What are the benefits of ERC-721A?
ERC-721A smart contracts provide significant gas savings, allowing users to mint multiple NFTs for essentially the same cost of minting a single token.
In Jan 2022, the Azuki NFT team announced their ERC721A smart contract, a custom implementation of the ERC721 standard exploring batch minting.
Introducing ERC721A: An Improved ERC721 Implementation ⛩️https://t.co/GbKSmmJxoW
Azuki has developed a new algorithm, which for the first time *ever* in the NFT space, enables minting multiple NFTs for essentially the same cost of minting a single NFT. pic.twitter.com/3AU9tmin2y
— Azuki (@AzukiZen) January 6, 2022
Smart contract deployment is not only about costs but also about building and maintaining a community. Making your NFTs efficient and easy to mint, trade, and use is essential. Enter ERC-721A.
What is the ERC721A Smart Contract?
ERC721A is a custom implementation of the ERC721 standard and supports minting multiple tokens for close to the cost of one, in turn reducing gas fees. The Azuki team developed the standard.
In a blog post detailing the costs of OpenZepplin ERC721 Enumerable and ERC721A contracts, Azuki was able to show the gas savings for their custom implementation of ERC721, ERC721A.
Want to see that in US Dollars? Here you go!
The difference is astonishing; you are saving around 50% in gas fees for one mint. Impressive. However, it shows the efficiency of minting five or more NFTs at an astonishing 86% discount over the traditional ERC721 Enumerable.
To say this differently, a person can now mint five NFTs for the price of one. We feel that the ERC721A contract is perfect for community building. Your community can go all in and grab more NFTs, whereas before, the gas might have stopped them from buying a handful. There will be less network congestion and smaller gas price spikes affecting the Ethereum network during popular collection drops. Say goodbye to gas wars!
Verifying the Gas Costs
[email protected] wanted to confirm this new contract, he set up an ERC721 test and an ERC721A test.
- One smart contract that mints using ERC721Enumerable, and
- One smart contract that mints using ERC721A
Here are his results:
How does the ERC721A Smart Contract work?
A standard ERC721 tracks several elements: Owners, Balances, Token Approvals, and Operator Approvals.
With no extra storage the base ERC721 is unable to use important functions like totalSupply(), tokenOfOwnerByIndex, and tokenByIndex.
These keep tokenids neat and organized. It’s partly why so many collections use the ERC721 Enumerable.
However, when using ERC721 Enumerable, every call to mint means this state needs to be updated, indicating new data added to their storage.
When Azuki studied collections using this standard implementation, they noticed that most NFT collections are not using or do not need the extra variables. So they simplified the code.
The real pixie dust is in structural management. _safeMint implementation means that owner balances are only updated once. Regardless of how many are minted, one or ten.
With fewer steps and fewer storage updates, you can reduce the cost to mint. This becomes even more cost-efficient when you are minting many NFTs because traditionally, the more you mint, the more calls are made, and the batch size would grow. Reducing that is the glory of the ERC721A smart contract.
Tokenfy Offers ERC721A Smart Contracts
The good news is that Tokenfy will be offering ERC721A smart contracts as part of our Full Project tier. Our goal is to make ERC721A and other smart contracts readily available to any collections or artists who want to make NFTs. But not only that, it’s important to us to help you grow and foster a community so your NFT dreams can become a reality.
Check out the home page to learn what we do to make it simple for creators to launch an NFT collection.
S is an early adopter of crypto and NFTs with over a decade of experience in SaaS software and Crypto. When not collecting coins like the Mario Bros., S likes to travel, swim and ski.
