From Hashlips to SVG Stack

We’ve seen several NFT projects, from individual artists and teams, that use various third party tools or platforms to aide in bringing their drop through incubation to deployment and beyond. Notably, for the NFT art-work in a generative style drop, with differing rarity of traits, usually in larger collections from 2 – 10k, there are tools, notably The Hashlips Art Engine, that can take layers of art, background and transparent layers, and spits out a random collection of images plus metadata to your parameters, needed for a quality NFT drop. All you need to run the hashlips art generator is Node js, download the git, and run in Vscode. You can edit the image layers in the existing folders to your own and rename the info in the config file, to your own, add descriptions, titles, commission percentages and so on, and then just run a script to generate your random trait collection (DNA exists!) Visit Hashlips Youtube Channel. Other options exists, for instance artist Carty Sewill of Art101NFT sometimes uses SVG stack for the SVG generative image collections, as well as his own Python scripts, and he also recommends Hashlips as a good option.

IPFS, Arweave, NFT Storage, Fleek, Pinata Cloud Decentralized Storage

Usually, or at least it’s a good sign, if the best drops or marketplace minting platforms, are the ones taking care and consideration to the web3 community, and using things like a combination of IPFS, facilitated by web3 platforms, cool stuff like Arweave, NFT storage, Fleek and Pinata Cloud decentralizing the metadata, website and images or media, so that the NFT images, website and information is always available to the NFT owner, to download or access from a decentralized, permanent location. Some of the storage options have their own wallets and tokens to cover the transaction to enable access to the web3 storage. The NFT behemoth platform OpenSea has a blog article showing their storage stack, IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin published June 2021: Decentralizing NFT metadata on OpenSea

Prelaunch Community Allow List Building

There are also platforms for pre-launch list / community building notably, premint.xyz. We’ll cover more about premint, community and list building platforms in another post, moving on. Some of the launch options we’re aware of have some prelist building features built in.

Images and json on IPFS – Wen Mint? Launch My Auto Mint Generator

Before you can mint, now we come to the options to deploy our contract and open up minting of our collection or piece. Wait, what contract? Welp yep some of the options we’re looking at help you get set up with premade solidity scritps you plug in your wallet to, or go with a custom one. Well, again there are options to help with launching, list managment and so on. Platforms like Ownerfy or Galaxis are more of a NFT launch concierge service approach. Others are more of a DIY, drag-and-drop nature, and some of which might be using the terminal from your IDE, or even deploy on Remix. We’ve seen platforms offering no-code solutions, like LaunchMyNFT, quite a few NFT drops listings we’ve added over the past year using this platform. Another we’re aware of is Autominter, and another is NFT Art Generator. Other notable web3 platforms available, if you like to dip your elbow into some code savviness or mess w APIs, you can deploy from a web browser dashboard using a place like thirdweb.com or check out NFTPort and check out Moralis for some cool NFT APIs and infastructure. We’re amazed and appreciative of what’s on offer from all of these guys, both in terms of builders tools, but also for the tutorials and ideas and inspiration.

Some services make the deployment and community building easier by taking the complexity of uploading to IPFS using Infura for Node information, running local hardhat, brownie or truffle and so on. So you can deploy and control your contracts from a web3 dashboard and build a web3 ‘firebase’ type of user database that interact with your contracts. Of course, the utmost care needs to be taken always to keep the pertinent private wallet keys and seed words safe and never push to github or give out. And am sure there are whole articles posts that can be written about the methods and safe practices for securing the wallets or multi-sig blah blah, associated with different deployed contracts. We realize we’ve probably only barely scratched the surface of the options that are out there in terms of tools, platforms, services, generators and so on, for instance on Solana now MagicEden has it’s launchpad services. So we’ll come back to this and add, refine, subtract as needed. Boom! That’s all I know.