Darina Salimovna

The bleeding era

The Capitals joined the National Hockey League as an expansion team for the 1974-75 NHL season, along with the Kansas City Scouts. Originally, they were owned by Abe Pollin who also owned the Washington Bullets of the NBA. He had a new arena built in Landover, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, in order to house both the Caps and the Bullets. With Milt Schmidt as the franchise's first general manager and Jim Anderson as its first head coach, the Caps made their debuts in 1974.

With the NHL hastily planting new teams in new cities in order to counter the World Hockey Association, who were acting similarly, a shortage of highly skilled players had to be expected. The Atlanta Flames and New York Islanders had previously had to deal with such a shortage two years before; by the time the Caps and Scouts arrived, the situation was even worse. As a result, both teams were filled with players who, for the most part, lacked professional experience; this situation was obviously a disadvantage against the sixteen other teams in the league. As a result, the Capitals' inaugural season was a real nightmare. Dreadful even by expansion standards, the Caps finished the season with a dismal 8–67–5 record, good for 21 points, far and away the worst record in the league. Even their fellow Scouts, who were all but stellar themselves, could still manage twice as many points during that time. The .131 winning percentage still holds as the all-time NHL's worst winning percentage in history. Among the other sad records they established, were the record for the most road losses (39 out of 40), most consecutive road losses (37) and most consecutive losses. If the first two records still last as of today, the latter was tied by the 1992–93 San Jose Sharks. Coach Anderson said: "I'd rather find out my wife was cheating on me than keep losing like this. At least I could tell my wife to cut it out." Anderson stepped out before the end of the season; Milt Schmidt found himself replacing him behind the bench late in the season.

1975-76 was barely better than the previous. With 25 straight games without a win and a 394 goals against record, the Capitals were en route to a 11–59–10 record, good for 32 points. Max McNab was hired as GM during the season, and Tom McVie took the coaching job. Greg Joly, the 1974 NHL Amateur Draft's first pick overall, who was expected to become a franchise player, failed to live up to the expectations and was dealt to the Detroit Red Wings after the season. Washington fared little better during the next few seasons; they would alternate between dreadful seasons and promising ones where they'd finish just a few points out of the playoffs. But this era, no matter how futile on the ice, had one bright spot. With all the bad seasons and the early draft picks, McNab selected several excellent players (Rick Green, Ryan Walter, Mike Gartner, Bengt-Ake Gustafsson, Gaetan Duchesne and Bobby Carpenter, to name a few) who would change the face of the team in the 1980's, whether by their performance on the ice or by their involvement in major trades. However, the team's overall horrendous performances made talks of a move away from the US capital very serious by the end of 1982; something had to be done to keep the team home. A "Save the Caps" campaign was underway, and two significant events changed the franchise's destiny.

Playoffs time

The first such event was the hiring of David Poile as general manager. The second was the first move he did. Poile managed to pull off one of the biggest trade in the history of the Capitals on September 9th 1982 by trading Rick Green and Ryan Walter, who were both long time regulars in Washington, to the Montreal Canadiens for Rod Langway, Brian Engblom, Doug Jarvis and Craig Laughlin.

This move literally turned the Caps into another team. Langway's reliability on the blue line solved one of the problems of the team: its enormous number of goals against. The arrival of Scott Stevens, drafted in the 1982 NHL Entry Draft, also was a key factor. At the other end of the ice, Dennis Maruk, Mike Gartner and Bobby Carpenter went into a goal-scoring frenzy, solving another of the Caps problems. The result was no less than a 29 points jump, which propelled the Caps to a third place in the powerful Patrick Division - this strong result ensured them a first time playoffs participation in almost a decade of existence. They fell to the three-time-defending Stanley Cup champions, the New York Islanders, but still, that was one giant step in the right direction, a step that was enough to shut all the moving talks.

