Traits often the most misunderstood point on here. A trait is a piece of information linked to the NFT ID, it has 3 parts: Key (attribute), Value (data), and a type (Text, Number, Boost number and percentage, or date). You can add multiple traits by clicking “ADD”. As an example of a Key and Value you could have “Color” => “Pink”, or “Birth date” => “01/04/2021”, or “Wen?” => “Moon”

When we’re happy with that we can click “CREATE”, verify the MetaMask dialogue and confirm that to the blockchain. Once that confirms, congratulations! You’ve created your first Rarity.Garden NFT.

If the form is still in front of you, you can close that, you’ll find yourself back at the Collection Manager, click the pen 🖊 again, this time go to “Manage NFTs”, you should see your newly created NFT.

If we focus on the NFT we created we can better understand the book analogy that I refuse to give up. This is the first NFT ID we created (you can see ID: 1). We also see the current supply of NFT tokens (pages) and the maximum supply of this NFT ID.

Clicking on the pen icon again we are presented with a number of options, we’ll discuss them a bit:

• Transfer — this is pretty simple, when you click it allows you to send one or more NFT Tokens to an address on the same network
• Mint — If you have not minted to the max supply you can create new NFT Tokens within that NFT ID
• Burn — This removes NFTs from circulation permanently
• Edit — All details about NFT cards can be edited by the collection owner, any change is visible on the blockchain however, so best to not use this to correct small mistakes and to get things right the first time.
• Royalties — Allows the collection owner to receive a portion of each sale on the Rarity.Garden marketplace, up to 50%. It is optional, and may not be taken into account for OTC transactions or in other marketplaces.

Having setup our NFT the way we like, we can now view the NFT in our wallet by selecting “Your Wallet” on the left side menu

If you don’t see your NFT in your wallet, you can click the ⚙ next to “Wallet” and register collection, from the collection manager you can copy that directly:

Alternatively you can find it in your transaction history on Etherscan (Rinkeby, Ethereum mainnet), BSCscan (BSC), Blockscout (Xdai), or any other relevant block explorer.

Once we have our NFT Tokens in our wallet, we can click the pen again and are presented with two options, to transfer (discussed before), or sell. Clicking sell will ask us questions about the sale and allow us to post it on the Rarity.Garden Marketplace

Again, we can select the amount of NFT Tokens to sell on the marketplace, select the asset to sell it in (for native assets like ETH, BNB, XDAI, we need to use the address of the wrapped version, e.g., WETH, this can be found on a block explorer). We can then set the price for this asset in that token (note that this may differ from the USD value).

We also have the ability to select a category and type of trade allowed. Rarity.Garden supports buying (buyer sends seller the token in exchange for an NFT) or swapping (NFT for NFT). We’ll cover normal buys for now.

Once we’re ready we will do another 2 part transaction, an approval and a sell transaction (note that if you’ve sold an NFT before you may not have to do the approval process again).

Now that we’ve finished that we can head over to the NFT Market tab on the left side menu and find our NFT.

Clicking on Open Details below the artwork will take us to a dedicated page for this NFT Token. Once there you can copy the link at the top in your browser’s address bar. This is unique and can be shared to market your NFT as you wish.

Rarity.Garden won’t let you buy your own NFT for sale on a marketplace, but switching to another wallet we can try it. When we click buy for the first time we will again have the approval process and then can buy the asset by approving in Metamask.

After this we can return to the “Your Wallet” option, note that you may need to register the collection again if it does not show up automatically after a moment.

That’s it! We created a collection, minted NFTs, and sold and bought NFTs on the marketplace.