How Much Does Minting an NFT Cost?

Bull or bear market, 2020 and 2021 will forever be cemented in NFT history.

Reports have shown that NFTs garnered the most profit ($17.7 billion) in the crypto space in 2021 – the market exploded by over 20,000 percent from the year prior. The total value of transactions jumped from $82.5 million to over $17 billion. 

However, the times are changing– namely, the technology behind NFT platforms and various mechanisms is improving significantly. 

Today, we’re going to explore NFT minting– how much does it cost to mint an NFT today, and how will this be different in years to come? Read along as we explore what “minting” an NFT is and more. 

What Does Minting an NFT Mean?

A common misconception about NFTs is that people often confuse minting NFTs with buying NFTs. There’s a fundamental difference. Minting an NFT means creating something completely new on the blockchain. 

It’s ‌converting a digital file into a digital asset that lives on the blockchain, whether that asset is digital art, music, or collectibles like sports and trading cards. However, it’s not like the blockchain is hosting the files for the NFT itself– that would cause the blockchain to become incredibly bloated and inefficient.

Remember, an NFT is just a token; this token represents the ownership of a specific digital asset. It’s not the screenshot of the Bored Ape Yacht Club that’s valuable; it’s the token. 

Minting an NFT means publishing your unique token on a blockchain to make it purchasable by other people. 

NFTs are minted on a blockchain. Ethereum’s blockchain is very popular for minting NFTs, including Solana, Cardano, Tezos, and more. 

You can buy NFTs on a marketplace like OpenSea– and sometimes, these platforms will also allow creators to mint their NFTs. 

However, many projects will first launch on a third-party site dedicated to the minting of the project; the fees you can expect to pay are usually only those for the network, which can be a princely sum themselves.

How Much Does OpenSea Charge for Minting NFTs?

OpenSea is the most popular NFT marketplace. Primarily for Ethereum-based NFTs, OpenSea announced the addition of Solana NFTs to their marketplace in Q1 2022. 

OpenSea requires users to pay two fees before minting their digital assets on the platform. These minting prices aren’t fixed: they can be higher or lower depending on the function you seek to perform. 

The first fee you’ll pay as a first-time creator is used to initialize your account. As of April 2022, this fee typically costs $70 to $300

The second fee used to grant access to your account costs $10 to $30. 

You can avoid high gas fees if you spot days when gas fees are lower using tools like Etherscan

Then, OpenSea charges 2.5% for first-time sales of your minted NFT– it’s a multi-billion dollar company for a reason. 

How Much Does Rarible Charge for Minting NFTs?

With ‌400,000 NFTs created and 1.6+ million users, Rarible is another of the most popular NFT marketplaces globally. 

Most users choose Rarible over other platforms because it is a multi-chain platform, has easy-to-use tools, a decentralized governance system that’s more advanced than what you’ll get on most platforms, and a flexible royalty management system that allows creators to set up to 50% royalty fee.

Minting on Rarible is straightforward compared to other NFT marketplaces. The platform itself doesn’t charge a minting fee. You have to pay the gas fee for minting on three different blockchains available in the marketplace (Ethereum, Tezos, and Flow).

After paying the gas fees required for minting, Rarible charges a 2.5% fee for every NFT buy and sell transaction.

What Are Gas Wars and How to Avoid Paying High Gas Fees when Minting

If you’re active in the NFT space, “gas wars” are something you may have sweaty nightmares about. Gas, or the computational power needed to verify transactions on a blockchain network, can often cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollar-worth of Eth.

Since “minting” an NFT to the blockchain is a much more computationally-heavy process, the network charges more than typical transaction fees. 

A gas war is an auction to get front row seats in an upcoming block of transactions to be validated on the Ethereum blockchain. If there is a surge in the number of people waiting for their transactions to get validated, the price gets too high, which triggers a scuffle.

