The first way to make & sell Non-Fungible Tokens for free, without paying gas

For the last month, we’ve been testing a new technique for creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on OpenSea that eliminates the need for creators to pay gas. It’s the first truly-free NFT maker, and today it works directly on Ethereum.

While we already had some existing tools for developers and a no-code NFT minter as well, it required users to pay the gas to deploy a smart contract and then pay gas to mint each NFT. Gas is the fluctuating price that miners charge to write new data on a blockchain. The gas price of minting an NFT on any platform ranged from $2 on a calm day to $32 on a crazy day like today. If you’re an artist creating just ten NFTs per month, this would have cost you about $100 per month.

Today, we’re announcing the Collection Manager on OpenSea, allowing you to create your own NFTs completely for free, without paying any gas. Selling these NFTs is also gas-free — you just have to initialize your OpenSea account once.

How does it work, and how do I use it?

The new collection manager allows creators to make NFTs without any upfront gas cost, as the NFT isn’t transferred on-chain until the first purchase or transfer is made.

We call this lazy minting. It unbundles the on-chain issuance of your NFTs from the metadata.

Even collections are now free and instant to make. To begin, create a new ERC-1155 collection at https://opensea.io/collections.

After you create a collection and select it, you’ll see an Edit button and an Add New Item button (pictured above).

Use the Edit button to:

• Configure your logos, social media links, and display settings
• Configure your commission that you take on primary or secondary sales
• Choose which currencies (including social tokens) you want to allow on your store

Use Add New Item to create a new NFT.

When you create an NFT, you encode your address and its total supply in the token’s ID. That way, no one except you can mint more of them, and buyers can count on a hard cap on supply that’s enforced by code.

If you want to deploy your own contracts, manage the way they look on OpenSea, or set currencies and sale commissions for contracts you made on other platforms like Mintbase or Rarible, you can do that all through the same interface!

NFTs made with the Collection Manager follow the ERC-1155 standard, partly to help with gas-free minting and partly to help us add exciting features in the near future…

Note: Even before they exist on-chain, these NFTs can be sold on any platform. The smart contract returns the correct results for your balance of each NFT you make, publicly, and conforms to the ERC-1155 standard so they can be sold and transferred off-platform! Some reasons for selling them on OpenSea can be found here.

Other features of the Collection Manager

Aside from making NFT creation free and instantaneous, the Collection Manager has a couple other new features:

• Collections are now multiplayer! Every authorized editor can create new items, in addition to changing settings on the collection.
• The Payouts page has been rebuilt and redesigned. Now you can more easily see all the secondary payments you’re due and how much commission you’ve earned from each NFT sale or bundle sale.

Results of the November Beta: $400/creator

To iron out the kinks and refine the new gas-free collection manager, we released it to a limited audience over the course of a month.

The idea of just an ERC1155 minter received substantial public interest. Thirty days later, 80 distinct creators made over 1000 NFTs for free, generating 58 ETH in revenue over 506 sales, with testers earning $400 on average that month.

One creator made 12 ETH for charity, and two prominent crypto artists moved collections over to the new collection manager.

Why are we doing this?

While a lot of crypto today is merely about currency speculation, the NFT art market is independent and real.

In just the second half of 2020, the volume of artistic NFTs and user-created content sold has grown from $1 million per month to over $20 million per month. That’s a 20x increase in just six months.

The number of art sellers has grown over 500%, from 1,395 in June to over 8,770 today.

A few other recent statistics:

• Art NFT sellers have averaged 9.7 ETH per user over the past six months. At the exchange rate of $650/ETH, lower than today’s rate, that’s over $1000 / wallet / month.
• For just their own NFTs, creators have sold 5.4 ETH (over $3,500) on average over the past six months. In just the Art category, 9.7 ETH ($6,300) was sold per artist on average. (Primary art sellers averaged 7.4 ETH, and secondaries were 9.1 ETH.)
• In just the past 6 months, 45 different artists have each exceeded 100 ETH in primary sales of their artwork. These super-artists averaged 44 ETH of sales per month, or over $28,000 per month per artist in primary sales of their own work. For this elite group, it’s like having a salary of $340k per year.
• There are now 12 NFT millionaires, or wallets have sold over $1 million USD in NFTs, with Sorare taking the crown at $6 million. One NFT trader claims to have grossed $650,000 from just a $600 deposit.

An entirely new industry has just been born, and on top of being fun, safe, and pandemic-friendly, it’s remarkably equitable. You can now create a viable creative business no matter where you are, which language you speak, or which banking infrastructure you have access to.

All you need is creativity and the internet.