Choosing Your Minting Platform

Today, there are many platforms where you can mint your NFTs. Each platform has its own particularities: choice of proposed blockchains, custodial or not, open or not. Before minting a collection, it is, therefore, necessary to identify which platform will be the most suitable for your project. 

‘Standard’ vs ‘Lazy’ NFT Minting

2020 was a year that will go down in history for the considerable increase in transaction fees on Ethereum. The cost of creating a smart contract or even buying an NFT was exorbitant. This has led to the use of other blockchains and second-layer solutions like Polygon.

OpenSea already offered the possibility to create smart contracts and therefore, to interact with NFTs from their platform. It is for example in this way that the game Crypto Assault created all the assets of its game in 2019. 

Until then, the standard of use was the ERC-721, making each NFT collection unique and associated with its own smart contract. But faced with the explosion of fees, OpenSea decided to use a new method to interact on its platform: the ‘Lazy Minting’.

Lazy minting allows the creator of a collection not to pay any fees and leave them for the buyer to pay. Because of that, the NFT won’t exist on the blockchain until the buyer has paid the minting and listing fees. Also, this has encouraged the onboarding of a new generation of creators although this has also had the perverse effect of the multiplication of spam.

Here is a summary table of this evolution on OpenSea:

The absence of fees to create an NFT collection on OpenSea seems to be an advantage for creators. But some collectors see things in a very different light. Indeed, the first generation of collectors is very attached to this notion of immutability and will tend to favor assets that are not likely to disappear over time.

Comparing Web3 Platforms to Create your First NFT Collection

Whatever your choice of platforms is, it is important not to duplicate the same work several times on different platforms. The rarity of a creation depends on its availability, if a sale does not happen on a platform, it’s ok. Blockchain remembers and in the long run, it is the reputation of the creator and the age of an asset that will prevail.

Here are the criteria we’ve used to describe the different platforms. 

• Platform: The different marketplaces that exist, just click on each name to access directly to the marketplace.
• Blockchain: Which blockchain is supported by the site.
• Lazy Minting: The particularity of the platform compared to others.
• Type of Sale: Way to sell your NFT (traditional auction, Open Edition…).
• Unlockable content: Whether or not it is possible to obtain exclusive content after purchasing the NFT. 
• Content hosting: The way the media (image, gif, video or music) is being hosted.
• Ownership: If you own the key to the smart contract or not. Both mean you have the choice when creating the smart contract/collection.

To begin with, we recommend you create a collection on OpenSea by using lazy minting or use a blockchain with very little fees. This makes it possible to become familiar with the different functions available to you and also obtain a starting capital to create more ambitious collections.

For example, for a video game, several separate collections will need to be created:

• one for avatars
• another for objects
• another for virtual fields and the list continues…

The important thing here is to determine how each NFT will be used. As each on-chain action will solicit the smart contract and therefore, may generate costs. Does any action necessarily have to be on-chain? Not necessarily. In addition, for video games, some properties of the objects will have to be changed to better balance the rules of the game. Absolute immutability is therefore not necessary for all NFTs created.

Conversely, it will be better to create an NFT for each artwork and think about the very long term. Will the chosen blockchain still exist in 10 years? Will the image hosting service still exist as well? We believe that the Web3 revolution requires decentralized solutions and above all, that allow users to keep ownership of their smart contract. That’s why we recommend using services like Manifold in order to keep some leeway and ownership of your data.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.