Minting My First NFT

The world of crypto is fasinating isn't it? For a market that is $1 trillion in size, similar to a mega cap company like Google, the market certainly dominates the news coverage at times.

I have been an investor of various crypto currencies, both as an investment and as a way to learn about the technology, but have mainly been using centralized exchanges and online custody solutions to store my assets.

I finally decided to take the plunge and follow the ethos of "not your keys not your coin" to the extreme and purchase cold storage solutions to safehouse my crypto. I was particularly intrigued by Ledger's new Stax wallet that is set to debut on April 2023. When I was about to hit the "purchase" button for $270 I noticed that you also could buy the wallet via an NFT token they were minting until December 17th 2022. The cost of the mint was .22 ETH and given current market prices of ethereum it was slightly cheaper ($258) than the fiat cost.

So I decided to take the plunge and mint my first NFT!

The first thing I needed to do was fund my Coinbase wallet with some ETH so I could purchase the NFT. Coinbase does make this easy by allowing you to fund your wallet with Coinbase Pay using your Coinbase trading account or personal checking account. However, I was staring at $7.75 in fees to buy $500 worth of ETH and was wondering if I could do better?

I decided to open up the Coinbase trading app and previewed what it would look like to purchase the similar amount of ETH on the exchange. Rather than using a market order, I changed it to a marketable limit post-only order to make sure I only got charged a "maker" fee and it reduced my fee to $2.00. Not bad!

I sent the order into the market and was instantaneously filled. So now I had $500 worth of ETH on my Coinbase trading account and needed to transfer that to my wallet. This tranfer to my wallet incurred an additional $0.30 gas fee to cover. Which I had to manually subtract out to get the actual amount of ETH I could transfer over, but due to rounding, there was a tiny amount of ETH "dust" still left over in my Coinbase trading account.

Of course in order for my ETH to actually hit my wallet address I had to wait ~10mins for the blockchain to validate my transaction...Queue the Jeopardy theme song.

Since I was doing this around 11:30am EST, I was getting close to when the minting window was about to end at 12pm EST. This was a self imposed end date by Ledger to enter into this Stax NFT opportunity. Luckily, I didn't have to wait 10 mins and the actual total wait time was around 5 mins.

So now I had around $500 of ETH in my online Coinbase wallet and linked it to the Ledger Market. I was able to purchase up to 5 NFTs in this mint per wallet address, but decided to only obtain one.

It was interesting to note that gas fees were particularly high at this time and I was able to select a cheaper gas fee since this was not an arbitrage trade that I was worried I would be front run on. :)

I again had to wait another 5 mins for the transaction to actually hit the blockchain before I received the NFTs in my wallet.

But there you go! Okay so I know I made this process entirely more complicated than it needed to be, but I learned a number of new things along the way, the main thing being the friction of using crypto currency to buy real physical assets, like a cold storage wallet.

1. Using a credit card to buy something is extremely easy and often taken for granted.
2. Transferring crypto to and from different wallet addresses is a bit cumbersome and the wait times are much longer than getting approval from a credit card transaction.
3. Gas fees should be more easily bundled into the transferring of crypto assets between addresses.
4. Seeing your transaction on the blockchain is really cool!
5. Supremely thankful that most of the details around sending and receiving crypto was fool proof. (i.e. no copying and pasting of addresses for potential "fat finger" errors)
6. There is no way that the average retail consumer will jump through the hoops that I did.

On that last point - 6, although Ledger did raise over $1M in revenue (1,028.94 ETH to be exact), they did not sell out of the NFTs, only 4,777 of the 10,000 being offered. Which makes me think most people didn't want the extra headache of purchasing the NFT bundle.

So now I have a redeemable NFT in my wallet than I will need to redeem on April 2023 of next year to actually receive my Ledger Stax. If you are interested in seeing how that process goes, stay tuned for Part II!

For those interested in exploring the Ledger Stax transactions you can view them all here. https://etherscan.io/address/0xd3214ef2ae5327468521be8d567e587b38e8ad79

For those interested in purchasing the Ledger Stax NFT you can buy them here. https://rarible.com/ledger-market-ledger-stax/items

For those interested in learning more about crypto in general please see some of these resources that I have found extremely helpful.

• https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
• https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s12-blockchain-and-money-fall-2018/
• https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mas-s62-cryptocurrency-engineering-and-design-spring-2018/
• https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/intro-to-ethereum/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir4dDCJhdB4&t=220s