Alchemy Launches NFT Allowlist Platform Spearmint for Ethereum, Layer-2 Projects

Blockchain software company Alchemy has launched a new product called Spearmintwhich aims to do NFT whitelist registration and management process easier for creators.

Spearmint is a free product that NFT creators can use to automate much of the process of creating approval lists using Spearmint’s tools. According to a statement, Alchemy claims users can create an approval list on Spearmint in under 10 minutes and connect it to a project’s application and smart contract “with a few simple lines of code.”

At launch, Spearmint will be able to support NFT projects on Ethereumpolygon, Arbitrationand Optimism.

Why do NFT creators use approval lists? NFTs– unique blockchain tokens denoting ownership over digital assets – have sometimes slowed down networks like Ethereum when “coining” (i.e. primary sales) happen, causing Ethereum gas prices rise and “gas wars” occur (the CryptoKitties and Yuga Labs’ Other country mint are two good examples of gas wars in NFT history).

The concern about gas wars and a desire to create anticipation and exclusivity lead many NFT creators to create “allow lists”, which are essentially lists of certain wallet addresses, typically limited to the number of NFTs available in a given collection, which are trusted for to characterize that collection.

“We’ve consistently heard from the thousands of NFT projects we’ve worked on that minting is the most critical and most broken part of building with NFTs,” Alchemy said in a statement about why it created Spearmint.

But Spearmint isn’t the first product aimed at NFT creators seeking an easier whitelisting process. Premint is without a doubt Spearmint’s biggest rival.

Alkymi product manager Mike Garland said Decrypt in an interview that Spearmint is more automated than Premint.

“One big difference is that we’ve built out what we call the Spearmint API, which effectively takes part of the whitelisting process that’s very tough, labor-intensive and manual right now and basically automates the whole thing,” Garland said.

For now, creators will need buyers to go through Spearmint’s website to use their approval lists, but Garland said this could evolve over time.

“We’ve been thinking about how we can make this a white-label solution,” he said.

When it comes to preventing gas wars, Spearmint’s lead engineer Jay Paik said Decrypt in an interview that in his view not all gas wars are preventable. But “transparency from the project” may improve the odds.

“We want to provide the tools to provide transparency around how many spots are on the approval list, and also push the creator side to implement reasonable measures,” Paik said of Spearmint, which also offers a “waitlist” feature that creators can adjust on the fly.

While Spearmint itself was developed by a multi-billion dollar company with celebrity investors like Jay-Z, Jared Leto and Will Smith, that doesn’t mean all projects using Spearmint are guaranteed to be trustworthy. Spearmint wants the platform to be open and accessible to everyone – so it won’t investigate the creators who use the tools.

“The general philosophy is open tools,” Garland said.

But if Spearmint decides to promote or highlight select creators using their platform, that’s a different story.

“We want to have confidence as a team that they’re legitimate,” Garland said of all featured creators, adding that Spearmint wants to showcase NFT creators “responsibly.”

Asked how Alchemy will profit from Spearmint, Garland said the company has “no plans” to do so.

“No monetization of the products and no plans to for the foreseeable future,” Garland said of Spearmint. “The goal here is to make it much easier to build with NFTs and build interesting things with NFTs.”