Why Using An Allowlist Will Save Your Free Mint

As an NFT creator, you may want to offer a free mint to your loyal community as part of your NFT project launch. However, there have been many instances where bots have ruined the experience. They can be used to infiltrate a mint and snatch up all the tokens, preventing your real community from minting them. To prevent this, you can use allowlists, which are a form of authentication used to manage who can participate in a minting experience.

What are bots, and why are they a threat to digital creators?

In the world of digital collectibles, "bots" typically refer to software programs that scoop up as many NFTs as possible during a mint. Unlike humans, bots can conduct consecutive mints and can perform all the actions required to mint faster than humans are capable of. This is where the trouble starts.

Bots can cause harm as people can design them to snatch up scarce NFTs for personal gain, taking them out of circulation and preventing others from acquiring them. This hoarding of bots deprives the market of liquidity, can make it difficult for other collectors to acquire the art, and prevents a real community from forming around a project.

While bots can wreak havoc on all blockchains, they don't pose the same threat on all of them. Depending on where you launch your project, bots can present a more significant issue on some chains than others. Solana is a prime example of the differing nature of NFT minting bots. Because Solana has low gas prices and high transactions per second, bots can seriously disrupt the minting process. Nevertheless, although bots are a potential hazard for digital art drops on all blockchains, we're here to provide you with the solution and prevent them from ruining your project launch.

Why are Allowlists the solution?

Allowlists are a form of authentication that manage who can participate in a minting experience. By creating an allowlist for your free mint, you can ensure that only trusted members of your community can participate. They verify a wallet address during the buying transaction and reject the transaction if the address is not on the list. This makes it difficult for bots and other malicious actors to take advantage of your art drop, as they must first obtain an approved address.

Allowlists also serve as a way to reward true fans of your project and provide utility for other projects by granting exclusive access. If you're planning on launching an NFT project, it's important to be aware of the potential problems that bots can cause and to have a plan in place to prevent them. By using allowlists, you can provide a secure and reliable way to ensure that only trustworthy collectors from your community can participate in your free mint.

Create an allowlist with NFT-Inator

Creating an allowlist usually requires a developer if you're launching a custom smart contract. If by this point you have decided that you want to use an Allowlist to prevent bots ruining your mint, then you may want to use a free tool like NFT-Inator to manage your project. Even if you're at a later stage in your launch, your collection can be added to NFT-Inator to make the management and launch process even easier.

When you deploy a smart contract with NFT-Inator, you have the ability to customize your contract and create an Allowlist. The process for doing this is as simple as clicking a few buttons and adding the wallet addresses of the people who want to mint your NFTs. You can also edit your allowlist to add more wallet addresses to your list even after you have deployed your contract. With NFT-Inator you get access to a contract dashboard where you can manage these settings, among many other features.

You can generate your collection and then deploy your contract on NFT-Inator, or if you have already created the artwork for your project, then you can go ahead and upload it to NFT-Inator and simply use the smart contract deployment feature. If you want to learn more about how the Allowlist feature works on NFT-Inator, you can head to the website and go to the Docs page where there is an in-depth guide about every aspect of our tool.

Allowlists are crucial

To ensure a successful launch free from the threat of bots depleting your art supply, allowlists are an essential component of your Web3 toolbox. Luckily for you, it's easier now more than ever to create an allowlist and ensure that your launch will be secure.