If you are creating an NFT for personal reasons or trying to make money by selling them, you need some planning. There are certain factors to consider before going ahead with your mint. Keeping up with them will ensure the success of your NFT.
Factors to consider
In this article, we will walk you through the five factors to keep in mind before minting. These are:
- Where to sell it
- Minting (creation) fees
- Catastrophic carbon footprint
- Platform complication
- Discount on mints
Where to sell NFT’s
If you are new to NFTs, you should be on the lookout for certain factors. Some of which we have covered in this article. Factors like minting fees need thorough consideration. Going for the lowest minting fees is always advisable. Also, consider the marketplaces that take the seriousness of the NFT verification. You do not want to be on a platform where stolen arts are sold.
Prefer one that displays your artwork to the collectors. One that showcases it on a platform that doesn’t set you back.
Minting fees
It cost between $30 to $200 to mint an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. For those new to NFTs, it is worth noting that Ethereum is the blockchain that NFTs were first created on. Also, Ethereum harbors diverse blockchain use case solutions, even beyond NFTs. This makes it the most used blockchain network alongside Bitcoin.
While this is great for security, the trade-off to this is that Ethereum uses a proof of work (PoW) validation protocol to keep things running with transfer and transaction validation of contract, which is at the center of all things blockchain, including NFTs.
The implication of using PoW is that miners get to collect a fee for each validation. The fee cost goes up when several activities are going on. It’s like the rise of NFTs and decentralized finance applications (DeFi) on Ethereum.
With these problems, there has been the rise of other alternatives. Noteworthy is the delegated proof of stake (DPoS) used by the Binance smart chain. It brings down transaction costs to less than a dollar. Reducing the cost of minting NFTs by over 3,000% to 200,000%.
This reduction in transaction cost is one of the major reasons why Orica settled for the Binance smart chain in the creation of its NFT minting protocol for the Orica marketplace.
Catastrophic carbon footprint
“I would never engage with Ethereum NFTs and crypto-art, I don’t believe I could morally do that with climate change currently hitting at the rate it’s going.”
Those were the words of Douglas Copeland — he was part of the artists who worked on the game ‘Lawbreakers’.
Several concerned artists tweeted their concerns about NFT following Artstation’s announcement. Which was to create an Ethereum based marketplace. The concerns were about the disturbing carbon footprints from networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The total Bitcoin network has a carbon footprint equal to that of the whole of Denmark. Ethereum has that of the whole of Nambia.
For anyone concerned about the climatic effect of such high carbon emissions, then there is a moral obligation to have this in perspective when using these networks.
Interestingly, following the press release of Artstation’s move to launch an NFT market, many concerned artists shared their concerns making the company withhold its NFT plans.
Concerns about carbon footprint emission are why the Orica team settled for the Binance smart chain for minting NFTs on Orica. With the Binance smart chain, transactions are minted based on delegated proof of stake, which does not require high carbon emissions due to mining competitions as seen with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Platform complication
The actual minting of an NFT involves an on-chain contact. This is by the blockchain network procedures. If you are a non-techy, you want to be on the lookout for platforms that cut out all the difficulties. We are talking of the ones relative to minting NFT tokens via on-chain connections.
This is a huge design concern while building the Orica user interface. As artists, we understand the needs of fellow artists in this regard. This is why Orica models with existing non-NFT art creation platforms. These are the ones that every digital artist is familiar with.
Discount on mints
Minting fees on networks like Ethereum costs in a range of $30 to over $200 in extreme cases. These same fees cost about a dollar on the Binance smart chain.
Imagine trying to mint 1000 art collections, which is about a thousand dollars for a $1 fee on Binance and over $30,000 on Ethereum depending on what’s being minted. That is not an amount some artists are willing to risk before sales are guaranteed.
We at Orica allow artists to mint as much art as they want for free, with all initial costs covered by us. Costs are only deducted if a guaranteed sale is made on NFT.