Following this era of mediocrity came a new era of regular season abundance, which had them participate in the playoffs for the next fourteen seasons. If the team usually started the season prety slowly, the Capitals usually ignited in January or February. But regular season success is not warrant of playoffs success; the Caps illustrated it well by failing to advance very far in the playoffs. The Capitals did not lack star players, with the likes of Gartner, Carpenter, Langway, Gustafsson, Mike Ridley, Dave Christian, Dino Ciccarelli, Larry Murphy or Kevin Hatcher, but they still were knocked out of the playoffs in the first or second round of the playoffs for eight years in a row. This resulted in some heartbreaking moments, such as 1985-86, where the team, after finishing the season with 50 wins and 107 points, both franchise records, were kicked out of the playoffs by the New York Rangers in the second round.

The next season, another such moment happened, perhaps even a worse one than the previous season, when Washington faced the Islanders in the Patrick Division Semifinal. This series was capped off by a classic, the Easter Epic game, which ended at 1:56 am on Easter Sunday 1987. After a thorough domination by the Capitals, who outshoot New York 75-52, they still lost in overtime after goaltender Bob Mason let a blue line shot by Pat Lafontaine in. With Gartner and Murphy traded to the Minnesota North Stars for Ciccarelli and Bob Rouse, the Caps underwent the 1989 NHL playoffs with confidence, but again faltered due to poor goaltending, which led to a first round ousting by the Philadelphia Flyers. They finally reached the Wales Conference in 1990, only to be swept in four games by the Boston Bruins.

The 1990's: a continuing story

New stars were on the rise in Washington in the 1990's. Forwards Peter Bondra and Joé Juneau and defenceman Sergei Gonchar joined an aging core of players, hoping to bring the Caps to the ultimate goal. In 1993, Washington was favourite for a win over the Islanders in the first round, yet were upset in six games. The Isles' win was darkened by a gesture from Dale Hunter, who out of frustration checked by behind New York's Pierre Turgeon after he had scored the series-clinching goal. Turgeon awkwardly fell on the ice and suffered a separated shoulder; he had to miss the second round against the Pittsburgh Penguins. This move earned Hunter a 21 games suspension, to be served from the first game of next season. At the time, no suspension for an on-ice incident had ever lasted that long in NHL history.

A first championship: the Eastern Conference's

In 1998, after 24 years of existence, the Capitals, led by a strong 52 goals season by Peter Bondra, by Hunter, Juneau and Adam Oates who retrieved their youth's form and Olaf Kölzig who maintained a solid .920 save percentage, finally managed to achieve an appearance in the Stanley Cup finals. The Capitals defeated the Bruins, the Ottawa Senators and the Buffalo Sabres en route to their first (and to date only) Stanley Cup finals appearance. In order to achieve this, they had to win six overtime goals (three against both Boston and Buffalo). But this proved not enough, and the Detroit Red Wings swept them in four games.

That same season, Oates, Phil Housley, and Dale Hunter all scored their 1,000th career point, the only time in NHL history that one team had 3 different players reach that same milestone in a single season.

A rebuilding

In 1999, the very year after participating to the Stanley Cup finals, Washington missed the playoffs. Injuries had plagued the team throughout the season. They bounced back the next season, though; they went to win back-to-back Southeast Division titles in 2000 and 2001. Still, both times they fell in the first round to the Penguins. Following the second such occurence, Adam Oates demanded to be traded. The management refused, however; they went even further and stripped him from his captaincy.

Hoping to put an end to their playoffs problems, the Capitals traded three young prospects (Kris Beech, Michal Sivek, and Ross Lupaschuk) to the Pittsburgh Penguins for Jaromír Jágr. The five-time Art Ross Trophy winner signed the most lucrative contract in NHL history: $77 millions over seven years (11 millions per season, or approximately $134,000 per game), with an option on an eighth year. However, Jágr failed to live up to the expectations and the Capitals failed not only to defend their division title but also to make the playoffs, and that, despite a winning record. The presence of the superstar however drew record crowds; an average of 17,341 fans showed up every game, and at the end of the season, it's 710,990 fans who attended to the Caps games.