Almost like a bidding war, people pay more so they can get their transactions processed quicker, ‌driving the transaction costs up. Gas wars are the main cause of high transaction fees on the blockchain. They’re prevalent on the Ethereum network, ‌infamous for its performance and scalability setbacks.

To avoid paying high gas fees, ‌learn how to track gas fees. Etherscan’s Gas Now is a handy tool that can help you to minimize gas prices.

How to Mint an NFT for Free on the Blockchain

Popular marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible allow you to mint NFTs for free on the platform.

Recently, Rarible announced that you could mint for free on the platform (yes, no gas fees). The downside is that your asset goes on the Rarible collection and not your collection. This means Rarible has more control of your digital asset, and also, the buyer pays for your minting fee.

You can also mint for free on OpenSea. The new collection manager launched in December 2020 introduced a lazy minting feature, allowing creators to list NFTs paying no gas fees until they make the first purchase. Since the NFT isn’t transferable on-chain until they purchase, creators can list without paying a dime.

However, this is not applicable for first-time listing. If this is your first time listing on OpenSea, you still have to pay the gas fees needed to initialize your account.

The Polygon network also allows creators to “mint NFTs for free at the speed of light.” All you have to do is connect your Polygon account, upload your digital art, select the Polygon network during the minting process, and you’re good to go.

Final Thoughts: What to Expect for NFT Minting in the Future

Although the NFT market went ballistic in 2021, the 2022 bear market has many reconsidering their sky-high purchases.JPEGs– if not at least the hundreds or thousands of dollars they spent on gas fees to simply purchase the art. 

In this article, we learned what NFT minting is, how to mint your project on popular marketplaces, and avoid paying very high gas fees. 

However, increasingly more creative and consumer-friendly innovations are being built to make the creation and selling of NFT art a much more profitable endeavor. 

Cezanne Testnet Release

The final phase of the Pastel Cezanne Testnet is live!

The Cezanne Testnet upgrade is our largest release to date — having been under development for over 6 months — and marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Pastel Network.

Cezanne brings countless improvements to both user & NFT functionality — such as registration, minting, transferring, and trading — alongside unrestricted access to advanced protocols like Sense and Cascade via interoperable Open-APIs, seamless composability, improved token economics, and the most powerful protocol standard for the Web3 ecosystem.

Continue reading to learn more about each new update, feature, and improvement. We will also discuss upcoming plans for Mainnet release.

Full stable release source code is available here.

Unrestricted NFT Functionality

One of the largest updates for the Cezanne Testnet Release is unrestricted NFT accessibility on the network. Users are able to fully create persistent identities (‘PastelIDs’) on the network, and then use these to create, register, transfer, and trade NFTs via our layer-1 protocol. This release is instrumental in ensuring that new users — whether they are individual creators, communities, or applications — can seamlessly mint NFTs for a variety of use-cases on the Pastel protocol itself using our advanced Smart Ticket structure.

Various Smart Tickets have been added, improved, and upgraded to support all of the necessary NFT-related information on the network, ensuring even more application flexibility and functionality. Stored in a simple and secure format, information is easily written, transmitted and subsequently signed by relevant nodes on the network. Various Smart Tickets implement all requirements to support:

  • User Information
  • Creator and Collector PastelIDs
  • NFT Minting
  • NFT Collections
  • NFT Transfers, Trades, and Auctions

The benefit of this system is that it provides a highly powerful and generic framework for encapsulating all sorts of structure, features, and functionality that can be easily leveraged by users minting directly on the protocol, third-party developers building entire decentralized-applications on the Pastel Network, or decentralized ecosystems seeking cross-chain composability.

In addition, the declarative and static nature of Smart Tickets means that there is no risk to end users from subtle bugs or edge cases in custom smart contracts. Instead, all the required logic for handling tickets and performing related computations is done in the node software itself, operating at the protocol level.

Web3 OpenAPIs

The future of the Web3 ecosystem relies upon trustless applications that interact with Web APIs. As a native layer-1 blockchain, it is important that any user around the world can access the functionality powered by Pastel via simple and secure Web API calls.

