Free Mint NFT Collections are on the rise and it is mostly due to the downturn in Crypto market (and other parts of the economy). I have always been a fan of Free Mint NFTs as an easy entry point for collectors to get into a project with a great mission and start contributing to its success. Although, Free Mint Collection should not be used as a bait for collectors to get into a project. while the project owners only have an incentive to collect royalties on the secondary sales; without any good intention to provide value to the community.

Now that we have talked about why you want to create a Free Mint Collection, let’s build one with the help of Flair.

Create NFT Collection

First thing we need is to create our NFT Collection smart contract. There are few criteria for this:

• We want to adjust the price for this collection to be 0

• We want to only allowlist certain wallet addresses to mint our NFTs

• We want optimized gas fee for collectors 

To create our contract, we head to Flair dashboard, choose Collections on sidebar and then select Simple NFT Sales extension.

The great thing about these extensions is that they are using the optimized ERC721A contract which is highly optimized for collectors. As your collectors are not paying anything for these NFTs, you also don’t want them to pay a high gas fee when minting.

Collection Metadata

After clicking on Simple NFT Sales extension, you need to fill out few details about your collection. Choose the right image, title and description for it; as well as how many NFTs are gonna be available.

Collection Price

Next step is to define the price of the collection which should enable the free mint for collectors. Now we have two options:

• We can only make the free mint exclusively available to allowlisted members

• We can have a portion of free mint for allowlisted members and rest for the public free mint

If we are going for exclusive allowlisted members without any public free mint, we never have to enable the Public Sale in Flair dashboard (will be shown later in the blog post). For now we will set the price for both Pre-Sale and Public-Sale to 0.

Collection Royalty

Finally, we will set the royalty percentage and receiver address for our collection. As I mentioned before, a large financial incentive for Free Mint NFT projects is the royalty on secondary sales (considering the project is creating value for the collectors and is not merely a hype project trying to take advantage of the market dynamics)

Deploy Contract

As developers or project builders, we want to always have full transparency about the tools we are using and the contracts we are deploying. By clicking on “Inspect the code” button at the bottom of the Flair Dashboard, you can exactly see the contract that you are deploying. 

Now, we click on “Preview” to deploy our contract and hit “Save now” in the next page; unless the collection and pre-reveal metadata is not correctly uploaded to IPFS (for that case you can hit in “Try again” button).

Finally, we need to hit the “Deploy” button while making sure the “Use Azuki ERC71-A” section is toggled with optimized gas fee for our collectors.

Manage Allowlist

After our contract is deployed, we want to create an allowlist and only allow selected wallet addresses to mint for free. For that, we choose the “Lists” and hit “New List” button.

After creating the list, click on your list and import the list of wallet addresses you gathered from your community. If you are looking for a tool to collect wallet addresses, I highly recommend MintParty, which is also a Flair technical partner.

After filling your list with the allowlisted addresses, it is time to head back to our NFT collection and apply it; so only wallet addresses inside this list are allowed to mint for free. 

Choose the List you created under “Apply allowlist” and hit “Apply allowlist”. And that’s it. Couldn’t be easier than this :)

Minting NFTs

Now it is time to test the flow for our Free Mint NFT Collection. We first need to enable the “Pre-Sale”, so allowlisted addresses can start minting for free. Click on “Pre-Sale” section on the NFT Collection page and hit “Activate Pre-sale” button.

After that, head to “Minting” section and click on “View public minting page”.

And that’s it. All the allowlisted members from your community can claim your NFTs for free. If not all the NFTs in your collection are minted by allowlisted members and you want to open it to public, all you have to do is to enable “Public Sale” in Collection section, set the “Public-sale max per tx” to the number of NFTs you want user to mint per transaction and make sure the “Public-sale price” is also set to 0.