Introducing Artamint

8 min readJun 29, 2021

In this blog we are presenting Artamint, an NFT minting service provided by Artano, a community driven NFT marketplace built on Cardano.

With Artamint, Artano is aiming to provide a simple service for everyone to mint NFTs while building its NFT marketplace to be delivered later this year.

Via the Artamint service digital content creators can experiment with minting NFTs. Users of Artamint can create their own NFTs, retrieve these NFTs and share them with others.

Later this year once the Artano NFT marketplace is ready for launch users can signup and import their minted NFTs into the marketplace.

Curation will be an additional step to put Artamint’s NFTs up for sale on Artano.

How to Mint NFTs on Artamint?

In this blog we will take a look at how to mint an NFT on Artamint.

For educational purposes, we are using a Daedalus testnet wallet. Note: You should use a Mainnet wallet (Daedalus or Yoroi) and real ADA to replicate this process.

You can reach the Artamint service via https://artano.io/artamint from July 1.

On the homepage of Artamint you will find a walkthrough video on how to mint your first NFT using this service. Once you make yourself familiar with the minting process, push the Go Mint button to go to the minting page.

On this page you can specify the following fields:

NFT Name — the name you want to provide to your NFT

Description — the description that describes your digital artwork

Note: In the first version of Artamint we don’t support copyright and ownership protection yet. If you want to make a disclaimer regarding copyright and ownership we suggest you use the description field for now or paste an external link in this field that describes the copyright and ownership related to the NFT.

NFT Author — the name or alias of the author of the digital artwork

Receiver wallet address — to what Cardano wallet should this NFT be transferred, make sure the receiver wallet address is a valid address ! In case you don’t provide us with a wallet address we will generate one for you.

Minting code — a unique code you have to retrieve first in order to be able to mint an NFT on the Artamint service. Note: Keep this personal minting code stored safely and don’t share it with anyone else.

Obtain minting code — request a personal minting code

You will need to provide your email address to receive a unique personal minting code to mint the NFT. Without entering a unique minting code provided by the Artamint platform the minting process will fail.

After providing your email address you will receive a personal minting code in your mailbox.

The mail provides you with a unique username and minting code. All your minted NFTs will be stored under this unique username and your minting code is required in order to be able to mint the NFT.

File — drag and drop your digital media in jpg, png, gif, wav format onto the indicated area to attach your digital media.

(Optional) traits — optionally you can specify keywords for your digital media, separate them with a comma. For example: NFT, CNFT, Cardano, Artano, Artamint

Once you have provided all the information you can push the Mint button to mint your NFT on Artamint.

The Transaction

Minting an NFT will initiate a financial transaction on the Cardano blockchain, this transaction should cover the cost for minting the NFT and for fueling the transaction on the blockchain (network fees related to the Cardano blockchain). These costs need to be covered by the user of the Artamint service.

Once the Mint button is pushed a popup window will appear with the minimal amount of ADA to transfer.

In the first release of Artamint the minimal amount is specified to be 4 ADA to mint an NFT, where the actual costs for minting an NFT will be much lower. You will receive the minimal amount of 4 ADA minus actual minting costs and network fees back in your wallet.

For the transaction to actually happen you pay a small amount for network fees also known as gas to fuel the transaction. In the next update of the Artamint service this minimal amount will be further optimized.

Artano does not charge costs for the Artamint service during a period of 2 weeks after launch, so everyone can start experimenting with minting NFTs via our service. After this period we will introduce a service cost of 1 ADA per NFT. These service costs are to cover our server costs to provide the Artamint service to the public.

Once the Artano NFT marketplace goes live later this year there will be no minting costs for users that register themselves to our platform. Artamint is a separate service provided by Artano and can be used by anyone who likes to mint NFTs without the requirement to sign up to our NFT marketplace.

In order to send the 4 ADA over to the specified address above you need to have a Deadalus or Yoroi wallet and address and a balance on that address that exceeds 4 ADA.

Note: The actual cost of minting an NFT is less than 4 ADA but to avoid spamming you have to transfer 4 ADA. After minting the NFT you will receive the 4 ADA minus the actual costs for minting the NFT back in your wallet.

In our example we are using Daedalus wallet and the wallet name we are using is ART2, it contains a balance of 35 million (testnet) ADA.

We are using the Send option within Daedalus Testnet wallet to transfer 4 ADA to the above specified address, we copy the address and paste it in the Receiver field, specify 4 ADA (estimated network transaction fees are calculated) next push the Send button.

Note: Make sure you specified the correct Receiver address and ADA amount before clicking the Send button.

enter ADA amount you want to send, currently 4 ADA — Enter 4ADA to send (we’ll refund the 4-fees)

In the confirm transaction popup screen that will appear enter the Spending password of your wallet and push the Send button to initiate the transaction on the network.

The transaction gets initiated on the network after pushing the Send button.

amount of ADA sent — Transaction is pending after being initiated on the network

Once the transaction is completed you will find two transactions in your wallet.

ADA was received or not — Transactions to be found in your wallet after the transactions are confirmed and the NFT is minted.

For an explanation how to find your transaction in the Cardano explorer, go to “Looking up the transaction via the Cardano Explorer” section below.

Confirmation that NFT was received

If you have specified a receiving address during minting you will find the asset back in your Daedalus wallet once it is minted and sent to the receiving address.

If you hover over the asset you will see it has a unique Policy id and Asset name.

Once the 4 ADA are received you will see the current status change into “NFT has been minted and is ready for transfer!”

You will also receive a confirmation email on your address that the NFT is minted with the link to retrieve your NFT.

Next you can view your personal NFTs by pushing the View my NFT button.

You can click on the image to see a larger display of the NFT being minted and zoom in and out on it.

By clicking on the link Back to my NFTs you will be brought back to a screen, from where you can access all your minted NFTs under your unique user id.

Congrats, you’ve successfully minted an NFT on Artamint!

Looking up the transaction via the Cardano Explorer

You can click on the Ada transaction (Ada sent) in your Deadalus wallet to dig into the details of the transaction.

Next click on the Transaction ID to open the Cardano explorer.

When clicking on the address where the 4 ADA was sent to we see more details.

As we can see this transaction has unmoderated content, in this case it contains metadata. This metadata is not checked by the Cardano blockchain and as such represented as unmoderated content. By pushing the button “SHOW UNMODERATED CONTENT” we can see the metadata content that belongs to this transaction.

Transaction metadata related to the NFT minted

As we can see from the metadata, it contains the information we specified before when we minted the NFT. Every NFT has a unique asset name and id and the name, artist, traits and description contain the information we specified as parameters for the NFT to be minted and the image contains a reference to the Interplanetary File System (ipfs) a decentralized storage system on which the digital work gets stored.

In the chrome browser you can install the IPFS companion chrome extension, this allows you to copy the URL after the image field and paste it in your browser to preview the digital work stored on IPFS.