Free Mints
Giving other collections 1X free mint for your collection is one of the best marketing tools you have. Other collections love that value is being given to their holders and are more likely to give you promotion in return as thanks.
Free mints are not entirely free, they still require a gas fee to claim, and when gas is high it can be painful for people to claim your free mints. Do not let that stop you from offering them however. Gas prices go up and down and people can wait until gas is lower to claim their free mints.
The process to setup free mints is simple.
- Use a site like https://holders.art/ to take a snapshot of the holders of the collection you wish to give free mints to.
- Create a list for your collection where you paste this list of addresses into, and make sure that the wallet limit is set to 1.
- Only the holders of that collection in that snapshot will be able to
Even major collections offer some kind of free mint so if you are not planning on having one you should reconsider. You can add more collections to free mint over time.
If you want to setup public free mints (i.e. anyone can mint for free) make sure you've set the list limit as well, otherwise the whole supply may be minted out by bots. Generally, it is advisable to avoid public free mint lists as they tend to attract bots, resulting in fewer tokens being distributed to genuine community members. A preferable approach would be to take snapshots of existing collection holders within your community and offer free mints to them. You can always create more free mint lists with snapshots of more collections over time.
If you want to setup public free mints on L2 chains (like Base, Blast, etc) you should understand it’s even more of a bad idea, since minting there is so cheap even if you put wallet limits bots can still mint out the collection for cents with public free mints. Free mints on L2s need to always be snapshot based on collecting wallets from real people.
