Grant from Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem support, EIP-2981 Royalties for NFTs, and a way to mint 2000+ NFTs in a single transaction

Update on what Mintable is working towards with help from the Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Support program — a new EIP for NFTs, an improved way to batch mint, and more

Ethereum Ecosystem Support Program has given a grant to Mintable to improve a series of functionalities for NFTs

There are many important aspects to NFTs, like their flexibility to handle a diverse range of situations, such as deeds, identities, games, and art, but there are a series of issues with the current NFT design that prohibits other use cases.

When we started talking to the Ethereum Foundation about some improvements we could make to NFTs overall, they were extremely interested and excited.

Over a few discussions we came up with 3 core changes we could make to help improve the NFT ecosystem. These 3 are:

  1. An EIP for a standard method of royalties across any NFT platform.
  2. Improved batch minting so that creating 50 NFTs doesn’t cost $500+ dollars in current gas fees.
  3. A new method of minting that again reduces the cost of minting new NFTs that are being sold.

Most of these directly impact and improve the experience of creators making NFTs for their work, but these could be adopted and applied to almost any subsection of NFT use cases.

EIP-2981- NFT royalties standard

This proposal was created to help standardize the way royalties are made for secondary sales of NFTs. Currently — a range of marketplaces offer their own system for royalties (where any secondary sale that is made, the creator gets X% back of that sale), although — NONE of them work on any marketplace outside of their own. So…. if you made something on rarible with a royalty and its sold on opensea, the creator misses out on that royalty payment.

This is a big issue, especially for crypto, where we are free to move our assets and sell them where ever we like.

To solve this — EIP-2981 was made as an easy, flexible way to implement royalties on all marketplaces — with very little changes needed. It was designed such that any new NFTs merely need to set a royalty amount and provide a function that returns that amount and the creator’s address.

Marketplaces can then simply transfer that percentage of royalty amount — to the creator with a few lines of code on their smart contracts — regardless of the style of marketplace they use. It should be compatible with every marketplace for NFTs currently live.

Feel free to see the EIP here and join the discussion!

Improved Batch Minting — no longer limited to 40 tokens per transaction

When we published the first method of batch minting for NFTs almost 2 years ago — we thought it was awesome. 40 tokens in one transaction, who wouldn’t love that?

Well….. with current gas prices, the cost of minting 40 tokens is around $250 USD (at 100 gwei gas). Thats not really cool anymore…

One problem was the ERC-721 standard itself though — as it costs a ton of gas to store values and each NFT needs to store values in the state. Making it prohibitively expensive to mint multiple NFTs.

We started redesigning the ERC-721 standard such that it hit 3 requirements:

  1. Completely backwards compatible, so nothing needs to be changed on any dapp/wallet/system and these new NFTs work perfectly as if they use the ERC-721 standard (which they do — but all the implementations we have seen would not work, so we had to make a new one)
  2. Batch minting was extremely improved and much less expensive
  3. A user using this contract would have no downsides compared to using a normal 721 implementation.

It was a big success — so far here are some of the stats from the redesigned contracts: (all fees are priced at 100 gwei as to match the example above)

  • Old limit — 40 NFTs before filling up the entire block
  • New limit — 2000 NFTs
  • Mint 50 NFTs in a single transaction? — $11 in fees
  • Mint 500 NFTs? — $120 in fees

Thats a 25x reduction in fees and a 50x improvement on the number able to be minted in one transaction.

  • Downsides? None. Completely backwards compatible, a user would never know they are using a completely different implementation of an NFT

A new method of minting NFTs

Currently right now — you mint an NFT by calling “mint()” and then its created. Thats cool — it works well. But if you are a project who wants to make a few hundred NFTs or an artist who is doing a print series of 100 artworks — it just doesn’t really make much sense, especially if you want to sell those NFTs.

So — while we don’t want to give away too much before its live — we have designed what we call….

Printable Series of NFTs

Get it? Get it? Mintable, Printable….

This new printable series will allow a user to offer an unlimited amount of NFTs to be available if someone wants to buy them — with a single transaction and with gas costs under $10 for the transaction.

This means if your an artist wanting to sell 500 NFTs you don’t need to pay $120 to do it, or $2000 to do it on another platform.

When will all this be live?

We will have everything live and open for anyone to use when we launch our 2.0 app on https://mintable.app. Its taken us awhile to do this — but we are working hard on it everyday. We expect everything to be live long before the end of the year. So its coming — soon.

In the meantime, you can check out our app, maybe buy a lifetime discount card, or mint an NFT. (Just watch out for those gas fees)

--

--