Top 10 Best Free Marketplaces to Mint an NFT Right Now
Top 10 Best Free Marketplaces to Mint an NFT Right Now
Table of Content

Despite the often high prices associated with NFTs, if you want to create or mint an NFT for free, it's pretty easy to do when your know-how.

NFTs have become one of the leading extensions of blockchain technology. According to data from Chainalysis, the NFT market surpassed $41 billion in 2021 and keeps on expanding with each passing day.

Since NFTs are minted on a blockchain, the creator of the NFT needs to pay a certain amount of gas fee to get their NFT minted, a fee that has surged since the NFT boom began. To help users find more economical ways, let's take a look at one such possible method through which a user can mint NFTs for free.

What is an NFT Marketplace?

An NFT marketplace is a platform where you can buy or sell non-fungible tokens. Non-fungible tokens are created for specific purposes, making each NFT unique.

This makes it different from other cryptocurrencies where there are in theory, an infinite number of the same coin. Buying NFTs is also different from other types of investment apps since the concept of buying digital art is quite a new one.

Many NFTs are also crypto-collectibles, which means you can only buy them with currencies such as bitcoin.

What Is Minting?

Before we can put your NFTs on sale in the marketplace, we have to mint them. Minting is the process of registering your digital art on the blockchain so that it can’t be changed or tempered. It is security for your artwork. The traditional process of minting costs a lot of money because of the gas fees involved. This created a hindrance for creators and artists from putting their work on sale. First, they were required to pay the gas fee, and then they could put their artwork or NFT on sale. They were never sure if their artwork would sell in the market or not. This kept many artists from joining the NFT space.

What Is Lazy Minting Of NFTs?

Lazy Minting was launched in 2020 and was soon adopted by the top-ranking marketplaces like OpenSea, and Rarible. Minting means “just in time,” and Lazy Minting means minting at them at the time of purchase.

With this concept, the creators were allowed to sell their NFTs without paying the gas fees initially. The gas fees would be paid when the artwork is sold.

In this concept of Lazy Minting, a creator or an artist can mint their artwork for FREE!

This is because you won’t have to invest initially in selling the artwork. Gas fees will be deducted from the purchase amount. This concept brought down the risk factor to zero. Now artists and creators freely mint their artwork or resale their NFTs, boosting the NFT market.

How Much Does It Cost To Mint NFTs?

As per Slate, the average cost of minting an NFT on Ethereum is around $1-$1000. However, users can mint NFTs for free if they decide to mint their none fungible tokens via the Polygon blockchain.

How to Mint NFTs for Free?

You can mint NFTs on OpenSea for free, with one major caveat. Here's how to create NFTs for free:

  • Connect an ETH wallet to the OpenSea account. It can be either Coinbase or MetaMask wallet.
  • Create an OpenSea Collection by clicking create a collection on OpenSea's dashboard.
  • Set up your first OpenSea collection by customizing it. Check the logo, banner, name, and description.
  • Pick the blockchain of your choice. To mint without paying gas fees, pick the Polygon blockchain for minting.
  • Start minting your NFTs by clicking on the option "Collection" and "Add Item" to begin. OpenSea requires the price to be a minimum of $2.

And that's it, sort of. While you won't need to pay to mint the NFT, someone does have to. And that person is the buyer. At the point of transaction, buyers must shell out the gas fees to mint these NFTs on the blockchain, which obviously may deter many prospective buyers, especially if the NFT price is lower than the gas fees.

Top 10 Best Free Marketplaces to Mint an NFT Right Now

1. OpenSea

2. Axie Marketplace

3. Rarible

4. SuperRare

5. Binance NFT

6. AtomicMarket

7. Nifty Gateway

8. Lazy.com

9. Async Art

10. Mintable

*******

1. OpenSea

Photo: readthegeneralist
Photo: readthegeneralist

OpenSea is a popular NFT marketplace that is home to projects like BAYC and Azuki. Minting an NFT on OpenSea is very easy. It supports all kinds of digital assets, from virtual worlds and collectibles to art, photography, and sound recordings.