In the summer of 2002, more roster changes were made in order to make it to the Stanley Cup. They signed highly regarded Czech Robert Lang as a free agent, reuniting him with his Pittsburgh teammante Jágr. At first, it seemed to have worked. Washington was back to the playoffs in 2003. They met the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round and gave themselves a 2-0 lead in the series after two matches. Still, they managed to lose the series in six games; game six went into triple overtime at the MCI Center; Washington lost on a power play goal, a power play caused by a blunder by Jason Doig who skated on the ice too early, resulting in a too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty against the Caps.

Return to the abysses

In 2003-04, the Caps unloaded a lot of their very costly talent. That was a cost-cutting spree, but also an acknowledgement that they had failed at building a Stanley Cup contender team by signing high-priced veterans. Jágr was a disappointment in Washington, failing to figure among the top scorers of the league or be included in the All-Star Team during his Captials tenure. The Caps did try to trade him, but due to his salary, no team was willing to pay so much for an underperformer, especially since there was only a year left to the current CBA (Collective Bargain Agreement). In 2004, the Capitals could finally get rid of him, sending him to the New York Rangers for Anson Carter and an agreement that Washington would pay approximately four million dollars per year of Jagr's salary, with Jagr himself agreeing to defer (with interest) $1 million per year for the remainder of his contract to allow the trade to go ahead. Soon afterwards, Bondra was dealt to the Senators, Lang left for Detroit and Gonchar to Boston. Lang's trade marked the first time in the history of the National Hockey League that the league's leading scorer was traded in the middle of the season. The Capitals ended the year 23–46–10–6, tied for the second worst record, along with the Chicago Blackhawks.

Alexander Ovechkin 2009

Luck smiled upon the Capitals in 2004. They won the Draft Lottery allowing them to select first overall in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft. They selected Alexander Ovechkin with this pick. With the 2004-05 NHL season completely lost due to the labor dispute between the league and the players, Ovechkin stayed in Russia with Dynamo Moscow. Several other Caps capitalized on the lost season to go play part or all of the season in Europe; these players include Olaf Kölzig (Eisbären Berlin), Brendan Witt (Bracknell Bees) and Jeff Halpern (EHC Kloten and HC Ajoie). In the 2005 summer, they signed Andrew Cassels, Ben Clymer, Mathieu Biron and Jamie Heward and acquired Chris Clark and Jeff Friesen via trade.

The 2005-06 season was filled with promise. They once again were bottom dwellers as they finished the season dead last in the Southeastern Division once again, finishing the season with an unimpressive 29-41-12 record (a 12 points improvement from 2003-04). The Caps still finished 27th overall in the league. However, there were many bright sides that led to think that Washington's pain was something that would end in the near future. Even though they lost more than half of their games, they always fought bitterly to win and were very rarely outclassed - in fact, 42 of the Caps' games were one-goal games. But the brightest spot on the Caps' roster was Alexander Ovechkin. In his rookie season, he finished third overall in scoring (and in goals scored) in the league, scoring 52 goals and collecting 106 points, the kind of performance that had gotten extremely rare for rookies in the modern NHL. He established an NHL rookie record with 425 shots (he was league leader in that chapter) and finished in the books as having given the Caps' second best ever performance by a rookie and his goal total was tied for third best in the team's history. Such dominance was rightly so crowned by the Calder Memorial Trophy, beating another much-hyped player, Sidney Crosby, and defenceman Dion Phaneuf.

His teammates also enjoyed good moments. Lithuanian Dainius Zubrus earned a career-high 57 points, while Jeff Halpern established a personnal mark for assists (33), Matt Pettinger for goals and points (20 and 38, respectively), while several of the younger players on the roster reached the 20 points mark for the first time in their careers. Veteran Olaf Kölzig earned a 250th win in the Caps' nets, while Andrew Cassels became the 204th player to suit play 1,000 NHL games. To make things better, Jeff Halpern, a native of the Washington area, was named captain during the season, a nice first for the team. A notable departure occured on March 8th, on the trade deadline, when Brendan Witt was traded to the Nashville Predators.

2008: Start of a Dynasty

After a disappointing 6-14-1 start in 2007-08, in which the Capitals saw then-head coach Glen Hanlon be fired, the Capitals made a historic turnaround. Winning 11 of their last 12 games, the Bruce Boudreau-lead Caps came back to win the Southeast Division thanks in part to Alex Ovechkin's 65 goal season, the most ever by a left winger in a single campaign. The year ended with a 4-3 series loss to the Philadelphia Flyers, losing on an OT goal in Game 7.

