Today PREMINT is releasing a feature that will make your mint successful without pissing off your community or causing people to lose a lot of money on wasted gas. It’s a simple solution and has been proven to be successful by mega-sellout-drops like Moonbirds, VeeFriends S2, and our own Collector Pass.

It’s very simple. ALLOWLISTS + WAITLISTS.

The single most important thing for a drop is to sell out. Feel free to argue with me, but I think that everyone benefits from a sellout. It’s good for the creator (selling out), it’s good for the collector (secondary market is anemic if primary is still available). Selling out is more important than any other element of a drop.

But, high demand drops that will sell out anyway introduce horrible side effects: gas wars and bots.

Enter allowlists

Allowlists (or access lists, green lists, or “white lists” though PREMINT does not use or encourage use of that term) let the creator assign certain wallet addresses that can mint. Most people (using PREMINT) collect a large amount of wallets and then randomly select winners who are on that list. For example, for the PREMINT Collector Pass drop, we had 36,000 people sign up for 10,000 spots. We selected 10,000 winners.

Unfortunately, if these were the ONLY people who could mint, this would guarantee that the mint doesn’t sell out. Even with XCOPY’s Grifters drop, all the winners didn’t show up (with is nutty considering they could buy a 10Ξ NFT for 0.25Ξ). This also happened with Moonbirds, PREMINT Collection, and every other drop. There’s just no way that 100% of the people show up.

Solution 1: Allowlist mint window, then public

One solution is just set a small time window (3 to 24 hours) where the mint is available for the allowlist, then the public gets access after that. That can help you sell out, because the public will buy up the extra supply. The negative here is the public part can still be botted (where bots interact directly with the contract and push gas up), which sucks for all the people who didn’t win the raffle.

Solution 2: Over-allocation

Since the most important thing is selling out, what creators sometimes do is select more winners than they have NFTs. So they select 14,000 winners for 10,000 NFTs. Over-allocation.

The good news, this usually causes a sellout. The bad news, you have people who were told they were winners show up and not get access to mint. That’s bullshit. And it’s unnecessary. Be honest and don’t do this.

Solution 3: Waitlist (This is the right solution)

This is the single best way to (a) guarantee your sellout (b) reward people who pre-registered, and (c) eliminate a gas war and heavy botting.

It’s simple. You set three mint windows:

Allowlist. This is a wallet list with the exact same quantity as the available NFT supply. Each wallet can mint 1 NFT. They can show up ANY TIME in this mint window (I recommend 3 to 24 hours) and they are GUARANTEED a mint.
Waitlist. This is a wallet list that is allowed to mint during a second window (usually 2-6 hours). The quantity is up to you. For PREMINT Collector, I put everyone who registered on this list (26k people). For other drops, I’ve seen this be about 15-30% of the total supply. If it’s too many, it could cause a small gas war. If it’s not enough, it could not get you the sellout.
Public. Any wallet can mint during this time, and you could potentially allow more than 1 per wallet. If you get to this point, you didn’t set your waitlist to be big enough, or there just isn’t a ton of interest in your project. Most likely it’s the latter and you won’t have a gas war here.

Seriously, this works. It’s fair. It’s easy. It rewards people who think ahead. It doesn’t waste money. It’s easy to explain. It’s very good.

PREMINT now supports waitlists natively

We want EVERYONE to move to this method. And we want to make it very easy to do so. We started building this functionality when we released our own Collector Pass, and improved it with Moonbirds and VeeFriends S2. Now, we’re rolling it out for everyone.

When you go to pick winners in PREMINT, you will now see the option to include a number for the waitlist.

Enter whatever number there, and after we randomly select the winners, we will look at everyone who didn’t win and randomly select people for the waitlist. (the rest of the screenshots are from the Collector Pass mint).

You can designate a message for winners to see:

And a message for waitlisted wallets to see:

These messages will show up in the PREMINT UI when people go to check their status on your list. When we introduce email notifications (soon), the people on the waitlist will also get email alerts.

And of course we make it easy for you to export the winner list and waitlist list to add to your mint process.

This is a proven solution that works, is fair, and is relatively straight forward. STEAL THIS.

BrendΞn Mulligan | mull.eth @mulligan

Not to brag, but I think the Collector Pass NFT mint had perfect mechanics. I'd recommend copying it. I'll turn this into a blog post at some point, but figured a thread would be a helpful The two core elements that led to the sell out: 1. @PREMINT_NFT (obv) 2. Mint windows

PREMINT’s Product Updates

Allowlist + Waitlist = Sellout without gas…