Hello everyone,
Here is a little update on my recent NFT project called Titan Dogs.
After a crazy week end of debugging I finally managed to upload all art, create the candy machine on the Solana mainnet and mint my own NFT. That wasn't an easy task. Let me tell you all about it!
I used Metaplex, a group of tools to assist you in making your own NFT collection on Solana. They have code to generate the asset, upload it on the blockchain, a React application with wallet connector to mint. The one stop shop!
I had no idea how much a collection would cost, that's why I had planned on 10,000 items. But I used the cost estimator on their website and I noted the following costs:
- A rental fee for the candy machine (for the random NFT mint) which depends on the number of items. For a 1,000 item collection it is 1.67 SOL (292 USD) for 2 years (payed upfront but refunded if closed early)
- File and metadata permanent storage fees 0.0003 SOL (0.05 USD) per file on Arweave (AWS and IPFS solutions possible).
- Minor transaction fees.
I decided to go for 1,000 items which was much more reasonable for a first project and also taking into account the number of attributes in my illustrations. I meticulously prepared the images with the corresponding metadata file according to the documentation.
I then followed the instructions with both a video tutorial and the official docs. What tricked me is that everything was working so well on the devnet, when I changed to the mainnet things started going wrong.
I realized I actually needed to used an RPC (remote procedure call) node on the mainnet to avoid any crash. That added the RPC node rental to the costs (9USD per month).
I also changed the storage from arweave to arweave-sol (paid directly in sol) which bundled the files when uploading, making it more efficient. At some point I even had a crash with arweave, which burned all the funds of my wallet (2 SOL) without uploading anything... Probably an error in loop that used it all up in transactions. :-(
Big thank you to the people in the Metaplex discord server. Everyone was very helpful. It's a great hub for any Solana NFT creator out there.
To sum up: I should have paid 2 SOL (360 USD) but paid 5 (875 USD). 8-O
If I had to do it again I would upload smaller files to reduce cost to the maximum. (Current files are 5MB each) Also I might pick a standard storage solution like AWS or IPFS. Storage on arweave was sometimes unpredictable (It got better towards the end). Thankfully now that is done, I won't have to pay a monthly fee for this. My NFTs can live forever!
The whole process seemed easy on paper but in real life I went from error to error, paying fees most of the time. Also I ended up using the brand new version of the candy machine because the first one did not allow the last part of the process. Very frustrating.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is all very new. Solana is still in beta and Metaplex's repository is from June 2021. In the end, it's all good as I learnt a lot from those errors. I allocate those costs to my blockchain learning journey.
And now to the fun part... Minting!
Using the basic front end provided I was able to mint my first Titan Dogs tokens. I set the price as 0.25 SOL (44 USD today). The mint will be public in a few days but I thought I would mint a few tokens early for marketing purposes. I'll do giveaways on Hive and Twitter at launch! So stick around for a chance to join the club!
With the candy machine complete, it is now time to create a simple website in order to host this component. I did a simple design in Figma as follows.
I'm confident that I can wrap this up in a few days, so that the tokens are finally available to everyone on the 1st of January 2022! I'll keep you posted on the progress here.
Once the site complete I'll go share more on the roadmap as well. The priority after the launch would be the implementation of voting for the token holders, and the first prototype for the game to show more utility.
Thanks for passing by,
See you on the other side,
Jrej