Behind the scenes of an NFT Collection, Part 3: Time to Mint
This is the final installment of a 3-part series providing a behind-the-scenes look at the launch of Orcanauts, an impact-driven NFT collection on Solana. Missed the earlier installments? Head over here for Part 1 on generative art, and here for Part 2 on creating a minting website.
Designing and building our Orcanauts and getting the mint website up and running took about a month. This was accompanied by a huge marketing effort from the Orca team to make sure people understood what was happening and when, and why they might be interested in Orcanauts!
As mint day approaches, you’ll want to start generating tokens, think about distribution, and make decisions on secondary sales.
Generating your NFTs
I’ll make the first part super-easy for you! In the Solana ecosystem, Metaplex’s Candy Machine is the go-to program for minting NFTs. It does all the heavy lifting around uploading your images to Arweave (or other desired immutable image provider) and creating the tokens themselves. It will also handle the associated metadata accounts that store the token-specific metadata we generated with our art.
You can configure the Candy Machine to open at a certain time and even configure it to accept an SPL token besides SOL which can be useful for communities which have their own tokens. The Candy Machine does take some time to set up however, especially for collections as large as 10,000. Using the base configurations, it took a few hours to upload all the relevant information for the Orcanauts, and cost about 16–20 SOL to cover the cost of the token rent as well as the image storage on Arweave.
Once you’ve finished uploading your Candy Machine config using the candy-machine CLI, you will create the actual instance of the Candy Machine that will distribute those NFTs. Important note — if you’re using a treasury wallet that is different from the keypair used to create the Candy Machine, you must set the — sol-treasury-wallet CLI flag and make sure that that wallet shows up in your mint website too. You can confirm the configuration of your Candy Machine with the candy-machine show command; misconfiguring this led us to delay our first launch by a couple of hours while we figured out what went wrong.
DISCLAIMER: These tips are built off of assumptions made with Candy Machine v1, which has since been deprecated. Please use Candy Machine v2 for all your minting needs, as some of these issues have been addressed.
Distribution
While the Candy Machine is capable of distributing NFTs, it is very simple. Given the token cost, it will provide an NFT… But what about presales, allowlists, or other ways to make sure an exclusive set of wallets gets access to it? What if you don’t know how much you should charge for your token? Most importantly, how can you make sure that humans and your community are the ones minting NFTs and not bots?
This topic is nuanced and many choices abound, with too many facets to explore in this piece. But with the Orcanauts we ended up going with the basic Candy Machine approach: we really wanted to have the “first-come, first-served” experience that harkened back to the days of ripping open Pokemon trading card packs. There are some obvious trade-offs to this strategy: the basic Candy Machine program has no mitigation for bots, and is largely restricted to the timezone of the launch time. In order to better serve the international Orca community, we broke our phase up over two mint periods, restricting access to the first mint to Orca users who had provided liquidity or swapped on Orca.
After the Mint
After a wildly successful mint that sold out in less than half an hour, the next phase was critical to get right — verifying our collection to be listed exclusively on Magic Eden. Verifying the collection is important because it is really easy to duplicate NFTs, and without that verification even the secondary marketplace cannot guard users from unwittingly falling for scams. Using `samdvwall/metaboss`, we provided our two Candy Machine ids to the CLI and it immediately spit out our list of mint addresses, the 10,000 unique mint addresses corresponding to our Orcanaut collection.
We provided this list to Magic Eden for secondary sales, but also to MoonRank for rarity analysis and to Grape Protocol to provide exclusive access to the #orcanautical Discord channel for Orcanauts holders. Orcanauts holders excitedly posted their newly adopted ‘nauts in the #show-your-orcanauts channel, with folks fawning over each other’s rare finds (clearly, the best-in-show was the Samo accessory!). Within the Orca team, celebrations ensued to mark this wonderful milestone.
As you’ve made it so far into this novel, I hope you’ve learned something about launching an NFT on Solana!
This isn’t the end of our commitments to Orcanauts, merely the start. If you’re interested in being a part of the #Orcanautical Community, you can find your next adorable adoptee on Magic Eden. If you have questions about any of the processes we went through for this launch, you’re welcome to hit me up on Twitter @jnwng.
I’d like to thank the Orca team and @corcorarium for the opportunity to turn the Orcanauts dream into a reality. Shoutout to Nikhil for the connect, Ori and Yutaro for taking a leap, and the entire Orca team for their love and support through the entire process.
Disclaimer: The content of this communication is not financial advice and should not be relied on by any persons as financial advice. This communication has not been provided in consideration of any recipient’s financial needs. We have not conducted any financial assessment based on the personal circumstances of any recipients. All persons are encouraged to seek their own independent financial advice prior to taking any further action.
