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I want to mint a collection of 10,000 NFTs. However, gas costs are an unknown. I was wondering if someone could help me understand the following:

  • If I programmatically mint NFTs on the mainnet for example by following this tutorial, I must pay the gas price when I deploy the contract and for each NFT I mint right? Seems like it will cost a fortune to mint 10,000 if I have to pay a substantial gas price for each mint.

  • When I created an account on OpenSea there was a one time gas fee. After that I can mint as many NFTs and create as many collections as I want all for free. How is this possible?

Is there an inexpensive solution (<US$500) for me to deploy 10,000 NFTs other than uploading them one by one manually onto OpenSea? Programmatic seems like the way but there's no info out there on batch costs...

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Opensea uses lazy minting for NFT mints, which means the NFTs are not actually minted on a chain before someone else buys them. There are several options that could help you achieve your goal:

  1. You could just choose some other EVM-compatible chain and launch your collection there (BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum,..)
  2. You could wait for lower gas times. Usually on Saturday or Sunday from 2 am to 3 am (EST) gas is the cheapest.
  3. You could use ERC721a instead of ERC721 as it is optimized for batch minting. You can see a gas price comparison with normal ERC721 here: [https://www.alchemy.com/blog/erc721-vs-erc721a-batch-minting-nfts][1].
  4. You could implement your own lazy minting contract, but be sure to check if the NFT marketplaces you are intending to use suppose such contract type.

I would advise you to go with a combination of options 2 and 3 since Ethereum still has the most volume so switching chains could result in lower interest in your collection. [1]: https://www.alchemy.com/blog/erc721-vs-erc721a-batch-minting-nfts

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