OpenSea to ERC 721 (NFTs)

Question

I'm a mere mortal in the coding world (e.g. a complete noob). I'm an NFT artist that has an increasingly popular collection on OpenSea. The collections on OpenSea, however, uses a system called 'Lazy Minting' and not ERC 721 if I understand correctly.

Here's the problem: I want to take the collection to the next level, adding more functionality to the collection and adding value for my community: adding unlockables retrospectively, using collab.land for my website and Discord, adding more wallet functionality, et cetera!

Is there a way to 'convert' these tokens to ERC 721? Is that even necessary? Can anyone guide me through this or point me in the right direction? I honestly wouldn't know where to start. I heard about letting users burn and remint tokens or something...

I would appreciate any help at this point. I think the people at OpenSea are literally too swamped with questions right now to answer any of mine.

Kindest Regards, SuperNfty

Answer 1

@super-nfty I dig the collection and I dig your handle. kudos.

I went down a similar path -- the way to level up is to create a separate collection and include a check during the minting process that checks to see if the user is a holder from the original collection.

If so, you can mint them an item in the new collection with the artwork from the previous collection or mint a new one and let them keep the old one, too!

You could also as part of this process burn the original.

Answer 2

OpenSea does use 721 (they support 1155 as well at this point) when they mint an NFT.

Opensea does not use smart contracts for NFTs in the obvious way. They injected themselves into the middle of each transaction so they could ensure themselves $$, they are after all a business not a government service, community service, nor charity. If you want advance features consider a more technically strong provider, I'll stop short of recommending one since I'm also in the space as a business but I'll say that there are many alternatives superior to OpenSea. If your only issue is that the NFTs aren't minted yet then you can add an FAQ "To use your NFT you must have it in your own wallet" and add a link to OpenSeas "how to transfer an NFT (from our custodial wallet or unminted state) to another user or your own wallet: https://support.opensea.io/hc/en-us/articles/5183126109715-How-can-I-transfer-an-NFT-using-OpenSea-

Have fun!

Answer 3

as of the time of this comment, I have not seen guides or educational materials on how to deal with this. We're definitely at the frontier.

It's theoretically possible for you to "burn" your existing NFTs and replace them with a token on an ERC-721 contract. But this will probably be expensive in terms of gas fees, and also require a lot of trust between you and your collectors.

My current opinion is that you should do all those things off-chain as much as possible. For unlockables, maybe find a way to email them to the token holder. (I'm sure this opinion will change at some point.)

You may want to switch to ERC-721 tokens in the future, but it's not required. One of the biggest collections, the CryptoPunks, aren't ERC-721!

EDIT:

I'm pretty sure my original answer was wrong, or at least incomplete. Anyone who bought a lazy minted NFT bought one of your ERC-721 NFTs, it was just done in a way that allowed them to pay minting gas fees instead of you.