We were continuing the series of articles for a general understanding of the NFT ecosystem and ways to make money. In the previous article, we considered fraudulent schemes on Twitter, fake NFT promoters and classified bots. Additionally, we discussed non-effective strategies for promoting NFT projects in Crypto Twitter (CT) and how to distinguish quality collection profiles from fake ones.
This article will introduce you to free mints and NFT raffles on Ethereum. You can find a complete and structured database on the cryptocurrency market in our Notion (beta version in Russian).
What is Mint?
As part of our article series, we only look at the NFT ecosystem of the Ethereum blockchain. As of Fall 2022, the trend is towards Solana-based projects. But we won’t be touching on this blockchain anytime soon. Let’s start with the theory and terminology. So what is a mint?
A Mint — is a process of obtaining a digital asset, a converted digital file stored on a blockchain. We classify mints into two types: free mint and paid mint.
History of Free Mints
Free Mint — the type of mint where you get a digital asset for free. You pay a transaction fee.
Free Mints have existed for a long time, but the crazy trend for them started after the release of the Goblintown.wtf collection.
Goblintown.wtf — an NFT market phenomenon, a collection of 9,999 jpegs mined on May 19. It took place via a free mint and splashed throughout the crypto community. The peak price per NFT was 7.65 ETH. The dollar value of one NFT was $14,000. All you had to do to mint the collection was to pay a transaction fee on the Ethereum network. The approximate amount was $40–50.
And this situation spawned a frenzied trend for free mines, which were hot throughout the summer of 2022. Hundreds of useless collections of free mines were released daily, and the degens mined them in batches and tried to sell them at a profit. Crazy as hell! But people who had time to ride the trend — made nice cash. This trend is almost over when writing this article, but NFT degens could tinker all summer and make obscene amounts of money.
We predict your question: is it possible to make money on free mints now? Our answer is yes, but it has become several times harder. It would be best if you had great competence and used analytical tools to be a member of closed alpha chats. In short, be in the market full-time.
Let’s look at the case of the DigiDaigaki project free mint. The mint was in early August, and the value of 1 NFT at its peak was 15 ETH. In dollar terms, it was $24,000. How do you like such sums? As they say — everyone could.
So everything is in your hands, develop, try something new, and you are sure to succeed. The NFT market has excellent prospects. Read our articles where we share our personal experiences—explore services for project analytics. You're mistaken if you think it’s too late to come here.
Mint via Smart Contract
When there is a new trend — it creates excitement, and crypto memes are activated. That’s why a large number of scams appear. We will not consider this topic within this article — only very superficially.
Minting NFT of dubious projects through the front end of a website has always been a dangerous activity. In layman’s terms, there are some sites where you connect Metamask, click on the mint and sign the transaction. Because of inattention, you may not see the function's name when you sign the transaction. The Mint function may be replaced by Set Approval for All. If you sign it, you will be introduced to a drainer.
Drainers are phishing pages that entice victims to sign malicious transactions that allow an attacker to gain access to your cryptocurrency and NFT.
How to keep yourself safe:
- Use only a hot wallet (with nothing but a small amount of ETH to pay for gas) for NFT mints.
- Read carefully which transactions you sign.
- Use Degenmint service, whose users highlight illegitimate projects.
And the easiest tip: don’t minify NFT via the front end of the website — use Degenmint directly via a smart contract. We’ll give you a little guide on how to do this:
- Find the contract address in Etherescan. 90% of the projects make it freely available on Twitter or Discord before the start of the mint. Let’s take the goblintown.wtf collection is an example. Their contract address is 0x3b3698303f600f11589c3dc6e2b0abf18b79cd55
2. Press the “Contract” button, then select “Write Contract” and press the “Connect to Web3” button.
3. After connecting the wallet to the interface, we look for the function's name, which has the word “mint”, “free mint”, or similar terms.
4. In the column “mint” — payableAmount (ether), we write 0. In the case of free mint. If it is a paid mint — we enter the amount of mint in ETH. In the column “mintAmount”, we write the number of NFTs we will mint. Most often, it is one piece per wallet.
5. We press the button “Write” and sign the transaction. The job is done. Check if the transaction was successful in the blockchain browser.
In our screenshot is a column “_address (string)”. This column will not be present if you have a free minuteman for all comers. If you need an allowlist for mints, you can’t mint NFT with a smart contract. The topic of how to mint through such contracts is at an advanced level. We won’t touch it in this article.
In general, anything that can be minted through a smart contract without using a website, you minted directly.
