[Coinlive Original] Free mint project, free minted NFT is king!

Free mint, as the name suggests, is "free minting", referring to those projects that can mint NFT for zero fees only by paying gas fees. When the NFT community talks about free mint, goblintown.wtf is probably the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe everyone is tired of hearing the name goblintown, but we really can't deny its awesomeness. Judging from the current situation, goblintown may become the first blue-chip project to debut with free mint. Those famous blue-chip players we are familiar with, such as Boring Ape and Doodles, both projects still need at least a few tenths of ether to mint.

Azuki, Moonbirds and CLONE X sold out almost instantly. The NFT circle at the time was in its glory days

In a blink of an eye, the prospects of NFT projects gradually dimmed, and the cold winter of cryptocurrencies even accelerated their demise. The price of Ethereum plummeted from $3,000 to $4,000 to $2,000, and is now barely hovering around the $1,000 mark. Many project owners who are committed to getting the project done well are caught in a bear market: if the minting price is set too high, no one will buy. The project party has no choice but to lower the price or even reduce the total supply. Before June this year, most project parties still didn't know what free mint was, but the experimental test in goblintown unexpectedly hit a home run. Since then, projects in the NFT circle have followed in the footsteps of Goblin and started free mint one after another.

The floor price chart of goblintown.wtf. Times make heroes!

Sadly, many other free mint projects have not received the same attention as goblintown. Regardless, overall, free mint projects seem to be doing better than projects requiring minting fees. For example, Ikusa, a WEB3 streetwear brand inspired by Japanese anime and aesthetics, recently launched a public sale. Ikusa was originally a highly anticipated project, launched as early as April, but now it is facing sales problems. On the other hand, Azuki, which inspired the Ikusa project, was swept away in 3 minutes in January this year, and the casting reserve price was still a full ether! At that time, the price of a single ether exceeded $3,000. Looking back at Ikusa, the whitelist minting price is 0.1 ether, the public sale price is 0.2 ether, and the total supply is 7,777 NFTs. Due to the collapse of the cryptocurrency, Ikusa was in a bear market and eventually had to reduce the supply to 2,222 and the minting price to 0.1 ether. As of this writing, the Ikusa has not sold out.

Azuki has a similar art style to Ikusa

Compared with the unfortunate Ikusa, the free mint project is enjoying a good time, such as the ill poop it and WAGDIE projects that the author once shared. Subsequent successful free mint projects include Gossamer Seed, Moonrunners and WZRDS, etc. How do these free mint projects obtain funds to maintain operations? The answer is ready to come out, that is "royalties". Royalty has become the main source of income for project parties. However, there is a common problem in free mint projects, that is, "come without a trace, go without a trace". For example, today we saw that the floor price of a certain project hit an all-time high (ATH), but it was beaten back to its original shape the next day. For those holders who mint for free, they only need to pay a small amount of gas fees as transaction costs, and the remaining income after subtracting the gas fees is the net income. Whenever a new free mint project appears in the market, we can clearly see that funds flow out of the old project and flow into the new project.

The floor price trend of each free mint project. As can be seen from the chart above, these projects all eventually inevitably went downhill

For avid NFT collectors, perhaps they don't care so much about price movements. However, for NFT traders, if they want to make as much profit as possible in a bear market, free mint can be said to be the preferred strategy. When an NFT project is overhyped and the floor price is pushed up to unreasonable levels, this may be the best time to take profits. What needs to be kept in mind is that before starting any investment or transaction, we have to do full research and be fully prepared to avoid being a "leek".

Author: [Coinlive] Nell