NFTs can be anything — art, digital land, music, video, you name it.
What about text NFTs?
As more and more people begin to explore the possibility of non-fungible tokens + text, this field of digital things is developing rapidly.
Why Text NFT Appears
The power of text NFTs is that they allow you to create, publish, and experiment with text in ways that traditional media cannot.
For example, digitally editing text into collectibles was not possible before NFTs. Now, with just a little bit of web3 technology and a few clicks, authors can turn texts like articles, blogs, digital signatures, novels, poems, etc. into NFTs to connect with readers in new, synthesizable ways.
So, literal NFTs are a bit like self-publishing and DIY distribution. With this medium at your fingertips, you can customize your publishing strategy at any time, easily airdrop new content to your fans, and leverage the many open web3 resources that sit on top of a globally neutral infrastructure such as Ethereum, anyone can use it.
Speaking of infrastructure, this leads me to my next point: Text NFTs are also attractive because they can turn text into long-lasting digital objects, digital artifacts, digital souvenirs, and more. Once minted, NFTs live on-chain forever.
Of course, NFTs aren't necessarily a panacea solution when it comes to saving/storing metadata (although this can be done with some on-chain technology), but they offer the possibility of full digital permanence, and the writers Never had this opportunity before. I used to have a poetry account on Instagram, but it closed a few years ago, but now I wish I could go back to those earlier pieces - with the text NFTs I'm minting right now, I know I can make readers and myself alike to return to them forever.
Where to Mint Text NFTs
Ethereum project
Currently, there is no NFT minting platform on Ethereum that explicitly caters to literal NFTs. For shorter pieces, an easy solution these days is to take a picture of your text and cast it to an image file, e.g. JPG, PNG, SVG, via the infrastructure of your choice. For example, I've used this image-based approach before with Zora and Foundation to mint poems into NFTs.
Optimism project
Mirror original NFT announcement
mirror
Mirror is a web3 publishing platform for authors, it handles accounts through Ethereum, stores data through Arweave, and mints literal NFT through Optimism L2 scaling solution. This type of minting allows authors to create literal NFTs for free, and economically enables them to interact with NFTs because they are on L2.
Polygon project
Cent
In July 2022, cent.co launched Cent Pages , a Polygon-based "premium NFT publishing platform". The system isn’t just for writers, it’s user-friendly with free audience management and content distribution tools.
Lenster
Powered by the Lens Protocol on Polygon, Lenster is a decentralized social media app where people can create and bookmark posts as NFTs. It's like a web3-native version of bookmarkable tweets!
zang
Zang is an on-chain text NFT platform built on Polygon. The project has a minimal design, but it does support some interesting stuff like HTML+CSS authoring.
Tezos project
fx(text)
Created by the team behind generative art platform fx(hash) , fx(text) is the first web3 publishing platform on Tezos. This recently launched project provides a custom text editor and supports markdown.
typed.art
typed.art is a text-based NFT platform on Tezos.
Text NFT platforms will continue to evolve
The text NFT scene is very early, so the projects listed above that persist from here will undoubtedly advance and develop further.
That said, as a writer and NFT minter, I'm a big fan of the aforementioned projects, but personally, my ideal literal NFT platform would be broader than what's currently on the market. Some of the features I would like to see in a one-stop text NFT platform in the future include:
Multi-chain support - choose whether to mint on chains such as Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc.
Customizable casting parameters - cast 1/1 or series with versions.
Minted Featured Image - Makes it possible for text NFTs to be minted as text + featured image.
Flexible Text Editor - Provides a text editor that supports basic formatting, such as paragraph breaks.
On-chain and off-chain modes - Provides the ability to mint a work's textual metadata entirely on-chain, or opt for off-chain storage via Arweave, IPFS, Filecoin, etc.
Lazy Minting - Allows authors to post unminted drafts of articles, which people can then mint if they want.
Native Marketplace - Provides a built-in marketplace system so people can list their literal NFTs directly on the platform for sale.
Profile Customization - Let creators customize their profile and divide their creations into collections/series for better exposure.