Users can now interact directly with the Pastel Network via context-specific APIs, which can be done directly from native full nodes or from smart contracts via off-chain services. To support this functionality, we have upgraded the core Pastel software (‘pasteld’) to provide new types of Smart Tickets for each action type such as ActivationStatus, or Retrieval events. This also extends to native Sense and Cascade protocol-level calls, making it even easier for ecosystem partners to interact with our network.

Sense Protocol

Sense is a lightweight protocol on the Pastel Network, built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT versus all previously registered NFTs on the network. Sense can recognize the most subtle similarities between two digital collectibles, even if one has been transformed. The protocol goes beyond the standard “digital fingerprint” approach to establishing the rareness of an NFT and actually looks at the rareness of the pixel patterns in data. While digital fingerprints do allow users to verify that an NFT was created by a particular creator, this is a fairly weak form of rareness. Sense solves this problem by assigning a ‘Relative Rareness Score’ to quantify how rare an NFT is relative to all NFTs in the underlying dataset.

See how it works first hand in our Demo.

Pastel’s Sense Protocol saw a dramatic facelift to make it even more powerful and robust against transformations through new methods of fingerprint analysis, statistical correlation, and rareness computations.

When a user registers an image as a new Pastel NFT or applies Sense via OpenAPI to an NFT from another blockchain, the Sense software analyzes the pixel data in this new “candidate” NFT and, using powerful Deep Learning models, generates a fingerprint vector (a set of ~1,500 numbers) which characterizes the visual structure of the candidate image in a very particular way. This allows the system to quickly compare this fingerprint vector to the fingerprints of all previously registered images on the Pastel Network, and for each one, precisely measure the visual similarity of that image versus the candidate image. This measure of visual similarity is robust to all sorts of transformations, allowing it to basically “see through” any superficial changes to an image. If any previously registered image is “too similar” to the candidate image, then this results in a lower “rareness score” for the candidate image.

We further modified how each WalletNode processes fingerprint data calculated by SuperNodes in order to dramatically decrease the time between asset registration and Sense analysis.

Through these method refinements and upgrades, we have more insight into image recognition and rareness than ever before. Sense provides users with the ability to define the relative rareness of their NFT with the highest level of precision. This release just made Sense even more capable.

Cascade Protocol

Cascade is an integrated, decentralized storage layer based on two powerful ideas from computer science: distributed hash tables (DHTs) and fountain codes (in particular, RaptorQ). Pastel ensures that the digital asset itself (e.g., an image file) is uploaded, verified, and registered on the Pastel Network, rather than just some brief metadata describing the asset with a link to an externally hosted file which might be unavailable in the future. Through a series of smart tickets living on the Pastel ledger, creators can store their assets in a distributed fashion across a variety of SuperNodes. The objective is that in 20, 50, or even 100+ years, the world does not lose access to a single data file entrusted to the Pastel network.

The emphasis of Cascade is on data retention, which is at its core an exercise in designing fault-tolerant, high-reliability systems.

By enhancing WalletNode features, we are optimizing Cascade to run and execute in a high activity and high volume environment. The ability to operate efficiently while scaling is crucial. The upgrades to Cascade in this release allow that to happen.

Introducing PastelUp — A Pastel-Utility Service

PastelUp is a Pastel-Utility service that makes the installation of key infrastructure like WalletNode and SuperNodes extremely intuitive and user-friendly. This service’s features include install, start, stop, remote set-up, default settings, and various command options. It also supports better handling of operation termination and dd-server installation.

We also added various SuperNode applications as systemd services for SuperNode operators, such as pasteldsupernoderq-server, and dd-server, and have built in functionality to support remote updates.

PastelUp is an extremely important infrastructure tool that we are proud to announce. PastelUp was developed with our community in mind as a means to support network participation, performance, and decentralization by making it easier for users to get up and running with Pastel services.

