NFTs are a great investment opportunity. However, if you’re planning on creating and minting your own NFTs, there are certain charges you need to be informed about.
We’re talking about gas fees — small price users have to pay to get their NFT minted and listed on the blockchain for sale. Different platforms have different gas fees, so do different blockchains depending on the blockchain activity when you’re minting your NFT.
However, there’s an alternative here as well. You can lazy mint your NFTs to list them on sale for free, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about in this article.
Also read: Airnfts vs Opensea: 6 key differences
What is NFT minting?
NFTs are tokens that are ‘minted’ after they’re created. Minting an NFT is the process of listing it on the blockchain, making it unchangeable and tamper-proof, making it eligible for sale on the marketplace. Minting your NFT also makes it digitally trackable, something that’ll come in handy for royalty payments.
What’s Lazy Minting?
Lazy minting is the same as minting, except there are no additional charges involved, such as gas fees, and you can list your NFT for sale completely free. Even when someone buys your NFT, they’ll cover any related gas fees for the transaction to go through.
Essentially, instead of paying a gas fee to mint your NFT, you’re just using your private key to establish a signature for the NFT, listing it on the marketplace. The buyer then pays the minting charge and the purchase price when buying a lazy minted NFT.
How to lazy mint on OpenSea?
The Opensea collection manager allows users to create NFTs without upfront gas fees. What basically happens here is that your NFT isn’t transferred to the blockchain until the first purchase or transfer is made. NFTs made with the collection manager follow the ERC-1155 standard.
However, if you’re creating your first listing on Opensea, you will have to pay gas fees associated with initialising your account.
If you’re looking to list your NFTs on Opensea for free, instead of Ethereum, you can mint your NFT on the Polygon blockchain to list your NFTs. Here’s how.
Step 1: Head over to Opensea and create your listing. Pay special attention to selecting Polygon as your blockchain instead of Ethereum.
Step 2: When on the asset page, click Sell.
Step 3: Now enter the price for your NFT, the duration for which the listing will be active and click the Complete listing button to list your NFT on the Opensea marketplace.
Step 4: Sign the message from your wallet, and you’re good to go. If you’re listing an NFT for the first time, you may even have to sign several transactions.
Keep in mind that you’re listing your NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, potentially lower buyers. You also can’t hold an auction for your listings as Polygon doesn’t support auctions yet. That said, it’s still a great way to get into the NFT world without much of an investment.
Also read: What to do if you can’t login to Opensea?
