Introducing Light Minting

At OVR, we’ve been exploring all the possible solutions to stay on Ethereum network with our NFTs – leveraging it’s huge network effects – while containing the gas costs.

We started testing Loom network, xDAI and Matic to understand what are the trade offs of all those scaling solutions. The upside is obviously transaction costs, minting an NFT on such networks is basically for free but there are 3 main downsides:

1.  You need to move your means of exchange on such a network
2. In order to interact with such a network you need to change your RPC on Metamask
3. If you want to bring your NFT to Ethereum mainchain – to exchange it on Open Sea for example – you still have to pay the full cost for minting the NFT on mainchain.

The other possible scaling solution is rollups, those have 2 main advantage compared to sidechains, no trusted third party and no need to change the RPC, unfortunately those are just not ready yet – few more months, we expect.

Considering the current development of technology and the actual trade-offs with sidechains, we decided that the best solution is to stay on Ethereum mainchain making the actual (very costly) NFT minting just optional. We was inspired by Open Sea’s Lazy Minting solution where users can create the NFT on their centralized database and decide to mint it just when and if they sell it. Our solution, called Light Minting it’s similar to Open Sea’s Lazy Minting but with a decentralization twist.

With Light Minting we create a very light weight transaction on Ethereum mainnet that entitles your address to mint a specific OVRLand NFT when and if you want to do so, also this Option to Mint will be freely exchangeable on OVR marketplace just like any other minted OVRLand NFT. We believe that this is the best trade-off possible for reducing fees, maintaining decentralization and reducing complexity for final user.