OpenSea offers Klatyn, Polygon, and Ethereum blockchains. It supports more than 150 cryptocurrencies, though since you buy using Ethereum, expect to pay a higher gas fee. OpenSea recently launched its own gas-free minting option, though they charge 2.5% of every transaction on the platform.

OpenSea is arguably the biggest NFT marketplace right now, and it also allows authors and creators to charge up to 10% in royalty fees.

Website: https://opensea.io/

2. Axie Marketplace

Axie Marketplace is the online shop for the video game Axie Infinity. Axies are mythical creatures that can be bought and trained and then pitted against other players' Axies to earn rewards. On Axie Marketplace, players can buy new Axies, as well as entire lands and other items, as NFTs for use within the game.

Axie Infinity tokens (called Axie Shards) are built on the Ethereum blockchain. As such, they can be bought and sold on a variety of other NFT marketplaces, as well as on some cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN).

Website: https://marketplace.axieinfinity.com/

3. Rarible

Photo: beincrypto
Photo: beincrypto

Another excellent marketplace to mint an NFT on is Rarible. Rarible is ideal if you want to sell NFTs focusing on art and photography. It offers support for Ethereum, Flow, and Tezos blockchains.

You can sell both single NFTs or full collections on Rarible. Since it supports Tezos, you can save quite a bit on gas fees (it costs only $0.5 to mint NFTs on Tezos). With their “lazy minting” feature, you can create an NFT for free and have the buyer pay gas fees when they purchase it.

Rarible also has its own token known as RARI, and as a user, you get to vote on any upgrades that the developers want to introduce.

Website: https://rarible.com/

4. SuperRare

SuperRare has a strong focus on being a marketplace for people to buy and sell unique, single-edition digital artworks. Each artwork is authentically created by an artist in the network and tokenized as a crypto-collectible digital item that you can own and trade. They describe themselves as being like Instagram meets Christie's, offering a new way to interact with art, culture, and collecting on the internet.

Each artwork on SuperRare is a digital collectible– a digital object secured by cryptography and tracked on the blockchain. SuperRare has built a social network on top of the marketplace. As digital collectibles have a transparent record of ownership, they're perfect for a social environment.

Website: https://superrare.com/

5. Binance NFT

Photo: Binance NFT
Photo: Binance NFT

Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Its NFT marketplace is an excellent option for anyone looking to mint on a future-proof platform.

Unlike OpenSea, Binance charges just 1% per transaction, and it also gives you the option of cashing out your money in fiat currency. If you already own Binance tokens (BNB), buying and selling on the marketplace gets easier due to native support.

Binance NFT requires users to make bids using BNB, BUSD, or ETH. Owing to the sheer size of the marketplace, Binance has been able to enter into several excellent partnerships with NFT creators. So, it's as good a place as any to mint your first NFT!

Binance charges 0.005 BNB to mint an NFT on its platform, but the first 10 are free.

Website: https://www.binance.com/en/nft/home

6. AtomicMarket

AtomicMarket is a shared liquidity NFT market smart contract that is used by multiple websites. Shared liquidity means that everything listed on one market also shows on all other markets.

It is a marketplace for Atomic Assets, a standard for non-fungible tokens on the eosio blockchain technology. Anyone can utilize the Atomic Asset standard to tokenize and create digital assets and buy, sell and auction assets using the Atomic Assets marketplace.

You can list your own NFTs for sale on the AtomicMarket, and you can browse existing listings. NFTs of well-known collections get a verification checkmark, which makes it easier to spot the real NFTs. Malicious collections are blacklisted.

Website: https://atomicmarket.io/

7. Nifty Gateway

Photo: phemex
Photo: phemex

Nifty Gateway was responsible for some of the most expensive early NFT sales. Beeple's CROSSROAD sold on Nifty Gateway for millions. The world's most expensive NFT also sold here for a cool $91.8 million!

Many celebrity artists purchase their NFTs from here, so if you are working on a premium collection, Nifty might be a great place to launch it. Unlike other platforms, Nifty uses "open editions". Essentially, it creates an unlimited number of variants for a brief period, retailing for a fixed price.

Once the timer runs out, the creator cannot issue any more NFTs from that collection. This creates a sense of exclusivity amongst holders, which leads to higher sales. Creators can also receive payments in fiat currency.

