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How to mint a Karel NFT

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How to mint a Karel NFT

You may have heard of NFTs, but not know what they are. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, and in this post I’ll show you how you can mint your own Karel NFT. If you want to just skip and see what a Karel NFT looks like you can see them on OpenSea or visit the KarelNFT website.

This will be a rapid intro that will set you up with the basics. In this post we’ll cover:

  • What is Karel?
  • Basic cryptocurrency terms
  • What is an NFT?
  • How to set up a wallet 
  • Set up the Polygon network on Metamask
  • Get crypto on Polygon
  • Mint your own Karel NFT
  • View your NFT on OpenSea

What is Karel?

So first, what is Karel? Karel the Dog is the friendly mascot for CodeHS which helps students learn coding. We use Karel the Dog to teach JavaScript, the idea is that coding is giving commands to a computer which is like giving commands to a dog. You can solve various puzzles which help teach basic programming concepts. It’s also a fun character, and with the Karel NFT you can have various versions of Karel.

Basic cryptocurrency terms

So there are a lot of cryptocurrency (“crypto” for short) terms. Here I’m just going to give a brief summary of a few but they can all go much more in detail.

Cryptocurrency is online digital distributed currency secured by cryptography.

A few example cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin and Ethereum. There is also Polygon (aka MATIC) which we’ll use in this tutorial.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger that is public and anyone can have a copy, where transactions are chained together.

A wallet is like your bank account for crypto.

An address is like the public bank account number for your account. This is how your account is identified. This is what an address looks like: 0x04528820c4afb4c9b4110bd5757ae484b18df697

Your private key is your super secret password to your wallet. It’s like a bank password in that it lets you access your account, but it is unlike a bank password in that if you lose access to your key you lose access to your funds. Often it is saved in the format of a seed phrase or recovery phrase, which is usually a 12 word random phrase. Important for all crypto-things: If you lose your seed phrase you lose your money. And don’t share this with anyone!

What is an NFT?

So, first: NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. It’s like a digital baseball card.

If something is fungible it means it is interchangeable–for example, any dollar is the same as any other dollar. Non-Fungible means something is unique.

So NFTs are unique digital tokens.

An NFT represents digital ownership on a blockchain.

Here are few sample NFT use cases:

  • Digital collectibles
  • Digital art
  • Digital usernames
  • Digital land
  • Tickets
  • Access tokens

A few famous NFTs are CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. These are collections of 10,000 digital unique generated images which have traded for very high values.

CryptoPunks

Bored Ape Yacht Club

How to set up a wallet 

Next, we are going to create a Metamask account to set up a non-custodial wallet! Remember: back up your password! Using a password manager is probably best. “Non-custodial” here means that you control your password and keys, no one else, like a bank or exchange, is controlling it for you.

Go to the Metamask site and install the extension: https://metamask.io/

Install it for Google Chrome.

Click “Add to Chrome.”

Click “Get Started.”

Click “Create a Wallet.”

Set a password. This password is not the recovery phrase. This just is what you need to unlock it on your computer.

Then you will get to the Secret Recovery Phrase (aka seed phrase aka private key).

This is what you need to back up! They are going to ask you to confirm you backed it up on the next page.

When you are done you’ll end up here:

If you click that area below Account 1 where it says “0x1c….”– that is your address. It will copy it to your clipboard.

Then you can pin your extension for easier access by clicking the puzzle piece and then clicking the pin.

Now when you access metamask from the top right it looks like this.

Set up the Polygon network on Metamask

Go to polygonscan.com, then scroll to the bottom, and click Add Polygon Network.

Then click Approve.

Then Switch.

You’ll know it’s right if your metamask looks like this.

Get crypto on Polygon

This can be a tricky step. Here are a few ways from easiest to hardest.

  1. Have someone send you polygon. If you are reading this and getting set up I will send you polygon to get started (this will be limited). You can tag me @jkeesh on twitter. But if you are going through these steps you will probably be one of the first 100 people to do it and I will probably send you matic.
  2. Buy polygon from an exchange, then send it to your metamask wallet. (A few ways to buy directly.) I think Dharma probably works. I’ve used Dharma for ethereum but not for polygon.
  3. Buy ethereum, bridge it to polygon and then swap to matic (**advanced). Here is the bridge. This works best if you already have ethereum in a metamask wallet.

Mint your own Karel NFT

Ok- now for the fun part. Also the good thing about the setup is once you have metamask and polygon set up, you only need to do that once. The reason I’m using polygon here instead of ethereum is because transaction fees on polygon are less than a cent, and on ethereum it can be $50-$100 or more. Karel NFTs right now mint for 1 MATIC which is about $2. Minting a NFT means you are creating a new transaction on the blockchain and creating a new unique token.

Visit karelnft.com.

Then click Connect.

Then select the number you want to buy. I will mint 1 for 1 MATIC.

Then you will receive a pop up you want to approve.

This costs 1.00855 MATIC, 1 MATIC to mint and 0.00855 in transaction fees.

Then I click the Mint box, and then View on block explorer. That takes me to see my transaction on polygonscan.com.

You can see here I minted karel #159.

https://polygonscan.com/tx/0x867ad4006e2933cc7b1b3d92148ff74a5a3be92b7560694b6e404b91440fca4a

View your NFT on OpenSea

Now you want to view your NFT. Go to OpenSea.io. Click the Profile icon in the top left, then connect your account with Metamask.

After a couple of minutes your karel will show up on your profile.

Now you can click in to your NFT to see the main page for it.

So there you go! Now you can view your NFT. Here is the link for mine: https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x9f0105fa457279db93545ebfd7a190659a2fd97c/159

You can also see the properties here if you scroll down:

So that is it! It is a bit complicated to get started right now but that is a way to get started minting your own NFT.

We have 10,000 generated Karel NFTs. If you mint one, let me know! Also if you are a student on CodeHS who does this definitely let me know! I’m sure some students are already crypto wizards.

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