Original title: A new NFT launch strategy: The wave mint
Original source: Scott Duke Kominers & 1337 Skulls Sers, a16z crypto
Original translation: Odaily Planet Daily
In NFT projects, mint (the process of initially distributing tokens) largely determines the tone of your community and how the community and the wider market view the development of your project. This means that there needs to be a mechanism to attract the people you want to participate, and to execute it in a simple, secure, and engaging way.
In this article, we will review a new mint strategy recently launched by 1337 Skulls, "wave mint", in which members of different NFT communities are invited to participate in mint in a series of waves (waves are opportunities to participate in mint), starting from the community and gradually expanding outward. Wave mint uses people's on-chain data and reputation to select holders who are a good match for the project culture and goals, while shifting attention and energy to the project. It also avoids common problems of "free mint" such as Gas War and interference from robots (bots).
Next, we will introduce how the wave mint mechanism works, its advantages and challenges, and some of our experiences running wave mint in practice. As the NFT community tries different minting and participation strategies, we hope that this will become a minting method that artists, builders, and other project creators can adopt.
How the Wave Mint mechanism works
In theory, giving away NFTs for free is a good way to attract more users to a project. But in practice, “free mints” make community management more difficult because “free mints” may be occupied by bots and/or users who are just looking to buy at the bottom and run, and they only plan to “flip NFTs” instead of sticking with the community for the long term.
How can a project find people who align with the project’s values and goals? The answer is to find people who already have the relevant NFTs in their crypto wallets and invite them to join.
In wave mint, different groups of people are invited to mint in sequence, and the time for each open "mint wave" ranges from a few minutes to a few days. As long as the number of people participating in each wave is low relative to the total token supply, mint can be free (or free if it is lower than the market clearing price) without causing Gas War.
Groups invited to mint in different "waves" should recruit holders who are likely to seriously participate in the new project and support its goals and vision. Perhaps the simplest and crudest approach is to leverage established communities with "common interests": 1337 Skulls has provided a "mint wave" for similar cc 0 projects such as Nouns and Blitmap. Meanwhile, an on-chain game may provide a "wave" for holders of projects such as DigiDaigaku and Pirate Nation to participate in mint.
The key takeaway is that each wallet should only be allowed to mint once, even if it is eligible for multiple "wave mints". Many NFT communities do have overlap in participation, so limiting each wallet to a single mint helps ensure that holders are non-overlapping and widely distributed. Even with the "single mint" limit, users who hold NFTs from multiple invited communities still have a better chance of winning than the average person. If they miss out on the first wave, owning NFTs from multiple invited communities will earn them more participation.
The community itself should be carefully planned, first developing a strong core community of holders, and then building from the inside out. This strategy requires establishing a strong connection between the core community and social identity, and then using "networking" to expand outward to connect to distant but like-minded networks.
Early Waves: Trusted Relationships - Early waves should focus on trusted communities. These are communities where creators have strong personal relationships and an established presence and reputation. Working with a close and trusted community early on can help build trust in a new project. Especially because in wave mints, people are often minting other NFTs from their wallets, perhaps even high-value NFTs. Establishing early mints through reliable connections helps build social proof that people trust the minting process.
The next “wave”: “Strengthening relationships” – Once a trustworthy core community has been established, the next step may be to target “strengthening relationship” communities, that is, those communities that have strong ties to those recruited through the earliest waves. Communities with significant overlap in population size. Community users grow through "introductions from acquaintances", which also helps attract people who specifically want to be part of the project.
Late “waves”: Once a project has established a core community and attracted attention from other related communities, it has the potential to open many new windows into larger communities with weaker connections, attracting people who don’t necessarily have a direct connection but were interested in the project in the early waves.
Testing the Wave Mint Mechanism
We tested this mechanism with wave mint in the process of launching 1337 Skulls, an NFT project that aims to build bridges between NFT communities that open up their intellectual property for extension and remixing under a CC0 copyright-free license. Wave mint is a way to attract holders who are themselves passionate about CC0, on-chain art, and the broader internet remix culture.
We started with our own close community, then opened up waves to holders of many other projects in the cc0 NFT ecosystem. As we progressed deeper into the mint process, we gradually introduced shorter participation waves for larger groups. Ultimately, our goal is to offer particularly short-lived waves to holders of a variety of NFT projects that share commonalities with projects selected in earlier waves (e.g., similar aesthetics, release dates, and community management styles). In this way, we filter out members who are particularly interested in joining us but who were previously "loosely connected" to the community.