Nifty Gateway doesn't charge a minting fee for on-platform transactions. It also lists NFTs that are on sale on other platforms, like OpenSea.

Website: https://niftygateway.com/

8. Lazy.com

Lazy.com is Mark Cuban’s NFT platform, advertised as the lazy way to show off your NFTs. Lazy isn’t so much an NFT marketplace as it is a place to simply show off your NFT collection and share it with others. You can easily share your entire NFT collection using your Lazy.com custom URL, which is Lazy.com/(your username). This makes showing off your collection incredibly simple.

With Lazy, you can set up an account by entering your Email, Username, and Password. In order to display your NFT collection, you will need to connect your wallet to the site. Lazy does allow users to post their NFT for sale on the Lazy platform, or you can just as easily click the View on OpenSea button which will take you directly to the OpenSea listing.

Although Lazy may not be the most innovative NFT platform, its simplicity speaks for itself—the super simple white background emphasizes the large exhibit of NFTs. Additionally, Lazy is one of the only platforms which allows users to display and shop Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana blockchain-based NFTs.

Website: https://lazy.com/

9. Async Art

Photo: influencermarketinghub
Photo: influencermarketinghub

Async Art only supports NFT creation on the Ethereum blockchain, and it focuses primarily on programmable art. Unlike conventional NFTs, NFTs on Async Art include Layers. There's a separate Master, which is the full NFT, while the Layers are discrete elements that you can use to customize your NFT.

Since this process tokenizes each layer, several artists can contribute to modify the Master NFT. This is great for innovation and collaboration, but it does mean you can't share such NFTs on conventional marketplaces.

Async now offers Blueprints which are like Collections on OpenSea. Anyone can mint an NFT for a base price until it reaches a maximum limit, after which price varies based on market conditions.

Async Art also supports gasless minting, allowing artists to create "Gasless Autonomous Art." It allows artists to specify rules for each Layer so other collaborators better understand the artist's vision at the time of minting.

Website: https://async.art/

10. Mintable

Mintable is not only a great marketplace to buy your NFTs, but it’s also a powerful tool to mint your own NFTs.

Mintable’s mission is to make the production of limited edition digital assets simple and accessible for everyone, allowing artists from all walks of life, to become entrepreneurs or even interested people to collect scarce digital goods to hold or sell.

By choosing Mintable as their marketplace, users will be able to make their ideas come true, without the need for technical knowledge.

Additionally, finding the right NFT to buy is made easy with the sorting of crypto art, music, video, collectibles, sports, and other collections presented on the website.

Website: https://mintable.app/

How to choose the best NFT marketplace

Marketplace information

The right NFT market needs to give you good information about the items listed on its platform.

You need to be able to see how many NFTs are available, the price of each NFT, and more advanced information such as the number of bids, owners, history of the piece, and more.

Having the right data at your fingertips is important when looking to buy NFTs on an online marketplace as it allows you to make the right decisions.

Digital Wallet Convenience

The right NFT marketplace needs to be simple and easy to use no matter where you are or what device you’re using.

It should also offer support for multiple NFT wallets as well as payment options, which is helpful if you want to purchase NFTs using different payment methods in your crypto wallet.

Security of the marketplace for digital creators

The right NFT art marketplaces need to have a high level of security so your items are safe wherever you store them.

There should be advanced encryption for privacy, while also offering protection against fraud by requiring identity verification or having insurance for transactions.

Marketplace Ratings

Most NFT marketplaces are those that give you all the information you need about their own platform.

This includes ratings from other users, analysis of the platform, and specific data about the items being sold there.

This allows you to make an informed decision about whether to use these leading NFT marketplaces to buy NFTs or go somewhere else.

You can also get a better idea of the experience others have had through their reviews, and what you can expect if you make the decision of buying NFTs from a particular marketplace.

Single vs. Multiple Projects

Depending on what you’re looking for, you may prefer a marketplace that specializes in a single project or one that offers multiple projects.

While both have their pros and cons, a single-project marketplace may be more trustworthy as they’re focused on one thing.

However, a multiple-project marketplace offers more variety.

Striking the balance between trust and variety is important when finding the best NFT marketplace for you.

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