MintPass

What is a MintPass?

MintPasses are essentially a reservation system for NFTs. You can think of it as unopened trading card packs - you know thereโ€™s a trading card (or in our case, an NFT) inside, but you donโ€™t know what it is until you open it.

Prior to MintPasses, new launches of NFT projects were first-come, first-serve. This was problematic at the time because:

  • to make transactions on a blockchain like Ethereum, users pay transaction fees (i.e. gas fees)

  • while thereโ€™s a limit to the number of transactions which can be processed in each block, users can choose to pay extra for their transaction to be prioritised

  • first-come, first-serve NFT launches created a dynamic where users would choose to pay high amounts of fees in a rush to mint their NFT before the supply ran out, also known as a gas war

Gas wars favour those with the most capital, so Pixel Vault conceptualised the MintPass in July 2021 to enable more fair & equitable NFT drops. The concept was quick to be adopted by other teams and is now extremely common.

Pixel Vault MintPasses include:

There were provided for free or at a low cost to existing holders of PV assets, as a reward for their support.

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