The following two years saw the Capitals produce franchise records in points. In 2008-09, Washington went 50-24-8 for 108 points and back-to-back Southeast titles. It ended in the semifinals at the hands of the Pittsburgh Penguins, losing the series four games to three. The next season, the Capitals light up the scoreboard game after game, scoring a gaudy 313 goals, the most in the NHL, and accumulate 121 points at 54-15-13. Despite Stanley Cup hopes, the Caps were stunned in the quarterfinals, falling to the Montreal Canadiens four games to three. Jaroslav Halák shined in net the final three games for the Canadiens, holding the Caps to one goal each game.

In 2010-11, Washington claimed their fourth consecutive division title and Eastern Conference regular season champions with 107 points at 48–23–11. After rolling over the New York Rangers four games to one in Round 1, they were swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning, still unable to reach the conference finals despite all the Southeast titles.

The following year, the Capitals had a promising 7-0-0 start, but they won only 5 of the next 15 games, leading to the firing of Bruce Boudreau, and the hiring of former Cap Dale Hunter. With a new defensive system in mind, the inconsistent Caps could not keep pace with Florida for the Southeast crown and settled for seventh in the east with 92 points. Joel Ward scored an OT goal in Game 7 of the first round against the Boston Bruins, yet Washington was stymied again, falling to the hands of the New York Rangers 4-3.

Following the conclusion of the Stanley Cup, Hunter announced his resignation from the team, prompting George McPhee to hire another former Capital great, Adam Oates, as the next head coach.

Logos and Jerseys

The Capitals took to the ice in red, white and blue jerseys featuring contrast-colored shoulders and stars on the chest and sleeves. The team originally had red, white, and blue pants options, but quickly retired white pants. The blue pants would eventually become the only option used.

The Capitals unveiled new uniforms on June 22, 2007, which coincided with the NHL Entry Draft and the new League-wide adaptation of the Reebok-designed uniform system for 2007–08. The change marked a return to the red, white and blue color scheme originally used from 1974 to 1995.[11] The new primary logo is reminiscent of the original Capitals' logo, complete with a hockey stick formed by the letter "t"; it also includes a new feature not present in the original logo in the form of three stars representing D.C., Maryland and Virginia.More simply, the stars are a reference to the flag of Washington, D.C., which is in turn based on the shield of George Washington's family coat of arms. The new alternate logo uses an eagle in the shape of a "W" with the silhouette of the United States Capitol building in the negative space below.

For the 2011 NHL Winter Classic, the Capitals wore a white jersey honoring the franchise's past with the original logo. The jersey resembled the one the franchise wore from 1974 to 1995. Instead of wearing the combination of blue pants and white helmets the team used when it played at the Capital Centre, the Capitals chose red pants and helmets for the New Year's Day game.[13] The Capitals wore the same jersey, minus the NHL Winter Classic patch, on February 1, 2011, to honor Hockey Hall of Fame winger Dino Ciccarelli.

The Capitals announced on September 16, 2011, that they would wear a third jersey modeled after the Winter Classic jersey for 16 road games during the 2011–12 season.

For the 2015 Winter Classic, which took place on New Years Day at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., the Capitals wore a newly designed jersey intended to pay homage to hockey's outdoor roots. The primary color of the jersey was a vintage deep red. The addition of stripes on the shoulders, waist and legs brought in elements of Washington's professional hockey jerseys from the 1930s, predating the Capitals franchise's formation in the 1970s. A large "W" on the front of the jersey, topped with the common three stars, offset in blue to contrast the white "Capitals" word-mark.

Starting with the 2015–16 season, the Capitals will wear their throwback red third jerseys, replacing the white Winter Classic thirds.

Prior to the 2017–18 season, the NHL announced a new partnership with Adidas, and the Capitals unveiled new uniforms with minor changes. There were no third jerseys that season, but the return of the program in the 2018–19 season saw the return of the Capitals' red throwback uniforms as their alternates.

