The essential part of any NFT project is its contract. Yet, most people ignore it and focus on other secondary stuff like the art, the team, and how they market the project.
The reason for that is the developers of any project don’t get creative when writing a contract for the project. That is why you see most of the projects out there were built with the standard ERC-721 contract.
The main purpose of a contract is to verify the ownership of an NFT within a collection. But you can program a contract that does anything you want for your collection. This is what the Chiru Lab team did in their project.
The Chiru Lab team, the founder of the Azuki collection, tried to create a new NFT contract with better performance. Their developers succeeded in building the ERC-721A contract, which is much better than the standard one in terms of gas cost.
Furthermore, this new contract became the best marketing strategy to promote the Azuki collection. The team just needed to write a blog post about this new contract and let the word-of-mouth marketing do the rest.
Therefore, it is a good strategy to focus on building a contract that markets itself. It also makes people hyped for your project.
Here are four different ways you can create a great smart contract for your project.
1. Write the contract by yourself
It is obvious that if you know how to write a contract on Ethereum or Solana network, then you don’t need to finish reading. Unless you don’t have time to write it by yourself.
But what if you know other programming languages like Python or C++? In this case, you can switch to Solidity (Ethereum programming language) very easily.
There is a famous course called Crypto Zombies which can teach you all the basics you need to write your first smart contract.
Also, all NFT projects out there have their contracts public on Ether Scan. You can read the contract of any project you want and learn from it.
2. Hire a freelancer to make the contract
Of course, money saves you time and effort. So, if you don’t know how to code or don’t have much time to do it, it is better to hire someone to do the job for you.
It is more professional, but highly expensive. A good freelancer may charge a thousand dollars at least for one contract, and this number gets bigger as you ask for a more complex contract.
If you don’t want to spend too much money before launching your collection, you can search for a developer who can be part of your team and take a percentage of the profit.
Just make sure you find someone who believes in your project and can be trusted. Because the developer can easily steal from you or even pull the entire fund of your project if he wants to.
3. Get software to do it for you
You don’t want to make the contract by yourself, and also can not hire an expensive freelancer to do it. Here is the middle option, you can get a software to write the smart contract for you at a cheaper price. Because bots are always much cheaper than freelancers.
NFT Generator is a great one for this task. It can write a contract for your project. All you need to do is provide some information about your collection, like the name, total supply, and mint price. And the great thing is that the developers of this software are consistently improving it to be more customizable.
Another advantage of the software is you buy it once and use it forever. You will be able to create as many contracts as you want.
4. Get a free contract from ZootChain
ZootChain developers (they also developed NFT Generator) offer a free contract for any NFT creator who is trying to kick his project off.
The developers promise to deliver a standard ERC-721 contract that is suitable for your collection. The code is well tested and will be ready for deployment.
With this free contract, your collection will function normally, just like most of the projects in the market today. But if you need more customization on the contract, then you need to hire a developer to add any functionality you want.
You can get your free contract from here.
I hope this post helps you make your smart contract. If you know other ways to make it, please share them with us. And if you have any questions about creating an NFT collection, let me know and I will be happy to help.
