MINTING
IN THIS LESSON
One of the biggest perks of minting NFTs on Cardano is the low cost. In this lesson, we'll explain why minting fees are so reasonable and how this benefits creators, especially those working with larger collections. We'll break down the technical reasons behind its low minting fees and we'll explain how to batch mint multiple NFTs at once, maximizing efficiency and minimizing costs.
The network fee paid for minting NFTs on Cardano is very small. This is why, for instance, most minting services don’t even bother to add additional calculations for minting fees. Because minting NFTs on Cardano is done by registering additional metadata to a transaction, multiple assets can be minted in the same transaction. The exact number depends on the metadata size of each asset, but as a rule of thumb, minting 20 to 25 NFTs in one transaction should not be a problem. In most cases, when minting multiple NFTs in a single transaction, you could even consider that the fee for minting one NFT is smaller than that of a simple transaction. For example the fees for a standard transaction on Cardano are approximately 0.17 ADA, a mint transaction that minted 10 NFTs with relatively large metadata, similar to the one pictured in the previous lesson, had transaction fees of 0.492 ADA - meaning that the minting fee for each individual NFT was just 0.049 ADA.
In conclusion, because the minting of a token is treated by the network as a transaction, the actual “minting fee” is just the slightly larger transaction fee that needs to be paid in order to add the token metadata to the transaction. This is because the network fees are determined by the size of the transaction in bytes and the metadata of the token is additional information that is stored on the blockchain. You can get a comprehensive explanation of this here.
The relatively low fees, apply not only to the minting of the tokens but to all other transactions throughout its life cycle, be it a transfer, a sale or other interactions with a smart contract on Cardano.
The Cardano roadmap even includes a feature called “Babel Fees” that would allow for network fees to be paid in tokens other than ADA.