For the 2018 Stadium Series, the Capitals used newly-designed navy uniforms, honoring the fact that the game was held at the U.S. Naval Academy. The chest logo was based on the regular stylized “Capitals” logo, but shortened to “Caps”, the nickname commonly used for the team. There were also features honoring various aspects of D.C., as well as the presence of a slightly altered W logo from the 2015 Winter Classic on the pants.

Amber Group official logo

Amber AI Group is an electronic technology and trading company that specializes in trading cryptocurrencies, including futures, spot, options, swaps and other derivatives. The company is headquartered in Hong Kong. The company also has its offices in Shenzhen, Seoul, New York and Vancouver. Amber Group creates systems, processes and tools for trading cryptocurrencies and ensuring their liquidity using sophisticated quantitative research and modern technologies. The company was founded in 2018.

Contents

1 Activity

2 Members

3 Links

4 See also

Activity

The main activities of the company are:

Liquidity Provision. Amber AI Group offers customized liquidity solutions including a wide range of instruments: spot, futures, swaps, options and other products across many electronic exchanges and alternative trading venues.

Risk-Taking. Run on computational techniques developed by the firm Amber Group combines proprietary models with practical knowledge of markets to capture inefficiencies. Several approaches such as volatility and relative-value strategies in warrants, options and decentralized financial applications deployed by the firm seek to identify trading opportunities through a hybrid approach that combines aspects of systematic and discretionary strategies.

Technology and Research. The company uses in the development more than 15 programming languages and it's a permanent member of a wide technological community. Amber's portfolio also includes many open source projects.

Members

The co-founders of Amber AI Group are:

• Michael Wu;
• Tiantian Kullander;
• Wayne Huo;
• Tony He;
• Thomas Zhu;
• Luke Li.

The advisors of the company are:

• Benjamin Falloon;
• Jianwei Li;
• Bo Feng.

A Complete Liqui.io Review

Home » Reviews » A Complete Liqui.io Review

Steve Walters

Steve Walters

Liqui.io is one of the smaller cryptocurrency exchanges, and also one of the newer cryptocurrency exchanges. Even though it’s fairly new, it already offers trading in roughly 60 different cryptocurrencies, including of course Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. They don’t support fiat currencies however, so all deposits and withdrawals must be done in cryptocurrencies from outside wallets.

When you first land on the Liqui website you’ll certainly be thinking about trading too. The homepage of the website looks like the trading area of most exchanges. I guess the folks at Liqui.io really don’t want you questioning why you’re there. It’s obviously to trade.

One marketing ploy that they had been using was to offer 24% APR on savings deposited at Liqui. That’s pretty darn good, but also reminds me of Bitconnect. I’ll take a deeper look at the whole savings vehicle aspect later in this review.

Liqui.io has its headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine and was launched in July 2016 with an announcement in a Bitcointalk forum post. The initial post stated there were 7 leading members, with remote workers also in Russia, Armenia and the U.S. That was 2 years ago, and the About page on the website still contains the same information. What it lacks is the name of any of these 7 leaders, including the CEO, as well as any mailing address, physical address, or phone number for the company.

Registering with Liqui.io

One nive thing about Liqui.io is the account creation process. It’s quick and easy! Simply go to the Liqui.io website and click the link in the upper right corner that says “Sign In/Up” and you’ll get a pop-up to Sign In, but at the bottom will be another link to Sign Up. Click that and the pop-up becomes a simple registration form asking for a userid, email and password. Fill in the fields and click “Sign Up” and wait for the system generated confirmation email to make it to your inbox. There will be a confirmation link in the email and once you click that you’re done. And I mean done as in no additional verification is required to deposit, trade, or withdraw.

One downside to this lack of verification is that Liqui.io does not accept fiat payments, so you can’t hook the account to your bank account or Paypal and use those for deposits and withdrawals. Everything is done exclusively with cryptocurrencies. They do support roughly 60 cryptocurrencies though, so this shouldn’t be too much of a hardship.

