Gas Stamped NFT

08 Oct, 2021

The Problem

A moderately hyped nft drop on eth l1 can see gas prices skyrocket to upto four digit gwei levels. And what's the problem here? Obviously, you're paying ~25-50x of what you'd pay for a typical transaction. Moreover, this gas premium creates an inherent inequity favoring richer accounts, simply because they can afford to pay for the gas.

Secondly, there's another problem that isn't reflected in gas prices, but in the buyers themselves. Broadly, there are three kinds of NFT buyers — humans, humans who can use Etherscan and bots. With humans (both who can and cannot use Etherscan), the drop turns into a fastest finger first competition with all everyone eventually at the mercy of the network-latency gods.

So WTF is a Gas Stamped Mint

Gas-stamped mints provide a fun way to mitigate these problems. They also create a relatively fairer (level playing field) for all human actors that are part of the mint. Gas-stamping a transaction binds it to the gas price paid for the transaction using the tx.gasprice global variable. Post-eip1559, this gas price is the (base fee + priority fee). The miner's tip can be accessed in the contract via tx.gasprice - block.basefee.

What Does a Gas Stamped Mint Look Like

• Ranged mint transactions

  • The contract can limit the range of gas prices between which NFTs are minted to create a level playing field - e.g NFTs can only be minted between 50-150 gwei.
  • This can also be coupled with rarity features - rarer pieces can only be minted at a higher gas price.
  • Arbitrary gas price mints can have special value - e.g. A 420 gwei mint transaction allows you to mint a highly sought*after NFT

• Gas caps

  • Different gas level transactions can mint a different number of pieces
  • This could be used to create a mint process where the mints are skewed towards lower gas levels i.e. most mints are at low levels while some are at higher levels

• Creator-centric: This is good for creators too because now NFT themselves can be priced higher i.e. It'd be reasonable to pay 0.05E (instead of 0.01E) for the same mint when you know that you're never gonna pay outrageous gas fees on top.

Downsides

• Mints could stretch for hours depending on network usage, this might not be ideal

• Long mints could create an artificial asymmetery on secondary market platforms, i.e. Those who mint earlier stand to gain more

• Mints still need bot protection and the whole process is vulnerable to OTC bribes accepted by miners

Implementation

You can check out a sample implementation on github.