Evaluating the Wave Mint Strategy
By design, the wave mint method selects those who pre-identify with the project's goals and values. In addition, each wave brings in a group of holders from an established community over the same period, which immediately creates a network effect and helps "break the ice."
From a go-to-market perspective, this provides a significant opportunity for compound audience growth - "attracting the next holder through the original holder". Information about each mint wave spreads rapidly within and between communities through word of mouth. From a community building perspective, the wave mint method helps ensure that most token holders have at least a few strong connections in the community from the outset.
We also found that, at least in our case, the wave minting process itself also attracted attention to the project. Minting within hours and days allowed the 1337 Skulls community to gain exposure as the NFTs were released and made it easier to onboard new community members in real time.
From a mechanism design perspective, the wave mint mechanism means that people's wallets effectively act as a kind of "proof of personhood". Many people keep most of their NFTs (especially high-value NFTs) in one or at most a few wallets (which is a security practice that is not recommended), and limiting each wallet to only minting one NFT helps reduce double counting. For example, at the end of the mint of the 11337 Skulls project, the project had over 50% of unique holders (measured in different wallets), which is much less concentrated than many whitelisted mints.
Additionally, spontaneously opening the mint window for a short period of time makes the entire mint process more difficult. Doing so also makes it easier to monitor mint in real time and detect anomalies, such as if someone distributes snapshot assets to multiple wallets to obtain multiple "free mints". The wave mint mechanism allows the team to easily pause mint in such situations. Since each individual "wave" is small relative to the total supply, it is possible to synchronize supply with demand, thereby avoiding Gas Wars.
Wave Mint vs. regular whitelists
The wave mint strategy has several advantages over the more common strategy of running multiple allow-lists, where members of a particular community have a chance to pre-register and potentially get on the mint list.
While whitelist mechanisms give people plenty of time to discover projects and register, they often fail to focus participation. Many people, ourselves included, register for whitelists but forget to participate in the associated mint when they participate. The wave mint strategy tightens the feedback loop - from initially learning about a project through existing NFT communities, to taking action to mint, and then subsequently joining and participating in the community.
With an early whitelist, there is no way to determine how many people will participate in the mint. This often causes teams to over-allocate supply, leading to massive gas wars. In contrast, wave mint allows the project to expand or shrink the number of available positions in real time, adjusting supply to meet demand. You can choose to let a "wave" last longer, or open multiple "waves" and provide a specific amount of mint for a specific community.
At the same time, multiple whitelist mechanisms make it harder for users to be restricted by mint, because they provide users with plenty of opportunities to reposition assets to obtain multiple whitelist slots. The wave mint mechanism directly addresses this vulnerability, although doing so relies heavily on taking a snapshot in advance.
Finally, wave mint has another advantage. Whitelists managed by application or lottery are often not guaranteed to win. In contrast, wave mint is more likely to result in a positive framework of open opportunities. Even if people do miss out on a wave they are eligible for, there are other opportunities to participate.
Challenges: Operations and Security
From an operational perspective, wave mint is complex to execute. It runs for a long time and requires careful synchronization between the front-end and back-end teams throughout the process. The front-end and social media teams will be constantly posting on Twitter, engaging users in Discord, and generating interest and attention for the project (and speculation about the next community wave that might be opened), while the back-end team will be switching wallet lists, opening and closing mint waves, and making sure everything runs smoothly.
Meanwhile, on the user side, there are some key questions about security. Essentially, this mechanism tricks people into minting with the same wallets they use to hold other digital assets, often ones that might be particularly valuable, like tokens from major communities. And bad actors could attempt to create fake wave mints to access these wallets that hold users’ high-value NFTs.
With wave mints, it’s even more important that people carefully check every mint invite, and that the team has a responsibility to provide clear information and documentation. With waves opening and closing quickly, smart contracts and other key information must be checked in advance and clearly explained and documented. (While it’s important for teams to implement maximum security measures around Discord, social media, and other communication channels, wave mints especially need to avoid malicious actors stealing legitimate wave mints mid-stream.)
In the long run, it would be nice to have delegation solutions optimized specifically for wave minting, allowing people to delegate access so that they don't have to mint directly from the treasury wallet. Finally, in terms of incentives, if wave minting becomes popular, people may start storing their digital assets in many different wallets, hoping to maximize their chances of participating in the mint. This will require more creative criteria for deciding who should be allowed to participate in each wave.
The way an NFT project forms its initial community is critical to determining its path forward. Getting tokens into the right hands is critical to building a community-native culture. Wave mint is a powerful way to solve this problem. By inviting members of different communities to join in batches, it is possible to build a network of holders in a way that is healthy and stable over the long term, gradually expanding the community from trusted core community members outward.