Trading with Liqui.io

Liqui.io is one of the very few exchanges that can have you trading soon after registering, thanks to their lack of verification requirements. The charts are provided by TradingView, making them some of the best cryptocurrency charts you’ll find. Placing an order is made as simple as possible, on both the buy and sell side. The order book is clearly visible at the bottom of the screen and you can click on any of the existing orders to prefill the order form. Then click “Buy” or “Sell” as appropriate and that’s all you need. You can literally do it in a second.

You don’t have to use the existing order book however. You can just as easily put in your own pricing and your order will be added to the order book to get filled when matched with a counterparty.

Liqui.io currently does not offer margin trading, but they have a link to information about margin trading on the site, and it looks as if they plan on adding the capability soon. With other exchanges adding margin trading they almost need to do so to keep up with the evolving industry.

Liqui.io Review: Fees

There are no deposit or withdrawal fees at, other than the obvious network fees from the blockchain. As far as trading fees go, they are reasonable and along the standard industry lines. Maker fee is 0.1% and taker fee is 0.25%. These fees used to be much higher when Liqui was using them to cover the interest costs, but since they’ve dropped that program (as you’ll see below), the fees are far more reasonable.

And in case you are wondering, the maker is the person who creates the order, providing liquidity to the order book, while the taker is the one who fills the order, or takes liquidity out of the order books.

Liqui.io Review: Interest Payments on Savings

Liqui.io began with a very compelling offer for users – 24% APR on deposits held with Liqui.io. That’s a darn good rate, but still low enough that people wouldn’t immediately think it’s a Ponzi scheme. Either Bitcoin or Ethereum could be used and the principle and any interest could be withdrawn at any time with no penalty or fees.

Initially there was a limit of 200 BTC, but that was soon raised to 300 BTC, and the Liqui team indicated that they would eventually raise the limit to 1,000 BTC. Note that this is the total amount allowed in the savings program, not per account.

They might be intending to raise that limit to 1,000 BTC, but when I checked while writing this article on July 8, 2018, the interest rate being offered was just 1% APR.

Liqui.io Security

Security is industry standard on accounts with 2FA offered and API keys. There is no indication that coins are kept in any type of cold storage, nor are client funds segregated from the organization funds.

Note that users reported hacked accounts beginning in July 2017 and through October 2017. There was never an official response from Liqui admitting a hack took place, but online accounts indicate that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum disappeared from user accounts in that time period. Things have been quiet since, but the lack of response from Liqui is certainly troubling.

Liqui.io Review: Customer Support

Liqui.io primarily provides customer support through their ticketing system through Freshdesk. You can also email them @liqui.freshdesk.com or try to contact them via Twitter @Liqui_Exchange, but online reports indicate they only respond to the Freshdesk tickets and emails.

Online reports also indicate that support is extremely slow. Don’t expect a quick response, and even when you do get a response it could be a canned response that really doesn’t address your problem. Note also that withdrawals and even deposits can be extremely slow at Liqui.io. I’ve read quite a few accounts of deposits or withdrawals taking weeks.

Liqui.io Review: Conclusion

I worry about any exchange that isn’t transparent enough to let you know who runs the company, or even where their physical offices are. Combine that with the slow responses, the slow deposit/withdrawals, and the reports of missing coins and I’m worried. Even so, there seem to be a fair number of people trading here as Coinmarketcap.com shows the daily trading volume as more than $12 million.

The savings account feature was pretty unique, but obviously turned out to be a marketing ploy and has been discontinued. Still, they keep offering a small interest rate on savings, which is better than any other exchange I’ve seen and could be a good step for the industry.

Overall I’d be careful with this exchange, just based on the lack of transparency and the reports of slow deposit/withdrawals.

Liqui.io Rating: 3.5 - Review by Steve Walters.

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Today it is quite easy to create music. You just need to have the equipment, knowledge, perseverance and a share of talent. It's not easy to find an interesting idea for the release of your music. That's why many artists and producers are interested in creating a musical NFT.

If you are an artist, musician or producer, you must be familiar with the blockchain trend regarding non-interchangeable tokens (NFT). The music industry is constantly evolving, which means that new means of distributing art are becoming commonplace for artists looking for non-standard solutions.