Network Optimization

Speed, security, storage, and efficient runtime processes are core pillars for Pastel. We rolled out a variety of network upgrades to continue to ensure that the Pastel Network runs with maximum uptime and reliability:

  • Implemented connection pool w/ multiplexing support & peer-only authentication to improve communications in Kademlia
  • Integrated zstd compression for Smart Tickets written to blockchain
  • Converted scheduler from boost to std to replace boost threads with stoppable threads
  • Added gtest for thread services and upgraded scheduler tests
  • Modified write ticket from async to sync to prevent previous ticket error during block load / re-load (on valid blocks)

Security

As always, security is our utmost concern and we made sure to further increase the robustness of our network in the Cezanne Testnet Release. Certain improvements include:

  • Removed configuration of SSH clientConfig with insecure HostKeyCallback from various sources in sshclient.go
  • Cleared text logging sensitive data extraction
  • Added additional encryption to data returned by actions requiring SN PassPhrase logging
  • Supported enable/disable logging for P2P and MetaDB
  • Replaced Ticket encoding from b64 to ascii85
  • Included authentication of Kademlia’s peers to other peers when connections occur using a SuperNode’s PastelID as a certificate
  • Added additional validation of connection requests by Kademlia peers to confirm PastelID in handshake is generated by enabled SuperNodes

Other Improvements and Functionality

We have made a series of other improvements as well as supported a variety of new functionality including:

  • LegRoast Public Key stored and encrypted in PastelID Registration Ticket as pq_key field as a vector of bytes, making it possible to locate LegRoast Public Keys via aPastelId
  • Updated API Documentation
  • Refactored the entire GoNode layer
  • Created checkpoint of blockchain written into chainparams
  • Updated PQSignatures for sign/verify of Ed448 & LegRoast Signatures

Our Cezanne Testnet Release source-code can be reviewed here.

Cezanne Mainnet Release

The Pastel Network team and community are thoroughly testing each component of the current release to ensure that all functionality is highly performant, bug-free, and optimized under a variety of environment and network state conditions. Upon completion of multiple phases of unit-level, integration-based, and protocol-level stress-testing, we will begin to upgrade existing Miners, SuperNodes, and WalletNodes which will culminate in the Cezanne Mainnet Release.

Community members will be notified in advance to upgrade their existing infrastructure to the latest release prior to a pre-designated blockHeight. Please stay tuned for additional details on the Cezanne Mainnet Release.

We are thrilled to announce the current and final phase of the Cezanne Testnet, which includes a number of groundbreaking innovations that have been in the works for many months. The future of Web3.0 is here.

About Pastel Network

Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel allows for the development of third-party decentralized-applications (“DApps”) to sit on top of its Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes, and security of the broader ecosystem. Lightweight protocols such as Sense — which was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata — and Cascade — which conducts permanent, distributed storage of underlying NFT data — can be integrated cross-chain across various layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 protocols, or other third-party apps.

Pastel is managed by world-class developers, cryptographers, and technologists, supported alongside an experienced and extensive network of marketers, influencers, and third-party agencies. Pastel is backed by key stakeholders including Innovating Capital, a prominent venture fund.

This article was first published by our team here.

Start Staking PSL on KuCoin

Users can stake PSL with KuCoin Earn for with as little as 1,000 PSL and receive similar staking incentives as operating a full Pastel SuperNode.

Please find more information on KuCoin Earn here.

PSL Staking Promotion

We are excited to announce that we have partnered with KuCoin to provide users with the ability to delegate their PSL and earn staking rewards.

The PSL Flexible Promotion program allows KuCoin users to earn up to ~42% APR of staking rewards earned by operating full SuperNodes, starting with a minimum staking amount of 1,000 PSL and a maximum staking amount of 1,000,000 PSL per user. The program has already commenced and will be running for ~360 days. Users can stake and un-stake at any time during the program (subject to a 1 day redemption period).

To participate, please register for a KuCoin account and then navigate to KuCoin Earn where you can find the PSL Staking Product.

