Mint

A more detailed look at our Mint solution

Overview

With the rising popularity of NFTs and tokens as reward mechanisms, an increasing number of brands, enterprises, tech companies, and game developers are exploring ways to use NFTs to better engage with their users. While the predominant way to interact with NFTs has been through one-time drops (e.g. with PFP collections and NFT memberships), it’s becoming clear that recurring, programmatic distribution models are better suited for loyalty and reward programs as well as token-gated commerce broadly.

With that said, there are real challenges to implement fast, stable, programmatic minting at scale, due to the constrained nature of blockchains themselves.

The Problems

Problem #1: Transactions get dropped

A blockchain like Ethereum relies on nodes propagating signed transactions across its p2p network. As these transactions get dispersed, they should eventually get included within a block. However, when the network is under high congestion, a node may actually drop your transaction (which also causes nonce gap issues for your remaining transactions). Needless to say, times of high congestion are often when you most need your transaction to go through (e.g., preventing liquidations!).

Problem #2: Transactions get stuck...along with everything else behind them

Almost as bad (or maybe even worse) than your transaction dropping is your transaction getting stuck in the mempool. Ethereum’s security model relies on transaction fees; hence, whether or not your transaction goes through will depend heavily on where you set fees relative to the existing market. If you’ve designated a gas fee that is lower than the average in the mempool, your queue of transactions may get stuck.

Problem #3: Paying too much… bad fee management

In order to prevent problem #1 and #2, you might decide to just include a huge premium on the average transaction fee. While that may be okay for a few transfers, this becomes quite expensive if you are sending 100,000+ transactions (even on a cheaper chain like Polygon or Arbitrum). You might try to visit ETH Gas Station, identify the trader rate, and then send that to the network. For the most part, that can work...except when you need it most. Prices can get quite volatile and fees can fluctuate significantly by the time you send your transaction.

Problem #4: Paying in crypto

Last, but definitely not least, sometimes the problem happens even before you send the transactions. Many firms are uncomfortable or legally unable to hold crypto on their balance sheet. This problem is only accentuated the more chains (and hence more native tokens) you use. You can't get transactions through if you don't even have tokens to pay the fees in the first place.

The Solution

The problems described above are already pretty common. And as large enterprises continue entering the web3 space, the number of transactions will increase exponentially, further testing the scalability and throughput of the underlying infrastructure. If not handled properly, any web3 experience you create will be plagued with issues and unhappy customers.

Our Mint API ensures all of these issues are a thing of the past. With our dedicated infrastructure, transaction monitoring software, and robust fee-replacement mechanism, you simply choose whom you want to send a token to, and we ensure it gets there, no matter the blockchain activity. Whether it's NFTs, ERC20s, native coins, or even Verifiable Credentials (VCs) based on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), we support it all.

Example Use Cases

• Send ERC-20s as a reward to your users for creating an account

• Guarantee KYC completion on-chain by sending an SBT to all verified accounts

• Enhance your loyalty program by sending NFTs to your customers who finish specific quests

• Increase your sales by sending NFT coupons directly to your customers' wallets

• Send your top 1% of customers an exclusive NFT (that can then use our token gating API to provide perks!)

How it all works

What does the Mint API do?

• Mint and distribute NFTs or tokens to designated addresses in batch

• Gas optimization and payment

• Transaction management and execution

Minting and Distribution

The API will mint NFTs and tokens to designated wallet addresses based on the predetermined 3mint smart contract you have deployed (either through the platform or API endpoints).

Gas Optimization and Payment

Before processing transactions, the API calculates an estimate of the gas cost required and optimizes for the best time to issue transactions.

3mint pays for the gas cost directly, ensuring that you never need to hold cryptocurrencies.

Transaction Management & Execution

All transactions sent through the API are monitored throughout their lifecycle. If any transactions are dropped by nodes or seem stuck, we use our fee-replacement engine to re-publish transactions. This also ensures no nonce gap issues inhibit your chain of requests.

During times of very high congestion, we keep a record of all transactions in our queue and feed these to the nearest node when space opens up. This means it's possible to send even 1 million+ transactions through our system.