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Even as gas costs fall, commercial artists continue spending hefty amounts on transaction costs when creating NFTs.
The NFT craze doesn’t seem to be running out of steam anytime soon and because of this, gasless minting is worth some consideration. The recent decision by Porche, the German sports car manufacturer, to jump on the bandwagon just goes to show that there is much more to be expected from the unique token technology.
High-profile cases like this and others such as Beeple’s $60 million digital art sale are raking in big money, but it is the smaller sellers that are finding it increasingly infeasible to release their works using NFTs.
Today, nearly all NFTs being created and sold are based on Ethereum due to the vast acceptance of its blockchain network. All transactions on Ethereum require a certain amount of GAS, a fuel value that is to be paid to the miners for validating and recording the transactions. The DeFi rise on Ethereum this year meant a deluge of transactions and ETH’s roughly 7~10 transactions a second has not been able to cope, fueling the average transaction fee to rise in value. In May, the average was as high as $68.8.
With recent technical upgrades on the network, coupled with a slowdown in transactional volume, these cases of extreme gas fees have somewhat abated. Currently, the average cost for a transaction has come down below $5 but for small-time commercial artists, it’s still a significant cost per NFT. If you are someone who sells original creations through NFTs on a regular basis, you know what I am talking about. If not, let me break it down for you.
Consider that you make some sort of art — digital images or music or anything else. NFTs are a great way to access a global market and showcase your creations. The ability to sell directly without the need of an intermediary — a gallery or a record label — that would eat into your profits is a great way to make an earning. But choosing this digital way to sell your art requires you to create an NFT for each piece of art. Each NFT creation will cost you $5 to deposit in your wallet.
This may not sound much, but when you are going commercial and selling scores of NFTs, the amount can start building up. If you have 20 NFTs created, this is $100 you have to pay straight up. Sure you can adjust this cost in your sales but you will only recover this amount when you sell.
Oh and did you know you will need to spend another $5 per sale to transfer over the unique token to a buyer?
What is Gasless Minting?
Gasless minting is a relatively new concept and there aren’t many NFT sale platforms that have started using it. By using innovatively coded smart contracts, these service providers allow anyone to create NFTs but instead of keeping them in personal wallets, allowing these tokens to reside within the smart contract, thus incurring no transaction fee.
How Can You Save Money Through Gasless Minting?
The seller can showcase their creations and when someone shows interest in buying, the NFT can be sent directly to the buyer’s wallet, with the transaction fee being paid then. At the same time, the total transaction cost is roughly halved as the seller needs to only make one transaction, not two.
The current Ethereum fee is low enough that the savings may not amount to much initially but the savings, when added up, can make a real difference for the budding artist. And should network congestion inevitably rise up again, you will thank me for introducing you to ‘gasless minting’.
