At NFTPort, we’re all about empowering developers in our community to succeed in building the next generation of NFT products. With that, nothing excites us more than sharing the stories of the creative developers behind these amazing (d)apps and products.

Today we’re excited to share the story of one of our most active community players here at NFTPort – Meet Rohan aka ThePeanutGalleryAndCo aka Mr. Peanut.

Mr. Peanut started his journey as a Solutions Architect at a company in South Africa in the telecoms space where he worked for 10 years. He started out in a support role and worked his way into building new projects involving processing third-party system data, fraud analysis, revenue assurance and API integrations. Since working with APIs for the last 6 years, Mr. Peanut stumbled upon NFTPort’s API integration. As he got more interested in this NFT space, it seemed like a no-brainer for him to dive straight into it.

Read about Mr. Peanut's journey to NFTs and his experience in the Web3 space below 👇

My journey into the NFT space

I got into the crypto space back in 2017 and bought a few CryptoKitties around the same time. Everything in crypto was new and interesting at that time. But, with the crash coming at the end of that year, I lost quite a bit of money and decided I was going to take a break from the crypto space.

In December of 2021, I kept on seeing Apes everywhere and I got curious as to how everyone was generating 10k collections, as I couldn't imagine people taking the time to hand draw 10k collections. That would take ages! 

During my investigations, I found codeSTACKr and Hashlips' coding tutorials and codebases, and this got me deeper into the NFT space. This is where it all started, and haven't left it since.

Currently, I work with companies that are dipping their toes into the Blockchain space as well as virtual reality such as Bwindi project. I’ve also been dabbling in GameFi, DeFi and the traditional NFT profile picture space. The future with blockchain looks very interesting! 

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Creating my first 10K Collection

When I started getting back in the swing of things in December 2021, I wanted to understand all aspects of the NFT space in terms of how transactions and ownership works, how the Polygon Network works, where the data lives, etc. I asked my partner to design a funky steak, as we are from South Africa and love to “braai” (barbeque). I decided from the start not to add utility, as I don't have time to do community building next to a full-time job, so instead I decided to use it more as a tipping collection for when I help people.

A little time later I had created my first 10k collection of 'funky steaks' – Steak Bites. Some of my steaks have sold for between $2 and $260 and I’m very grateful for that!

The first collection gave me a very good understanding of everything in this space, and it enabled me to support the community members of NFTPort on a daily basis. I am by no means very artistic but I am very much into technology and integrations, so I decided I would rather focus on learning as much as possible in the NFT and crypto world in order to give back to the community and help artists and devs as much as possible. 

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One NFT project led to another

After creating my first NFT collection, my focus shifted to the next trend in the metaverse: DApp integrations. I heard a lot of people talking about it, so I started investigating the space, and soon later I built my own DApp collection – The Resident Legend NFT – to learn the whole process in order to help the community.

I decided to do a collection of 777 items, each at a price of 7 Matic, with a max mint of 7 per transaction. Lucky number 7! I also decided that 10% of all funds raised will go to an animal shelter in South Africa so that we can give back to the community. This helped me to understand the whole process and enable me to get other community members' sites up and running and integrated in no time.

None of this would have been possible for me without the awesome APIs of NFTPort and the original codebases of HashLips and codeSTACKr. Shout out to everyone that helped me thus far in my learning journey!

Building NFT projects with NFTPort

Initially, I ran into a lot of challenges with the codebase being in Javascript, so I decided to write the codebase all over again myself so that I can understand exactly how everything works.

After watching codeSTACKr' tutorial, I joined NFTPort and haven't looked back since. Competitors....are there really any competitors making things this easy to integrate with such an amazing and supportive community at such a small cost and at times completely free? None that I am aware of 🙃

By getting more involved in the NFTPort's Discord server, I was able to learn so much about how the blockchain works. Sometimes the best way of learning is to just get stuck into issues experienced in the community and find solutions for them.

So, if you are a dev or a company in the Web2.0 space that would like to jump into the Web3.0 space, I do not see another easier / better starting point than NFTPort! They have amazing support and nurturing culture in their discord with devs and community members all helping one another, from finding solutions to actual implementations.

Find out more about thePeanutGallery aka Rohan on his Twitter and Github.

About NFTPort

NFTPort is the Stripe for NFTs: one-stop, simple NFT Infrastructure and APIs for developers to bring NFT applications to market in hours instead of months. NFTPort takes care of the infrastructure so that developers can focus on building their applications. NFTPort provides APIs for multi-chain NFT data and easy NFT minting, together with enhanced functionalities for search, recommendations and detecting NFT counterfeits.

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