As the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) matures, we are seeing an increasing number of artists and creators flock to the space looking to reach a wider audience. NFTs provide a chance for talented individuals to give their work the exposure it deserves, allowing them to establish ownership, provenance, and earn continued royalties.
Getting artwork or a collectible on a blockchain, however, involves minting a token. While this process is getting easier and easier, it can involve hidden costs that catch some unawares.
NFTs which also mean the non-fungible coin is becoming a major trend in the blockchain market world with news, information, criticism, and suggestion on NFTs constantly coming out almost every day.
NFTs are simply the sales of tokens of a digital item such as digit art, audio, pictures, books, and many more items. When an individual buys an NFTs, it does not mean he buys the item directly but it means he but the certificate or token showing the legal purchase of such item as the digital item can easily be copied without stress on devices.
Although the success of bitcoin and Ethereum in the cryptocurrency and blockchain market has shown that NFTs can also be successful, it is the hottest crypto trend of 2021. NFTs overall sales are up about 55% since 2020, it grew from $250 million to $389 million (leech, 2021). But at what cost? What will cost a seller to sell NFTs?
Here then, we will ask how are NFTs minted and how much does it cost to mint an NFT? We will take a look at several of the biggest platforms and explore the process and costs involved.
Cost of Selling Your First NFTs
According to Cryptoslam, NFTs sold about $500 million worth of digital assets. While some NFTs sellers have made a significant amount of money others are still unlucky.
Many sellers and buyers have said that cost of buying and selling NFTs has so many hidden charges in it. Although many people are still buying and selling NFTs due to the news of its headline-grabbing sale such as when Pablo Rodriguez -Fraile sales reach the news headline after-sale Beeple’s artwork for $70 million which is the highest digital art sold as NFTs, the art which was sold for $6.6 million grew by 1,000% to sell at that price.
Many sellers have tried to sell digital assets with NFTs but have come out losing such as when Robert martin a senior strategist at kapwing said that he tried buying and selling NFTs but realizes that it not as simple as it is after he lost over $200 in the gas fee. He said he bought an NFTs worth $30 Ethereum on Rarible but ended losing $200 after the buyer offer three times the token original price in less than 24 hours. He also talked about the conversion fee when Rainbow wallet charged him nearly $80 to convert (WETH) into (ETH).
The cost of a creator selling his NFTs includes first funding his wallet with crypto which requires a conversion fee, paying a gas fee, and listing fee. A lot of creators have said that NFTs favors do who are already into cryptocurrency as they are required to buy or fund their account with cryptocurrencies.
CONVERSION FEE
This is the cost of converting or buying a cryptocurrency in other for you to be able to use the blockchain for your NFTs token before listing on a marketplace.
The cost of NFTs is an important factor when trying to create, sell or buy NTFs. In fact, that is why many individuals see it as luxury goods for the rich.
As the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) matures, we are seeing an increasing number of artists and creators flock to the space looking to reach a wider audience. NFTs provide a chance for talented individuals to give their work the exposure it deserves, allowing them to establish ownership, provenance, and earn continued royalties.
Getting artwork or a collectible on a blockchain, however, involves minting a token. While this process is getting easier and easier, it can involve hidden costs that catch some unawares.
NFT Minting Fees and Gas
As seen, minting doesn’t need to be complicated. Marketplaces are relatively transparent when it comes to the fees involved in minting and will detail this during the process. Some platforms provide a free minting service and instead choose to take a percentage cut of the final sale price. Others simply place a charge on the user upfront, typically ranging up to $150, though this figure fluctuates.
One aspect that does catch people out though, is gas fees. These are the fees you must pay for conducting a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.
A gas fee is an amount paid on the energy required to process any NFTs transaction. The gas fee is one of the major problems NTFs are facing because of the amount of energy required to transfer and validate transactions on the blockchain. Gas fees are mostly ridiculously high that sometimes the gas fee of a transaction might be more than the actual price of the NFT. The gas fee price changes depending on the time of the day and network traffic at the time of transaction.
Whenever anything is written or altered to the Ethereum blockchain’s digital ledger, there is a considerable amount of computing power required. Gas fees are the network’s way of rewarding the “miners” involved in doing the cryptographic legwork required. This is typically paid by the user.
When minting, a gas fee is typically involved as a smart contract is being written to the blockchain. Lower fees can be found by minting at quieter times of the day and week when the network is quieter. The early hours of Sunday mornings are often the quietest, with miners’ computational power not quite so in demand.
Eth blockchain average gas price is about 8 Gwei. When the price is about 12 Gwei you can simply wait for the price to go down. An individual posted on Reddit said “why is minting NFT’s so expensive compared to other types of transactions? Does the cost to mint vary depending on characteristics unique to the NFT? I just minted an XYO World geotoken (ERC-721) and it cost about $50 in gas at 43 Gwei” (r/ethereum, 2021).
Gas fees can also be saved by using blockchains such as Binance, which have been designed to induce lower costs and be faster, at the expense of centralization.
List fee is charged by the marketplace for listing an NFT item on their platform. A platform like Opensea which is the largest NFTs marketplace allows creators to list their items for free, as compensation they charge 2.5% of the item sold. Rarible like Opensea charges 2.5%of the item sold as a service fee, Nifty Gateway takes 5% and 30 cents of every secondary sale, and SuperRare charges 3% of all fees paid by buyers of an NFT.
A closer look at minting costs
Below, we’ll take a look at the way different platforms handle minting both single NFTs and entire collections. For most, the biggest costs are gas fees, with some platforms allowing the minting of entire collections of NFTs for free.
