How to create and gift Digital Awards with Mintable — perfect for hackathons

How to create NFT awards for any digital event within a few minutes and with no strings attached

Coming soon to every crypto event of 2020

Some events, such as hackathons, want to provide digitally tangible awards like Trophies, or Badges for the winners. Now you can by creating that award on the blockchain. Using NFTs creating a digitally tangible item is now possible. Giving the user the feeling of actually owning or holding something.

Digitally Tangible

adjective

verifiable ownership of an digital item via cryptographic signatures on the blockchain.

If you don’t know what ERC-721 digital items are (called NFTs) or non-fungible tokens on the blockchain — see more about these digital items here

Why would we make a digital award?

Using the power of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) projects can now easily create a token that is provably rare. A token that cannot be altered, changed, or deleted.

Your project could be hosting an event — and wants to give away 3 awards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in your cooking competition (replace cooking with anything else). By having a smart contract that holds your event’s tokens — you can easily make and give away these awards — whilst the winner knows there are only 3 awards, and they are only made by your contract.

Heres how it works:

You create a NFT smart contract on Mintable.app for free — 2 mins

You mint your three badges/awards/trophies — 2 mins

You transfer to the winner or sell the badges/awards — 2 mins

In ~6mins you have just created a smart contract, made tokens, and transferred those to their owners. It’s the easiest way to make and interact with your ERC-721 tokens. Don’t believe me? Try it out! Its free!

Did we mention we don’t have a token, nor an ICO? We never will. We are a tool for the NFT ecosystem.

Detailed Guide — step by step

First off: “Why would I do this?”

Your a project or event who wants to offer a new collectible token as an award or ticket Your event wants to target crypto-users by selling or marketing these digital items you’ve made. You have a event or business and don’t know how to make smart contracts or don’t want to pay thousands to hire a smart contract developer

Before you Start

If you are new to blockchain you will need to do a couple of things. If you already have this nailed you can jump to the next step:

Install Metamask — Link or use a mobile wallet like Ambo or Coinbase Wallet Set up your wallet and load it with ETH — You can buy ETH directly via metamask via https://coinbase.com — guide to set up your wallet

Step 1: Create a Smart Contract on Ethereum (time: ~3 min)

Using the UI on Mintable you can create your contract without needing to know how to code. Here is how I would set up my Smart Contract if I was a graphic designer who wanted to make a blockchain avatar as an NFT. But for an event — you would want to include all your event information within the contract so that people can see later — “Oh this contract is the official Event Contract, with only 100 tickets made, and they are only found here”. This allows for you to advertise and verify your tickets very simply — by the address of the smart contract. It also provides some information to the user so that they have faith they are interacting with the correct address.

My smart contract I’ll create.

Go through and add any information you think is related or relevant for your group or users to know. You have 20 fields of data that could include:

Your website

Details about the avatar/character

terms and services

Stats/data for the item

Event information, location, etc etc.

After you’ve confirmed its looking good — submit your transaction via metamask an Ethereum wallet in your browser.

If you don’t have Metamask or If your on mobile — use Coinbase Wallet or Trust wallet on iOS/Android

You just made a smart contract in this step — that contract has a unique address that no other contract will ever have — this is called the contract address — you can manage your token at anytime by going to: https://mintable.app/manager/-YourContractAddressHere-

Step 2: Mint your tokens (time: ~2mins)

After you have confirmed your ethereum transaction you will have an email copy — and also a screen that presents a receipt page

Load your token in the manager by either:

going directly to it via the url style above (mintable.app/manager/address)

going to your profile and seeing your history then pressing view

Finding it via the contract address on the manager page

Once loaded you’ll be able to do this…

Going to mint 5 tokens at a time because I only picked 5 batch minting

Here is where you mint new avatars — or items. In order to create tokens on your smart contract — you need to mint them. So here we are going to mint 5 tokens of my character — because maybe I only want 5 — or because I didn’t buy the 40 batch minting package.

Making my avatars under my genesis shop contract (where all my items are stored)

These are also automatically added on OpenSea.io — the leading exchange to buy and sell NFTs (digital items)

Step 3: Go to Opensea and sell away! (time: ~5mins)

Now that you are done minting tokens — you can go to opensea.io and search for your contract’s name — or go directly to your contract using a link like this: https://opensea.io/assets/-contractAddressHere-/0