Introducing Mint on Demand

One of the many reasons web3 makes sense for the gaming use case is that blockchain allows for true ownership of digital assets inside a game. Almost everything inside a game, from skins, to weapons, to powers and land, can be made available for buying, selling and trading. As such, games may easily have millions of assets available for sale at any given time. Placing such a large number of items on the blockchain can be problematic, both in terms of speed and cost. Despite modern layer 1 chains like Solana being much less expensive than their predecessors, the sheer volume of items for sale inside a game still introduces challenges.

Mint on Demand

To solve these challenges, Fractal is pleased to announce “mint on demand” functionality, launching as part of the Fractal Developer toolkit. This functionality allows game developers to mint items on the blockchain at time of sale. This delays the cost of minting the item until the point where a player has expressed interest to buy the item. Rather than a collection being defined up front, and all blockchain fees paid up front, minting on demand allows an NFT collection to be built up over time as players mint items.

Continuous monetization

Mint on demand allows games to generate mint revenue in a smoother and more predictable fashion. Developers can have items for sale inside their game in a virtual storefront, 365 days a year, and slowly and surely sell out these collections over time, rather than rely on periodic “drops” that starve the developer of necessary cash flow to fund development.

New types of assets

Minting on demand may also change the nature of the items being minted. Without this feature, games are incentivized to keep their collections narrowly defined. Now, games can be more experimental in what they make available to mint. There is little risk of failure because there is no cost until a player expresses interest in minting an item. We’ll likely see new and interesting asset types being minted inside games.

Dynamic assets

Mint on demand opens up a lot of interesting opportunities for UGC (user generated content). Because the assets aren’t minted until time of sale, the NFTs themselves can be dynamic, incorporating metadata on the fly based on game-play. For example, perhaps a player unlocks a certain level inside a game. That player can be given the option of minting an NFT that embeds properties of that player into the NFT itself (perhaps the players name), forever memorializing the player who brought that asset into existence.

Furthermore, some games may allow players to customize or construct their own assets. For example, a player may build structures or maps for use inside a game. If some of these items never find a buyer, no harm done. But the items that find buyers will become part of a dynamic and growing collection.

How to get started

More information on how to mint NFTs in-game is available at developers.fractal.is. Once you have your API token, simply specify the metadata of the NFT you want to be minted, and Fractal will return a transaction to mint the new item. To further simplify your workflow, we manage the treasury and update authority wallets on your behalf. If you’d prefer to manage these wallets yourself, let us know.

Our roadmap is your roadmap

When we launched Fractal, the goal was to serve the needs of web3 game developers. Today’s launch is the embodiment of that goal. We are not building these tools in isolation. What developers need is what we build.

So please, if you would like to get involved in our roadmap and help us shape the future of web3 gaming together, please get in touch with us at developers@fractal.is or join our Discord and ask questions in #eng-ama.