OpenSea
1+ NFT minting: Free / 2.5% of final value
Gas fees: $70-$300 to initialize account and collection
The most popular NFT marketplace currently out, OpenSea, has made a name for itself by offering completely free NFT minting. The price model is simple: OpenSea takes 2.5% of every final sale price.
Because a single NFT or even a collection is not transferred on-chain until the first purchase, the gas fee involved is difficult to estimate. Thanks to the “Collections Manager,” after initializing the collection, you will only pay a gas fee upon interactions with the blockchain.
Typically this will only be when accepting offers. If the seller buys an NFT at full price, the seller will not pay any gas, just the 2.5% final sale price.
So, while gas fees can still be involved, OpenSea’s promise of free minting is (technically) true, whether that be for a single NFT or a collection of thousands.
Rarible
1+ NFT lazy minting: Free / 5% of final value fee
1+ on-chain mint: $55-$200 + 5% final value fee
Approval: $10-$30
Create collection: $650 – $2000
(source)
From October 2021, Rarible introduced a new function called “lazy minting” that enabled zero-fee minting on the platform, similar to OpenSea’s model.
Like OpenSea, Rarible’s new method involves waiting to interact with the blockchain until a purchase is actually made. This way, non-starters, and dud NFT projects don’t cause unnecessary congestion and power usage.
By not minting at the time of creation, Rarible is hoping to pull away some of OpenSea’s userbase with the same promise of low-cost NFT creation. The burden of gas fees now becomes the responsibility of the buyer, who will shoulder the cost at the time of purchase.
However, it’s worth noting that unless you are willing to pay the gas fee to create an on-chain collection, your NFTs will reside in Rarible’s own. The creation of a collection can therefore bring the cost of NFT minting up significantly.
Nifty Gateway
Minting: Undisclosed / 5% + $0.3 of secondary sales
As a more exclusive NFT platform, Nifty Gateway has gained notoriety for hosting only the best crypto art. Rather than choosing to mint your work on Nifty Gateway, Nifty Gateway chooses to mint your work. As such the cost of minting a single NFT or a collection is opaque but is most likely covered by the platform itself.
However, Nifty Gateway only lists NFTs from the scene’s most popular artists and creators who already have a considerable following. For these, the cost of minting would most likely already not really be a concern with almost a guarantee of high-value sales.
Foundation.app
1+ NFT minting: 15% of final sale prices
Gas per NFT minted / added to a collection: $50 – $200
As an invite-only platform, Foundation is also quite an exclusive NFT marketplace. Foundation takes 15% of any final sales value, leaving creators with 85% of the proceeds.
Minting involves becoming a “creator” and creating the token on-chain. Unlike OpenSea and Rarible, Foundation uses the more traditional method of writing tokens to the digital ledger upon minting. This means the NFT is live and on the blockchain as an ERC-721 token before it’s even listed for sale.
The downside to this is that the creation of each NFT involves an interaction with the blockchain, incurring a gas fee. On top of that, creating a collection and adding NFTs to it also incurs gas fees.
When producing a collection of thousands of NFTs, the fees become untenable. For collections of thousands of NFTs, other platforms are recommended where the blockchain is interacted with more economically.
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With only Rarible and OpenSea fully transparent on their cost of minting and gas fee structure, they are most suitable for minting large collections of NFTs. While Nifty Gateway and Foundation are difficult platforms to become creators for, with higher final sale fees, artwork and collectibles on those platforms tend to see for a lot more. They are therefore ideal for single, one-off NFTs.
How are NFTs minted?
Most NFTs still exist on the Ethereum blockchain. While Ethereum is still king, there are alternatives out there, including:
- Binance Smart Chain
- Polkadot
- WAX
- Tron
- EOS
- Tezos
- Flow
- Cosmos
Despite sounding complicated, minting an NFT is a relatively simple affair.
1. First up, you need to choose a marketplace that allows the creation of NFTs. The most popular are:
- OpenSea
- Rarible
- Nifty Gateway
- Foundation APP
2. With a platform chosen, you need to create an account, link a wallet and fund it.
3. Upload the digital file you wish to turn into an NFT.
4. Next, you’ll be required to pay the marketplace’s fees, if applicable.
This whole process will be familiar to anyone who’s ever uploaded a video to YouTube or other media sites. Also, similar to YouTube, users must fill in the NFTs metadata after uploading. This information will then be embedded into the NFT.
After minting, you are then free to set a price and share your listing.
How To Sell Your NFTs?
Selling NFTs is not complex and does not require much process in setting it up. You need to decide which blockchain platform you want to use for your NFTs of which Ethereum is the most popular blockchain used to issue an NFTs although other blockchains you can use to issue your NFTs include Tron, EOS, Tezos, Cosmos, WAX, Binance Smart Chain and many more.
If you are using Ethereum which is the largest NFTs blockchain system you have to use an Ethereum wallet that supports ERC-721 such as Trustwallet, Metamask, or Coinbase, you should also have about $50 to $100 in Ethereum.
Once you have your NFTs wallet, the next thing is to list your NFTs in a reliable marketplace. If you are using Ethereum wallet-based Market Place you can upload your image, audio, or files to Opensea, Rarible or Mintable. However, some marketplace only supports crypto wallet they were built on such as VIV3 marketplace which accepts only FLOW token which means if you are using an Ethereum blockchain you can’t use VIV3 as your marketplace.