Please learn more about the program here or at the link below.

PSL Flexible Promotionhttps://www.kucoin.com/news/en-psl-flexible-promotion

How does staking work on Pastel?

True decentralization & security is of the utmost priority to Pastel’s Layer-1 network. While delegated staking at the protocol level has become very popular throughout the community, it comes with a high costs and risks.

In many delegated staking models, users can simply ‘delegate’ their stake to an existing validator and receive network rewards earned by validators (less any commission fees that the validator charges), without needing to worry about setting up and maintaining their own infrastructure. With little incentives in place to operate a full validator, delegation at the protocol level has led to many networks being operated by a concentrated number of validators leading to concerns around centralization and security.

The potential risks are a growing concern to the ecosystem, as we have seen as recently as the Ronin Network hack. Smaller numbers of validators operated by concentrated parties sacrifices decentralization and increases the likelihood for security exploits such as 51% attacks and chain rollbacks. It also opens the door for the formation of cartels where delegates can concentrate the role of validation and governance to a few parties.

We are not alone in this view. Ethereum has long taken a similar stance — to be sure, Ethereum 2.0 will be a pure self-staking network with decentralization and higher levels of security at the top of mind. By choosing to not apply delegated staking to the Pastel Network we are able to better prevent many lethal attacks by increasing the number of independent network operators. This also combats any incentives for users to form cartels and bribe other voters, thus bolstering the network’s robustness, resiliency, and security in the name of decentralization.

Partnering with KuCoin gives us the ability to balance such risks at the protocol level, while simultaneously offering the community an opportunity to gain staking rewards without the arduous costs of running full SuperNodes. Through this partnership, up to 20 SuperNodes (100M PSL in total) operated by the Pastel Foundation will allocate their staking rewards for up to 1 year to the KuCoin earn program.

About Pastel SuperNodes

SuperNodes are powerful validator servers backed by self-staked collateral held in PSL.

SuperNodes host full copies of the blockchain and provide a unique second layer of services to the network, processing advanced functionality such as NFT Registration & Activation, OpenAPI Sense & Cascade Requests, and cross-chain bridge relayers & orchestrators.

This interconnected layer provides an additional level of performance, functionality, and security to the broader Pastel ecosystem. Compute intensive operations can be conducted on high-powered nodes, who collectively verify the output and monitor the state of other SuperNodes on the network prior to data or information being submitted on-chain.

SuperNode operators must self-stake collateral denominated in PSL, and in return their operators receive regular payment for the services they provide to the network. As highly committed custodians and validators of the Network, SuperNode operators are also given the opportunity to vote on key ecosystem development and growth initiatives playing a fundamental governance role.

Additionally, you have the opportunity to participate in Pastel’s SuperNode Founder Program. The Founder Program is intended to incentivize early SuperNode operators with additional rewards for participating in the network, providing enhanced performance, ensure network security, and encourage long-term decentralization. The first 250 SuperNodes activated on the Pastel Network will become members of the Founder Program, tracked by their unique PastelID and Address. In addition to receiving Block and Transactional Rewards, Founder SuperNode operators will also become eligible for random PSL or NFT airdrops.

Learn more about running a SuperNode here.

SuperNode Overview: https://pastel.network/supernodes/

Pastel SuperNode Founder Program: https://medium.com/pastelnetwork/pastel-supernode-founder-program-9f3f814c5e2

About Pastel Network

Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel allows for the development of third-party decentralized-applications (“DApps”) to sit on top of its Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes, and security of the broader ecosystem. Lightweight protocols such as Sense — which was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata — and Cascade — which conducts permanent, distributed storage of underlying NFT data — can be integrated cross-chain across various layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 protocols, or other third-party apps.

Pastel is managed by world-class developers, cryptographers, and technologists, supported alongside an experienced and extensive network of marketers, influencers, and third-party agencies. Pastel is backed by key stakeholders including Innovating Capital, a prominent venture fund.

This article was first published by our team here.

