Gasless Minting- How To Make An NFT Collection Without Owning Crypto

Gas fees can be a pain for NFT artists who want to sell their creations.

Imagine buying a $500 NFT and paying $650 in gas fees. Crypto enthusiasts will understand the investment they are making while paying so much in gas fees. However, cryptocurrency newbies find it difficult to understand why processing fees can be higher than the price of the digital item they are trading itself.

Institutional investors buying a lot of NFTs tend to understand the value of paying a higher transaction fee to fast-track processing, whereas individuals testing waters in the NFT space will be turned off. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone wants to get on the NFT train has pushed gas prices to an unprecedented level.

The solution to a huge gas fee when buying NFT comes in the form of gasless minting. Gasless minting allows you to mint an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain without paying a dime in transaction fees. To better grasp the concept of gasless minting, it is best to understand what gas fees are all about.

What Exactly Is a Gas Fee?

Gas in the crypto world is quite different from the type you put in your car. Gas is the computational value required to carry out a transaction or execute a smart contract on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Gas fees are paid to miners on the Ethereum Blockchain to carry out transactions. Regardless of the type of transaction you want to perform, you pay a gas fee when you want it performed. The gas fee you will be charged is determined by the complexity of the transaction you wish to perform on the blockchain.

The gas limit is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a particular transaction. The minimum amount of gas limit is currently 21000 and can be increased or reduced. It was initially 5000. Gas is measured by “gwei” or “nanoeth.” This is converted to ETH and paid to miners. One gwei equals 0.000000001 ETH.

Why Do You Pay For Gas On The Ethereum Blockchain?

Simply put, gas is what you pay to ensure that a miner adds your transaction to a block. It is used to secure the network. Moreso, gas is used by Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to execute smart contracts automatically. Miners process transaction requests in the EVM. So they are incentivized with gas. Gas is the computational power used to compensate miners for validating and verifying transactions on the blockchain. Note that you do not pay a gas fee on Bitcoin. Instead, you pay a miner fee.

Many transactions and smart contracts are on the blockchain, such as trading NFTs, sending ETH, participating in an ICO, or swapping one crypto for another. As such, there is competition among users to ensure that they become a priority for the miners. This is known as a gas war. A gas war naturally pushes up the average gas price. On the other hand, if the mempool traffic on the blockchain is slow, the gas price will fall. In other words, gas prices depend on mempool traffic.

In some cases, it can be better to set a high gas fee for two reasons. First, the higher your gas limit, the higher the priority miners will give to your transaction. Secondly, paying a low gas price may lead to a failed transaction where you will have to pay another fee and repeat the process. This is because if the gas runs out while computing your transaction, the miner will stop. It is mostly recommended that users pay the max fee per gas for a transaction if they want to be included in the next block. You might be refunded for an unused fee if the miner did not utilize all your gas.

The Problem With Paying a High Gas Fee

Since you may not know whether you are setting your gas price too high, you might end up losing money. For instance, if you want to list an item as an NFT for $1700 and the gas fee is $900, you might have to forfeit a part of your profit to pay for gas. This happens if you set your gas limit too high in the hope that you will be refunded, but you do not. One solution developed to the problem of high gas prices is to wait for a drop in the gas price before initiating a transaction. However, just like the price of a cryptocurrency, the ETH gas price is highly volatile.

The gas price on Ethereum keeps increasing, and this is especially problematic for individuals making a simple transaction as they have to compete in the same space with whales. Currently, the average gas price on the blockchain is 174 gwei, which is high compared to the beginning of the year.

The only way to ensure that you mint your NFT without getting hindered by an extravagance fee is through gasless minting.

What is Gasless Minting?

Minting a non-fungible token has always required gas, and the traffic determines the gas price you pay on the Ethereum Blockchain. However, popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea are gas guzzlers. That means it requires a lot of Ether to mint NFT and sell it in the marketplace. Since buying Ether costs money, it does not take a genius to deduce that after have created a unique art, collectibles, real estate, or digital art and music, you will need to pay a huge processing fee for a storefront regardless of whether your item sells or not.

Gasless minting is the process of minting NFT on a marketplace without paying for gas. Gasless minting increases the number of creators of unique NFT who sell their creations in the NFT marketplace. NFT artists can save the money they are supposed to pay for gas and still make a profit on the item they create. One of these Gasless minting marketplaces is Mintable, where NFT creators can choose whether or not to pay gas.

What is Mintable Gasless Minting?

Mintable is an NFT Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) marketplace where you can create, buy and sell digital items. Since Mintable is a DAO, users can make decisions concerning the organization as they have the voting power. An NFT marketplace is like a store where you can take your creation, turn it into an NFT, and sell it for a price.

Showcasing unique items on the NFT market has always been open to artists who can pay the entry fee, which can be a turn-off, especially for those new to the NFT marketplace. To allow everyone to list their creation and mint NFT, Mintable introduces gasless minting where you can mint NFT without submitting a transaction on the blockchain. Instead of creating a smart contract and paying a gas fee, users use Mintable gasless store. Mintable also has several other unique features.

• Mintable allows creators to mint more than one NFT at a time to save time, which is known as batch-minting. You can batch-mint as many as 2000 ERC-721 compatible NFT at once. However, creators who opt for gasless minting cannot enjoy this feature.
• Users can choose between gasless and traditional minting.
• Creators can list their digital items in three different ways.

• • An NFT can be auctioned where interested buyers bid for the item, and the person with the highest bid will buy the NFT. Items in this category are signed.
  • Printable listing is for items that are limited edition.
  • At the lowest end of the food chain is the regular listing where everyday items are sold. However, Mintable allows users to combine the three listing methods for the same NFT to maximize profit.

How can I Mint Gasless NFT on Mintable?

To mint a gasless NFT on Mintable, you can either choose to create a store on the marketplace or not. Remember, you must create a store if you opt for a traditional minting with gas, but it is not compulsory for gasless NFT minting since you are using Mintable’s smart contract for your NFT gasless minting.

So, you only need to set up your Mintable account through the mintable.app and follow the prompts or Log in if you already have an account. Next, you need a wallet to store your NFT. Use your MetaMask extension wallet on your Chrome or Brave browser to connect to your Mintable account. Now that you have a Mintable gasless store, you can go ahead to mint your NFT by following this guide:

• Click on “Mint an item.”
• Then choose “create a new item.”
• Fill out your item’s details, including store name, category, token name, title, subtitle, tags, preview image (100Mb limit), optional metadata, copyright, resellable, mint only, and downloadable file. Take your time filling this part to distinguish your item from the sea of NFTs in the marketplace.
• Accept the transaction through your wallet.

Conclusion

Gas fee offers protection to the owner of the NFT as they have an immutable ownership record on the blockchain. However, it deters artists who are newbies to NFT.

To offer protection to buyers and artists of rare items, Mintable is set to introduce a way of recognizing unique items so the NFT marketplace will not be filled with spam.