Accordingly, many of them are now thinking about how to create, in particular, a musical NFT and about its advantages.

In this article, we will learn how to create a musical NFT on Ethereum, or rather, consider each step of the process of creating your own NFT using OpenSea. In addition, we will look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of this new format, and, at the same time, the best NFT music platforms.

How do musical NFTs work?

Music NFTs allow artists and producers to create limited editions of rare tracks and releases. Unlike traditional formats, NFT cannot be illegally copied or duplicated. Each musical NFT can be a digital representation of a song or release, in addition, musical NFTs can contain some kind of bonus, in the form of concert tickets or ownership rights to rare goods.

In addition, NFTs allow artists to interact with the audience. So, fans can show their musician or band by buying their rarest releases. The first big stars who launched their NFTs were Steve Aoki, Kings of Leon, Tory Lanez, 3LAU, Dillon Francis, Katy Perry and Deadmau5. Nevertheless, the NFT trend continues to evolve, and is in full swing throughout the music industry.

How to create a musical NFT

Now let's see exactly how to create a musical NFT. The process of creating an NFT is called "minting". For example, we will use the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is the base for development work in the field of blockchain and Web3, and also contains many of the most famous NFT trading platforms. Thus, we conditioned the choice of our example.

We will create an NFT using an audio file. You can also include illustrations, visual effects and many other additional features. When we have the original piece of music ready, we will also need something called an "Ethereum wallet". A crypto wallet is what we use to store our cryptocurrency and send it to other wallets.

To do this, we inform the Ethereum network in our crypto wallet that we want to send some amount of ETH to the address of another wallet. After we have deposited the recipient of our ETH, we sign the transaction to confirm our actions in the wallet.

The most popular market for buying, selling and creating NFT is OpenSea. To interact with the OpenSea NFT market, you will need a Web3 wallet and some ETH. In this example, we will use the MetaMask wallet. MetaMask is the most widely used Ethereum wallet and is ideal for interacting with NFT trading platforms such as OpenSea.

Create an OpenSea account

Although creating an account with OpenSea is free, you will need ETH to pay transaction fees, known as "gas fees". The gas fee varies depending on the network load. You can wait until the network load decreases, thereby avoiding high fees.

OpenSea

After buying ETH, you will need to transfer it to your MetaMask wallet by copying the corresponding wallet address and sending ETH to it from the centralized exchange of your choice.

Now it's time to create an OpenSea account. First, you need to allow OpenSea access to your MetaMask wallet. Follow the on-screen instructions and create a "new item" by uploading an audio file. In this example, we'll just upload one audio file. However, you can upload multiple files as part of a collection or include additional content.

Come up with a name for your NFT, specify the URL of the audio file, a description, and create a collection for your NFT. Select the number of releases, unlockable content, and write a detailed description in the provided field. Click "Create". This process will require some amount of ETH for gas.

After confirming the transaction in MetaMask, your NFT music will be put up for sale through your OpenSea profile. Although there are many other reputable NFT music platforms, OpenSea is by far the most widely used. But you can also search and use other NFT trading platforms according to your preferences.

How to Sell NFT Music

Many jokingly call OpenSea "eBay for NFT". You can choose various additional features that will be sold along with your music. Whenever a musical NFT is resold, the artists who released it can receive an additional percentage of the transaction.

Not so long ago, the performer 3LAU hit the headlines of the crypto space, giving the NFT auction participant offering the highest price the opportunity to collaborate with the musician himself on a new release. So, the additional utility helps to increase the hype around the NFT project, which contributes to the establishment of higher prices for the project.

NFT Music Platforms

OpenSea is undoubtedly one of the best NFT music platforms. However, it might be worth checking out some of the other popular NFT music platforms. For example, Rarible NFT is a fairly thriving ecosystem.

Also, Opulus and Audius are among the most popular NFT music platforms. These platforms offer industry-specific services to help you release music in NFT format. Other well–known NFT music platforms are BitSong, HUSL and Rhythm (from BeatPlaylist).