Launching your next NFT collection

0xMarko|2025

If you’re planning to launch your own NFT collection, it’s important to know how to make the process smooth, secure, and fair. A good minting experience can build trust and help your project succeed.

We've seen dozen of projects fail to launch their NFT collections due to smart contract bugs, poor minting strategies and lack of technical support.

While creating a community and hype around your project is important, it's not enough to ensure a successful launch. You need to have a solid technical foundation and a good execution strategy.

Let's go through the most important technical aspects of launching your next NFT collection.

Minting Strategies

Minting strategies are the methods used to distribute NFTs to participants. There are numerous minting strategies, but the most common ones are:

Whitelist Mints

Whitelist mints give pre-approved participants exclusive access to mint an NFT. It's simple, you create a list of wallet addresses that are eligible to participate in the mint. Smart contract verifies that a user is on the list and allows them to mint.

Whitelist spots are given by any means you imagine, such as airdrops, raffles, giveaways, partnerships, etc. You can get very creative with this, and there are no limits to what you can do.

Projects like to give whitelist spots to active community members, holders of their previous collections or partner projects. It's not unusual to see projects giving whitelist spots to different web3 influencers, Youtubers, Streamers etc, to help them build hype around their collection.

Token-Gated Mints

Token gating requires participants to hold a specific token (e.g., an NFT or ERC-20 token) to qualify for minting. This approach builds on existing communities by rewarding holders of your previous collections or partner projects.

For example, you can have a partnership with Pudgy Penguins, and require participants to hold a Pudgy Penguin NFT to mint your collection. Smart contract verified that user has a Pudgy Penguin NFT and allows them to mint.

Same thing can be done with any token, not only NFTs. For example, you can require participants to hold a specific amount of a token to mint your collection. This is especially powerful if you already have a token and want to build NFT collection around it.

Public Mints

Public mints are open to everyone, but they often attract bots. It's important to have a good anti-bot strategy in place, such as merkle proofs, backend signature minting, or other techniques.

Important thing to understand is that public mints are not always the best option. If you have a good community and hype around your project, you can skip public mints and go straight to a whitelist mint.

Combining Phases

Many projects combine phases, such as starting with a whitelist mint or token-gated phase, and concluding with a public mint. This approach balances exclusivity and inclusivity.

You can also have multiple whitelist mints, such as a public whitelist and a private whitelist. This is useful if you want to give more people a chance to mint, but also want to reward your most loyal community members.

You can also get creative here and have different price tiers for each minting phase. This also creates a sense of urgency and scarcity, as people will want to mint early to get the best price.

Minting strategy is very important, as it can determine the success of your NFT collection. Badly executed minting strategies can lead to a lot of issues, such as bots overwhelming the mint and a loss of community trust.

Technical Solutions for Minting

Efficient and secure minting requires a solid technical foundation. Smart contract will be at the center of your minting process, and you need to make sure it's secure and efficient. You can have amazing community and hype around your project, but if your smart contract is not secure, you are at risk of losing all of that.

Here are some tools and techniques you can use to make your minting process smooth and secure.

Merkle Proofs

Merkle trees are cryptographic data structures that enable efficient and secure verification of data.

How They Work

In the NFT context, a merkle tree can store a list of whitelisted wallet addresses. During the mint, users provide a merkle proof to prove their inclusion in the whitelist without revealing the entire list.

Here is an example of a simple merkle proof usage:

  1. Each wallet address is hashed using keccak256
  2. Pairs of hashes are combined and hashed again
  3. This process continues until a single root hash remains
  4. The smart contract only needs to store this root hash
  5. Users provide their merkle proof to verify inclusion

Important thing to understand is that you don't have to hash only wallet address, you can hash multiple parameters into a single leaf. For example, you could hash together an address, a quantity limit, and a price tier into a single leaf node.

This is very powerful, as it allows you to create complex whitelisting logic without having to put all the whitelisted addresses in the smart contract.

Why Use Them

Merkle proofs are computationally efficient. Without merkle proofs, you would have to put all the whitelisted addresses in the smart contract, which would be very expensive and inefficient.

Gas Cost Comparison

  • Storing 1000 addresses directly: ~1,500,000 gas
  • Storing merkle root: ~20,000 gas
  • Verifying proof: ~40,000 gas per mint

Backend Signature Minting

Backend signature minting requires users to obtain a cryptographic signature from a backend server before minting.

How It Works

  1. Users visit the minting website.
  2. The backend server verifies eligibility and issues a unique signature.
  3. The frontend submits the signature to the smart contract for validation.
  4. Smart contract verifies that the signature is valid and created by the backend server.

Benefits

Signature minting allows you to implement all kinds of custom logic for your minting process. For example, you can issue a signature to a user based on their X activity, or their balance of a specific token on any network without onchain computation.

Signature minting also prevents bots from directly interacting with the smart contract, as they need to be aware of the signature generation logic and server API endpoints.

Challenges

It's very important to have a good backend infrastructure in place, as you need to be able to handle high traffic and ensure that the backend is scalable and resilient.

Since signatures are generated by the private key that is exposed to the backend server, you need to make sure that the private key is not compromised, else anyone with the private key can generate signatures.

Using backend signature minting adds additional complexity to your project, as you need to make sure that both smart contract and backend are secure.

Scaling and Infrastructure

High-demand NFT mints can face performance bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks will be your centralized services, such as website for minting, backend for signature generation and centralized NFT metadata storage.

To ensure your mint is scalable and resilient, you need to have a good infrastructure in place.

  • Decentralized Storage: If possible, use solutions like IPFS or Arweave for storing metadata and assets to ensure availability. There are some project types that require centralized storage, in that case make sure that API is prepared for a possible high-demand.
  • Auto-Scaling Backend Services: Leverage cloud platforms like AWS with auto-scaling capabilities to handle peak traffic. Also make sure that you have a good monitoring and alerting system in place to ensure that your backend is always available. It's better to overallocate resources a bit more than you need, than to have a downtime. You can always scale down later.
  • Load Testing: Simulate high traffic scenarios to all of your services to identify and resolve potential bottlenecks before launch. Before the mint you should have a good idea of the traffic you can expect, and make sure that your infrastructure is able to handle it.

The success of your NFT collection depends on thoughtful planning and good technical solutions.

Reach out to me if you need help with your next NFT collection.