Spearmint, the Free and Automated Allowlist Platform

A nifty step forward

After more than four years of powering the most innovative teams in the NFT space, we’re taking a massive step forward in how we enable NFT developers and creators.

Today, we’re announcing Spearmint, our free and automated web3 allowlist platform.

With Spearmint, creators can manage who can mint their NFT to drive stronger, more engaged communities, and avoid costly gas wars that alienate would-be collectors. Even better, since Spearmint has automated the entire process, you can start using it for your mint in less than 10 minutes. No more wasting precious hours on mint day spinning up databases or generating Merkle proofs to connect your allowlist and smart contract (if you haven’t heard of this, ask your developer about it - it’s a PITA 😅).

Spearmint is open for early access to select teams starting today, and we’ll be welcoming more teams into the Spearmint community every week. Just sign up for our VIP early access list!

What is Spearmint?

Spearmint is a free, automated allowlist platform. Don’t know what that means? Don’t worry, we’ll break it all down!

First things first. What is an allowlist platform? At its core, an allowlist is a crazy powerful tool that allows NFT creators and developers to have more control over their mints and their communities. Imagine it almost like a CRM for NFTs - by setting certain rules for who can mint (eg. ”only collectors who follow our Twitter” or “only collectors who hold the ‘degen’ roll in our discord”) you can powerfully shape who can become owners of your NFT now, and who will become owners of your NFT in the future.

Allowlist platforms have another, extremely important quality. They entirely eliminate the possibility of gas wars, and the panic and community blowback that accompany them. Yuga labs’ Otherside NFT drop was one of the largest in history, completely selling out of its 55,000 NFTs and generating more than $500M in sales. Ask any collector about the mint though, and what’s the enduring memory of that drop?

A magical UX? The Christmas-morning excitement of seeing their NFT for the time? Nope.

They remember the frustrating, hours-long experience of trying to get their transactions mined, and the more than $150M burned through gas fees (more gas than both Metamask and Opensea, two of the most used products in all of crypto, had burned in their entire history to that point 🤯).

If Yuga labs had used Spearmint to create a transparent and appropriately sized allowlist, Otherside collectors could have saved that collective $150M+ in gas and hundreds to thousands of hours of time, while at the same time making the mint more fair and open.

So that’s an allowlist platform, but what about the free and automated part?

Free, of course, means that Spearmint will be available to all creators and collectors at no cost. At Alchemy, we have long been dedicated to making it more accessible to build amazing things in web3. Making Spearmint free is our latest re-commitment to that value.

Automated, means that Spearmint solves everything needed to manage access to mints completely out of the box. One of the main things that has held NFT projects back from using allowlists has been the significant work involved in doing so. Creating your own rudimentary allowlist would take weeks to months of dedicated eng work, distract from your real goal (launching a great collection) and potentially push back timelines and disappoint the community you’re trying to excite.

Even existing allowlist products force you to do a ton of custom work. Instead of connecting automatically with your application and smart contract, all they give you is a list of addresses. From there you need to build custom infrastructure, generate Merkle proofs or digital signatures, and make on the fly changes to your NFT contract in the final hours before your mint. Not only does this burn precious developer time when it’s most needed, it introduces change and risk to your mint with little time to test or resolve issues.

Spearmint, on the other hand, has a built in API that takes all of that work and risk off your plate. You can create your allowlist in less than 10 minutes, and you can connect it to your application and smart contract with a few simple lines of code. No custom eng-work or infrastructure needed.

Why did we build Spearmint?

We’ve worked to empower the NFT ecosystem for as long as NFTs have existed - innovators like OpenSea, Cryptokitties, and CryptoPunks were among our very first users more than four years ago, and continue to be close partners to this day.

During that time, we’ve continuously reinvested in making building NFTs as easy and powerful as possible. Earlier this year, we released our NFT API to make interacting with NFTs and all their many properties dramatically more accessible to developers. We’re building towards a future where NFTs can be used for any use case on the web, and created by anyone.

Spearmint is the next step.

We’ve consistently heard from the thousands of NFT projects we’ve worked with that minting is the most critical and most broken part of building with NFTs. By solving problems like gas wars and custom allowlist handling, Spearmint will make the entire process more predictable, lower lift, and a dramatically better experience for creators and collectors alike.

How to get started

Spearmint is available today for select NFT projects. We’ve also opened up a VIP early access list, and we’ll be onboarding and showcasing the most exciting new projects every week.

If you’re building an NFT collection, sign up for the early access list! If want to move up the list, or be part of our showcase series, follow us and let us know what you’re building!

We’re so excited to bring Spearmint to more teams, and continue building amazing NFT products together!