Contrary to popular belief, there are ways to sell NFT without paying. In many NFT marketplaces, you have to pay marketplace fees and gas fees before publishing your NFT for sales.
This can be a deterrent for NFT artists and sellers who want to start publishing their art, as they’ll have to pay a lot of crypto just for a chance to sell their NFTs.
There’s a solution for that: a process known as lazy minting. Lazy minting lets you sell NFTs without crypto.
Let’s find out how you can start selling your NFTs for free:
What is mint NFT?
NFTs exist in the tamper-free ledger of data known as the Blockchain. Blockchain technology ensures that NFTs can’t be duplicated or copied.
Minting an NFT involves publishing your token on the Blockchain for a purchase. To do this, you should create a digital wallet to store cryptocurrency.
Minting an NFT incurs a miner’s fee, compensation for the Blockchain miners who employ their computing power to power the transactions that publish the NFT.
What is the gas fee?
Gas fees are the payments individuals make to complete transactions on the Blockchain. Paying for gas is necessary to validate all blockchain transactions, but its price is volatile and depends on various factors.
These factors are block time, the time required for the specific Blockchain to generate new blocks and transactions, and the chain’s transactions per second rate, which determines how many transactions it can process in a second.
Ethereum is slower and more congested than other chains, meaning gas fees are more expensive than Solana. The Solana blockchain has lower fees thanks to its higher transaction speed.
Gas fees are calculated using Gwei as a unit of measurement. Gwei is a blend of Giga and Wei, a name used to define the cryptocurrency Ethereum, the coin used in the Ethereum network. Gwei is equivalent to 0.000000001 ETH.
NFT gas fee is calculated by using this formula:
NFT gas fee = minimum gas x gas price in GWEI.
What is lazy minting?
One of the recurring issues of the blockchain industry and NFT space is the congested network. Millions of transactions can occur at any given time on a blockchain, and depending on their transaction speed, these could be very costly in terms of gas fees.
Lazy minting is an alternative for NFT artists who don’t want to spend much money without the certainty that their NFTs will sell.
Lazy minting requires a smart contract used by the NFT marketplace where you use your private key to generate a signature for the NFT.
This will list the NFT in the marketplace and allow the buyer to pay for the gas fee when buying the lazy minted NFT.
The seller will deduct the fees after the buyer purchases the NFT, but at least they can sell it without paying and don’t risk losing money if the NFTs don’t sell as much as they projected.
Lazy minting also comes with certain disadvantages for the seller. First, as it removes gas fees, the seller has less control over the NFT sales than average. They can’t control who purchases their work or intervene in its transfer.
It can be less secure than traditional minting. Remember that when you mint an NFT, you validate the transaction as part of the Blockchain. Your NFT could be weaker to fraud or duplication than usual if it’s not validated.
Best places to sell NFT for free
The best places to sell an NFT without paying are OpenSea and Rarible, as both marketplaces offer multi-chain support and allow lazy minting while still being quite popular. OpenSea is a top NFT marketplace, and Rarible has one of the best UX/UIs in the entire NFT space.
How to sell NFT without gas fees:
To sell an NFT without paying gas fees, first select your NFT marketplace of choice. Some of the best options that also offer lazy minting are OpenSea and Rarible.
- If selling on OpenSea, you must use their Collection Manager and create an ERC-1155 collection.
- On OpenSea, go to the collections you’ve created and click on “Add Item.”
- Upload your NFT and fill the required data, including description, properties (if any), and the supply, which is the amount of the item that can be minted.
- Use the external link space to add a link to your NFT project’s website or your socials.
- Select the Polygon network. Polygon offers a gas-free experience and works with Ethereum.
- Click on “Create” and complete the verification captcha to complete the creation of your NFT.
To sell an NFT without paying gas fees on Rarible, here’s the step-to-step guide:
- Go to Rarible.com, sign in to your wallet, and your account.
- Click on “Create” to begin the process of lazy minting.
- Choose between single or multiple collectibles.
- Upload the file you want to mint as an NFT.
- Choose the price of the NFT if you’re going to sell for a fixed price or through an auction.
- Fill in the information of your NFT, such as relevant data, supply, description, properties, etc.
- Select “Free minting.”
- Click “create item” and sign the free authorization on your crypto wallet.
Lazy minting lowers the barrier for entry to the NFT space, allowing artists who don’t have a considerable budget for gas fees to sell their NFTs and make a profit regardless. They can even incorporate the fee into their pricing structure, making it less liability for enthusiastic NFT artists.
Final words about selling NFTs without paying
Minting NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain can be expensive when gas prices are high, especially considering how not all NFT projects sell.
Then there’s the fact that even if the NFT sells, you won’t earn as much from it due to the high price you had to pay to mint it in the first place.
Lazy minting offers you an alternative for selling NFTs without paying. Check out our other articles here to learn more about What are NFTs.
