What are typical minting costs for a free mint on the ETH network?
what are the minting costs typically involved for a project offering a free mint (eth network), lets say for a collection of 3,000?
To post an answer, please !
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I think the actual gas fees will depend on the exact moment you're minting, as gas fees fluctuate based on demand for blockspace on a particular blockchain. For Ethereum, you can take a look at this site, which shows you the current and historical gas prices denominated in gwei. For more information on gas fees, you can refer to this excellent article by Mai here.
Apart from demand, gas fees are also contingent on the amount of computational work required by the smart contract to process the transaction and get it validated on the blockchain. There is a whole area of work by blockchain developers on how they can optimise smart contracts to use less gas. As an example, you can look at this Tweet thread from the Azuki NFT project on how they have optimised their smart contract for minting.
Finally, just to give you a sense of the variability of transaction fees for NFT mints, I have done a couple of free mints on Ethereum over the past months, and the following were my total gas fees (and their USD price at that point) which I compiled from Etherscan:
- Mint on 1 Jan 2022: 0.0190 ETH (~$71)
- Mint on 5 Feb 2022: 0.00918 ETH (~$28)
- Mint on 12 Feb 2022: 0.00440 ETH (~$13)
- Mint on 16 April 2022: 0.00196 ETH (~$6)
You can easily see that there is a huge range in prices!
Thank you. To clarify, if Im minting a collection of 3k NFTs, do I pay one gas fee for the entire collection or a gas fee for each one?
thank you...yes, I am asking from a creators standpoint.
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You pay gas fees for each transaction on a blockchain. So if you're minting one NFT, you pay one gas fee so to speak. Likewise, if you mint more than one NFT in a single transaction (some projects allow you to do that, subject to a certain cap), you also only pay one gas fee. I don't think the total number of NFTs in a particular project matters in determining the quantum of the gas fee you pay - what matters is how gas optimised the project's minting smart contract is, as well as the current level of demand on the blockchain network.
If you asking from a creator's rather than user's point-of-view, i.e. about the gas fees for deploying a smart contract on a blockchain, I unfortunately have no idea, but I reckon it may be a bit more expensive than merely minting as a user.