NFT Traders: Keep your gas on failed mints with “Gas Protected” transactions

By: Eyal Markovich, Co-founder & COO.

As an NFT trader, you know the feeling of losing thousands of dollars in gas on failed NFT transactions and missing out on the NFTs you wanted. We hear you and we feel your pain. bloXroute created “Gas Protected” transactions to solve this problem.

You pay a small fee as an insurance and in exchange, if the NFT doesn’t get minted, you keep 100% of your gas, it never leaves your wallet.

The NFT Trader app allows you to do a direct contract mint using the project contract address. Currently around 50% of the NFT contracts are supported. You’ll need to create a free bloXroute account to get access and to fund the account for the small processing fee.

1. Find an NFT drop that’s active and locate the contract address.
As an example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT drop has a contract address of
0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d

Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d

You can find the NFT project “contract addresses” on the project’s website or links on the website to Etherscan or OpenSea.

Contract address on Etherscan will be shown in the top section of the page.

OpenSea displays the contract address after clicking on an individual item within the collection.

What NFT projects are compatible?
Around 50% of NFT’s on Ethereum that do not require whitelisting are compatible. Generative NFT’s like Crypto Kitties are not. The NFT Trader app will indicate if the contract is not compatible for you.

You can find upcoming NFT Drops on many sites including:

• NFT Calendar https://nftcalendar.io/events/ongoing/
• Rarity Sniper https://raritysniper.com/nft-drops-calendar
• ICY Tools https://icy.tools/discover
• DegenVerse https://degenverse.com/

Always do your own research.

2. Access the app and sign up for a free bloXroute account. https://nft.bloxroute.com

Next, fund your account with credits to use the app. Each minting attempt costs $20. Login to the bloXroute portal, copy your bloXroute account header, and paste it into the NFT Trader app.

3. Paste the NFT project Contract Address into the app
The app will indicate if it’s not compatible right away.

Contracts that are supported use minting functions that contain an input for
Payable Amount in Ether and the number of tokens with format of (uint256), (uint16), or (uint8).

Enter the NFT price and number of tokens. Be sure to follow the limits for these values set by the project to avoid failure. This information can be found on the project website, on twitter, or in the smart contract directly.

4. Select the transaction type. “Gas Protected” is the most popular.
“Gas Protected” provides the ability to save your gas if the mint fails for any reason. You pay a small fee for the protection. If the mint is successful, you’re charged a small percentage of the gas fee. You can also experiment with the “Private Transactions” or the “Fast Propagation” options.

5. Setting the gas amount
When using “Gas Protected” you’ll want to bid at least a little more than the latest “High” gas amount indicated by popular gas services. As the “Gas Protected” option provides an added tip to validators and miners, you’ll have more success by paying a little more than the latest high gas amount.

For the latest Ethereum gas rates go to https://etherscan.io/gastracker
One rule of thumb is using the “OpenSea Sale” gas fee as a reference to add on to.

6. Approve the transaction
You’ll approve and sign with your wallet and the transaction will be routed across the bloXroute network. If successful, the NFT will be deposited into your wallet. If it fails, the gas will never leave your wallet.

What is the technology that makes this possible?
bloXroute is a Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN). A global content distribution network of high-performance servers for blockchain scalability. As a part of this network, we directly connect and peer with mining pools covering over 90% of the hash power on Ethereum.

bloXroute and Flashbots are not mutually exclusive — many Flashbots bundles are sent through bloXroute blockchain trading API’s.
The advantages that bloXroute MEV Flashbots service provides to Crypto traders and NFT traders include:

• Submit MEV bundles faster to pools.
• Increase your success rate.
• Trade from multiple global relays.
• Less congestion than other services.

How can projects take advantage of this service?
You can make sure that your NFT smart contract mint function is compatible with the NFT Trader app. You can provide your community members with the contract address and link to the NFT Trader on your website and Twitter.

The popularity of your project or brand can become your worst nightmare.
You don’t want your mint to create negative impressions of your brand and bad PR coverage when people lose gas. You want people in your community focused on the value and fun of the brand. Trying to get the NFT should be positive for everyone.

bloXroute solves the issue of lost gas at the network layer in an equitable way and prevents the creation of unhappy community members.

How big of a need is there for “Gas Protected” NFT minting.
When trying to win a competitive NFT drop you must pay high gas due to the limited supply and high number of people trying to mint the NFT’s. The price of gas bid is often far more than the price of the NFT. As a result, to win you bid high gas, the problem is if you don’t win the NFT you lose all the gas. With bloXroute “Gas Protected” transactions if you don’t mint you don’t pay the gas fee. It never leaves your wallet and lives to fight another day.

• Adidas: $2.6 million lost

35k wallets attempted 39k mint transactions, and 59% of these mint attempts failed. The median successful mint transaction cost 0.16 ETH in gas. 680 ETH worth of gas was wasted on failed mints.

• Doodles: $1.26 million lost

During the public drop, 13k mint transactions were attempted by 10k wallets. 12k of these mint attempts failed, representing a 90% failure rate. The median successful mint transaction cost 4.0 ETH in gas. 335.2 ETH worth of gas was wasted due to failed transactions. Block 13,439,104 had over 1,000 failed transactions, 100 ETH in failed transaction fees alone.

• TimePIECES: $836,000 lost

11k wallets made 13.5k mint attempts, and 96% of those attempts failed. Successful mint transactions had a median gas fee of 2.3 ETH. 265 ETH of gas was lost as a result of failed transactions. Block 13,283,025, failed transactions.

For more information on bloXroute trading API’s visit https://bloXroute.com
For the NFT Trader app visit https://bloXroute.com/NFT