Gas Fees for 10k NFT

Question

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...

Answer 1

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