The Visitors Have Finally Landed!
So I made the leap yesterday, and forked out around 0.048 ETH to mint a miserable grey witch. We are on this journey together, and I can’t wait to see where this extraterrestrial community goes!
Here is my newly minted, magically miserable companion:
I think I’m going to call her Wonda. She is feisty on the inside, and she’s jumped straight into working on her first big announcement: she is running for President in 2024. There is nothing stopping her, and with a heart emitting a glorious stench of nuclear fusion, represented by the atomic ‘V’ t-shirt she proudly wears - which will also be her campaign branding once she gets out on the road to meet her loyal supporters - she has got world domination on her agenda.
It was 02:00am last night, and as I waited for my ETH to be wrapped so that I could hit that ‘MINT’ button at https://thevisitorsnft.com/, I was scrolling through the Discord channel and getting excited about the variation the Universe would conjure up for me in my Visitor; and then there she was - Wonda came out the meta-box with the most miserable face on her. But I instantly forgave her. The world is a hard place, and who doesn’t arrive in this world crying and screaming. If anything, it shows she’s more human than other visitors, and for that reason I am rooting for her.
Process: Minting a Visitor
So this was a new process for me. I haven’t every minted an NFT outside of a marketplace, and so there was a few hoops to jump through that I want to break down briefly here, in order to let others know that it is simple, and well worth learning in order to find a route into exciting NFT projects at their source. When these things are all out the box, and only found on secondary markets, then I fear that you are already too late to grab an absolute bargain and ride the wave as they take off in their special way.
So: learning to mint is a great practice, and opens all sorts of exciting opportunities for collectors of NFT’s out there.
First of all, I am presuming that those I am writing this for already have a Metamask wallet setup, as that’s where I began. The rest went as follows:
Step 1:
Linking your Metamask wallet to the Polygon network. This is just a matter of clicking a few buttons and allowing the technology to do most of the heavy lifting, and before you know it your Metamask is open to Polygon projects and purchases.
Step 2:
You then need to source some MATIC, and not just the stuff you buy on exchanges. The best way to do this, and the most amazing thing about the community surrounding NFT projects, is that you can simply ask people on Discord for some MATIC and in a matter of seconds, someone is willing to send you enough funds to make the purchase on Polygon (all you need is 0.02 MATIC, which is what I got sent by a very generous Discorder)
Step 3:
Then you need to purchase some Ethereum on an exchange. In this case, enough for the minting (0.042 ETH) plus enough to cover the gas fees to wrap the ETH. I sent 0.07 ETH and I have quite a lot still left over (which I am considering spending on another Visitor to be honest…).
So once you have purchased enough ETH, withdraw it from your exchange to your Metamask wallet and wait for it to arrive, which takes a few block confirmations to appear.
Step 4:
You need to wrap your ETH using the Polygon Bridge. It is a fairly simple procedure, and you may just have to be a bit patient with the confirmation and completion of the transaction, depending on how busy the network is at the time. It took around 30 minutes for mine to be confirmed, at which point you are one step away from being able to hit that sexy MINT button! You will need to swap back to the Main Ethereum network on your Metamask wallet for this step.
Step 5:
Finally, you need to authorise the VisitorNFT minting contract (I don’t know the technicalities of this procedure) but it’s very simple, and once again the technology does most of the heavy lifting.
Step 6:
HIT THAT MINT BUTTON BABY!
And your Visitor will soon land..
Step 7:
Check on OpenSea to see the Visitor in your account! (A warning: the actual jpeg of your Visitor may not exist immediately, as it takes a while for the OpenSea database to display the image for some reason; a green alien placeholder takes its’ place in the meantime. But the process is complete, and you own a beautiful and unique Visitor NFT)
Bonus Step:
You can also check the contract confirmation on EtherScan and see how it all looks on the blockchain:
Here is where you can see the unique no. of your Visitor in the contract itself, under TokenID (in my case, 6431). With this number, you can head to the Visitor platform on Rarity and check out the rarity of your specific Visitor amongst all the rest.
Conclusion?
Well it was a lot of fun, the Discord Channel is lively and active which is always a great sign of good things to come from a project, and to be honest, I may just go and grab myself another one because there will soon be a feature where you can burn two aliens and get yourself a whole new one! So as much as I love Wonda, maybe there is opportunity to increase the rarity of my combined exposure to this project through sacrificing two NFT’s for an even better one!
I love that this feature creates a deflationary marketplace where they become rarer and rarer as people combine and eliminate weak aliens. That is going to make for a really competitive marketplace I believe, and all the more reason to get exposure to the project now whilst it’s early and the Visitors are within reach.
The bottom line: Go and get yourself a visitor and join the community to be a part of this project as it grows and grows!
Thanks to the creator Mike Mitchell for designing the thing; it’s a pleasure to be a part of it, and I can’t wait to see what happens next!
To infinity and beyond!