Free NFTs — good or bad? Plus, a free Smart Contract template for Free-mint & tier-priced NFT collections.

Over the past couple of months, with (almost) everybody getting rekt by the bear market, the NFTs found a new way to thrive — the Free Mints.

So, are free mints good or bad? We’ve heard arguments for both sides, and here is our opinion on them.

Like any other good idea, we, humans, will find a way to turn it around and make it bad. It’s just how things are in life, and it’s up to you to pick a side.

Let’s start with the “bad.”

You might think it’s a free mint; what could be bad about it?

Let us first try to define or classify “bad”:

• It can be bad for the general NFT industry;
• It can be bad for the NFT collectors and investors.

What opens the doors for bad things to start happening is that at 0 ETH/mint or very, very low prices, for example, 0.00X ETH/mint — the bar (of quality) drops very low. All of a sudden, it is OK to invest ZERO effort into the artwork (people would mint nothing literally), ZERO effort into the community, no Discords, no roadmaps, nothing — and it seems “ok” because of the price you pay to mint — 0 ETH or very close to it.

Bad for the industry

The first problem this creates is that the market is flooded with terrible, low-effort projects. And this leaves a bad impression on the people that haven’t yet entered the NFT space or/and the mainstream media talking about the NFT industry. It’s just another argument someone can make on why NFTs are bad as a whole.

Pretty clear, right? Let’s dive a bit deeper now.

Cash grabs

How can a free mint be a cash grab? Easy… In our opinion, even very low mint prices (less than 0.01 ETH/mint) should be considered “free mints.”

It is easy to understand how delivering shit NFTs for less than 0.01 ETH per mint is still delivering shit and charging money for it, and when you add a multiple of, for example, 5000 to it — it’s a cash grab.

On the other hand, some of these projects are pretty hyped. And if the creators are experienced on that front, even at 0 ETH/mint, they can make money through royalties from sales on secondary markets. Some of the projects will succeed, but most won’t — so it still boils down to paying money for nothing.

NFT thefts

Here is where things get serious — a truly bad actor will hide a malicious smart contract behind a free mint. The bottom line is — the end user thinks they are minting a free NFT while, in fact, their wallet is being drained of everything they own.

Messed up, we know. But, it’s hard to tell which is worse — the greed and desire to get something for nothing or malice and will to exploit that greed.

But it’s not all bad. Let’s look at the bright side of free mints.

We think there are a few intertwined positives to the free mint movement: fun, speed, idea validation, and community inception.

Fun

First, we think free mints can be fun. If the creators behind it do not have any bad intentions, a free mint can be a fun experience for everyone.

The creators do not have to spend months of hard work and (tens of) thousands of dollars on building a community, and the participants pay just a bit of gas to be a part of an Internet joke or a meme in the making.

It might turn into something valuable one day, but it most likely won’t, but who cares? We all had a good laugh, and it was fun while it lasted. Plus, those who are new to the space probably learned something.

Speed & idea validation

A free mint allows creators to move very fast. Those with experience in the start-up world know how valuable this speed can be — knowing if you are right or wrong about a product-market-fit.

A free mint is like a “free trial,” and it can help founders find out whether or not there is a general interest in their big idea. In other words, it can help them test the “hype-potential” of their vision, and build the foundation for the “main collection”.

If nobody was interested in your story when it’s free, there is a high probability no one would pay to mint it either — and this will save you an incredible amount of time and money.

Community inception

On the other hand, if people like your idea and your story, and they start showing up in numbers — you might be onto something.

If your free mint goes incredibly well, it’s a 100% sign you’re onto something, and you should take the idea further.

What is good about it — is that at this moment, you’ve already gained some hype and momentum, you have identified and gathered your early adopters, and you can start building your community further.

The benefits, in this case, are indeed many. To name just a few of them:

• First, your Discord will not start with two members (assuming there are at least two founders to a project) — your Discord will start with a few hundred, if not a few thousand members.
• It will be easier for you to collaborate with already established NFT projects. People will want to work with you.
• You will have secondary sales of your free mint, and the royalties from those secondary sales can help you fund the development of the real thing.

This introductory free mint is going to be the approach we will take on our next big project. It will allow us to validate our ideas beforehand and tell a better story — we’re all storytellers in the end anyway.

If there is a takeaway from this article — it is that it’s up to us to pick a side, are we going to be a “Jedi” or a “Sith”, and always RTFC (read the fucking contract) before you click that Mint button.

What about that free free-mint smart contract template you mentioned in the title?

About that… :) We want to encourage and help all creators, artists, and people with ideas in general. Assuming you are one of them, we would like to make your life easier — so we made a smart contract template. It’s free, robust, and ready to deploy. All you need to do is adjust basic parameters such as your collection name, token tracker, price, and a few other things.

Here’s a brief overview of the features included in this contract:

• Merkle tree allowlist/whitelist
• Per wallet and transaction mint limits
• Tiered pricing
• Contract pause state controls
• Supply management
• Token URI management
• Admin/owner mints
• Payment splitter

Before we share the download link, a word on tiered pricing — the contract allows you to set pricing tiers. For example, you can configure the contract so that the first 1000 mints are free, 1001–2000 are 0.00X ETH/mint, and 2000 and above are 0.00Y ETH per mint. You can have unlimited tiers, or you can set the entire collection to be free.

Per wallet and per transaction limits allow you to configure the limits on how many NFTs a single wallet can mint and what is the maximum number of NFTs that can be minted in a single transaction.

The contract also allows the deployer to control the supply after the contract has been deployed.

The allowlist/whitelist support is done via the Merkle Tree mechanism, and the contract allows you to update the allowlist/whitelist after the contract has been deployed.

Base URI and file extensions management allow you to control your metadata and do a live or delayed collection reveal.

It’s a full-blown smart contract with pretty much everything you need.

You can download the contract from our GitHub repository here. For full transparency, the contract does include a 2.5% optional tip for 0xRebels in case you are doing a paid-mint, but as we said — it’s completely optional, and you are free to remove it from the contract.

We hope you found this article insightful and the smart contract we shared with you helpful. If you are already working on, or planning to start working on your NFT collection — we’d love to hear from you and help you if we can. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter.

Stay safe, be mindful of rugs and scams, and follow us on Twitter and Medium for more articles like this.

May the Force be with you :)

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