Introducing SmartMint by Pastel— A No-Code NFT Minting Platform.

SmartMint by Pastel enables creators to do what they love without the hassle and complexities of minting and deploying NFTs across various platforms and blockchains. Easily create smart contracts and NFTs in seconds via our no-code tool powered by Pastel’s advanced technologies for guaranteed NFT security, storage, and counterfeit protection.

What is SmartMint?

SmartMint is a no-code NFT minting platform where creators can easily create, manage, and mint NFTs on their own custom smart contracts. The tool also provides creators with additional peace of mind as it leverage Pastel’s infrastructure for near-duplicate NFT detection (Sense) and permanent NFT data storage (Cascade). SmartMint enables creators to mint NFTs on Ethereum, Solana, Pastel, and more.

Why should creators use SmartMint?

There is currently no simple solution for users to easily create smart-contracts and NFTs that allows for custom metadata, properties, and attributes while also guaranteeing permanent NFT data / metadata storage on a decentralized network.

Existing marketplaces limit the amount of custom metadata or traits that users can add, and in many cases also retain ownership of the collection smart contract that is deployed on the user’s behalf. They also offer fairly limited solutions in terms of supporting NFT data / metadata storage, certifiable authenticity, and counterfeit protection.

Writing and deploying your own smart contracts on Ethereum requires extensive knowledge of advanced programming languages like Solidity. It also requires technical knowledge for deploying smart contracts to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (“EVM”). This creates a significant barrier for many creators and collectors.

SmartMint solves these problems by enabling creators to simply upload files, add custom properties & attributes, and simply ‘click’ the network they want to mint the NFT on. We make it as easy as ‘1 2 3’ while taking care of all of the heavy lifting on the backend. SmartMint does not own your smart contract, meaning users can do whatever they choose with their NFTs like list for sale on marketplaces such as OpenSea or airdrop to fans.

Users get the additional benefit and security of Pastel’s advanced Sense and Cascade Protocols. Creators can have their NFTs run through Sense Protocol for Near-Duplicate NFT Detection and will be given a relative rareness score along with other useful information — certifying the authenticity of that NFT vs. existing collections. At the same time, the NFT’s data / metadata lives forever on a network of fully decentralized SuperNodes via Cascade Protocol for Permanent NFT Data Storage. Currently, users can take advantage of Sense and Cascade at no extra cost and with the click of a button.

Need to Knows

  • Membership is currently free.
  • Creators are responsible for paying network gas fees to deploy their contracts and NFTs.
  • Gas fees are dependent upon the specific smart contract network you choose to deploy.
  • SmartMint will receive 2.5% on the primary sale upon withdrawing earnings from your smart contract and 1.0% on any secondary sale.
  • SmartMint is not a marketplace. It is a unique NFT minting platform where you can customize and manage your smart contracts and NFTs.
  • SmartMint does not own your smart contract, we simply create and deploy it on your behalf. You are free to do whatever you choose such as list it for sale on a marketplace like OpenSea or airdrop to fans.

SmartMint Beta Coming Soon and Early Access Benefits

The Beta Release of SmartMint will go live in the coming weeks. Be sure to join our Whitelist for the Beta Release by signing up here or at the link below.

Users accepted to the Early Access Whitelist will have the chance to receive wPSL & NFT airdrops, along with other special benefits.

Early Access Signup: https://smartmint.pastel.network/whitelist

About Pastel Network

Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel allows for the development of third-party decentralized-applications (“DApps”) to sit on top of its Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes, and security of the broader ecosystem. Lightweight protocols such as Sense — which was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata — and Cascade — which conducts permanent, distributed storage of underlying NFT data — can be integrated cross-chain across various layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 protocols, or other third-party apps.

Pastel is managed by world-class developers, cryptographers, and technologists, supported alongside an experienced and extensive network of marketers, influencers, and third-party agencies. Pastel is backed by key stakeholders including Innovating Capital, a prominent venture fund.

This article was first published by our team here.