Free Mint via Whitelist
Some collections allow you to mint them NFT only if you have an allowlist. Whitelist (WL) — is a list of NFT project members pre-approved for minting.
How do I get it? It would help if you were active in the community to bring value to the project. Most often, they give WL for accomplished tasks in Discord servers. For example, a contest for the best meme, art, translating articles into your other languages, or just typing in chats, corresponding in them. Benefit the project, and your contribution will not remain unnoticed.
You can also give away your winks in giveaways on Twitter. Follow the social media collections and be an active member of the community. You could create many accounts, get allowlists and then sell them on specialised OTC sites. That’s how the trend of multi-accounts was born.
Later, projects started using certain services for playing so-called allowlists with a convenient system to weed out bots and multiple accounts. The big projects took this step to reward only their loyal audience instead of multi accounts. The purpose of multi-accounts is to make money. They mined the collection on several accounts and sold it at once on the secondary market, thus rolling up the floor price of the projects.
The market needed special services, and NFT raffle sites appeared.
NFT Raffles
The raffle is a drawing of NFT tokens held at specialised services, where winners are randomly selected and receive NFT for further minting or subsequent sale on marketplaces.
Raffles platforms are analogues of IDO and ICO platforms, for example, DAO Maker or Coinlist. But only related to NFT projects. Let’s consider the most popular raffles platforms:
Premint — the platform for the creation of Web3. Widely used by the world’s leading NFT artists, communities and brands. The first and most popular service.
Superful — analogue of Premint, but recently gaining popularity.
Magic Eden Drops — analogue of Premint, but more suitable for raffles on Solana. Ethereum support has also appeared recently.
HeyMint — analogue of Premint, more suitable for small collections since using the site is free.
Where to Look for NFT Raffles?
The easiest way is Twitter bots. We can recommend an aggregator of raffles with Premint, Superful and HeyMint — Premint Alert Bot. But, the most exciting projects can be found in closed alpha groups in Discord. There is a trend for NFT Pass — NFT with access to closed communities. But that’s another story.
But if you’re more serious — buy Premint Collector Pass. With it, you’ll access all NFT rafts in one place. You’ll have privileges in projects just for holders of this pass. And a lot of other stuff. The cost of access on the secondary market is about 0.4 ETH.
How do I participate in NFT raffles?
It’s pretty simple. To participate in raffles, you need a Twitter account, Discord, email and a Metamask wallet with some ETH for gas.
Usually, registration looks like this — subscribe to the project’s Twitter, like and retweet the entry, join Discord and click “register”. If you win, you’ll get an email with further actions.
Multi-account farms
Even before the free-mint frenzy, there were raffle sites. But, it wasn’t until late spring 2022 that they started to gain momentum. In early April, there was the Premint Collector Pass minting — it was free. And later, the cost per NFT was as high as 3 ETH.
Participants of the NFT market understood that it was possible to earn on this hype and started to make multi-accounts for participation in raffles on Premint. The more accounts — the higher the chance of winning an allowlist. And the madness began…
Also, register via our OKX link. Why OKX? The exchange stands out for its high trading volume, a growing number of users, and reliability, especially against the background of recent problems with Binance for Russian citizens. We have been using the exchange for a long time and appreciate OKX for its low commissions, high liquidity, fast transactions, and user-friendly interface, but the main feature is the ability to use sub-accounts. Few exchanges support the creation of sub-accounts, and our journey began with FTX. However, after the collapse of FTX, we switched to OKX, which is perfect as an exchange for Sybils.
How do you eliminate the chance of a project deciding you’re a retrohunter? The key point in multi-accounting is to avoid crossing wallets and use sub-accounts, where the exchange provides different addresses for input, but the money is stored in one place. And this is where OKX comes to the rescue.
Conclusion
As we learned, you can still make money on free mines and NFT raffles. There is less competition in a bear market, and those who can tell the difference between a good project and a mediocre one earn more. It’s better to sign up 100 accounts for ten cool projects than ten accounts for 100 low-quality collections.
In the following article, we will continue to talk about multi-accounts, how to create them and what they are used for. It will be a complete guide with beneficial information. And then, we’ll share with you how to make a farm for Premint Abuse and earn from it. We’ll show you the behind-the-scenes raffle creators on Premint using Creator Pass and tell you what you need to do to keep your multi-accounts from getting dropped by collection creators.
Want to thank us for the work we do — share the articles with your friends and subscribe to our social networks. As they say, Stay tuned!
