NFT-MAKER-PRO API
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Scaling Issues
NFT drops are a difficult scaling challenge, given that a lot of traffic is focussed over a short period of time.
Overview
As mentioned above, your NFT drop will likely be based around a key mint date, for which your community will mint the majority of the NFTs over a short period of time (the most concentrated being in the first hour or so of the drop).
Because of this, it is very important to consider three factors regarding your set up:
- Ensure your website can handle the expected traffic
- Minimise the impact on NFT-MAKER infrastructure
- Minimise the impact on the Cardano Blockchain
This is particularly important when using the NFT-MAKER PRO API
Note - NFT-MAKER Infrastructure can more than handle very large drops, but there are still best practises that will help to minimise the load on all sides.
Your Website
It is now standard practise for projects to have their front end minting 'vending machine' be located on their own website. You can then very easily embed our Payment Gateway onto the site to enable a very sophisticated minting system.
Given this, the first thing to consider is the realistic level of traffic you expect to get over that initial 1 hour period. As this will be the busiest time, it will create the peak load that could cause your site to become unreachable if it does not have the ability to scale.
Look at the realistic demand and then thing about how this may convert (in the best case) to the number of people attempting to mint.
Consider:
- Peak number of concurrent connections
- Peak number of connection requests per minute
- Based on these figures, you can research with your hosting provider or look to other solutions like Cloudflare to provide load balancing.
NFT-MAKER
Using the Payment Gateway on your site has further benefits beyond the fantastic user experience - it also optimises the performance for your site and our infrastructure.
The first thing to note is that we already handle all of the minting-based bot defences. You will see that when using the Payment Gateway, we challenge each user to complete a reCAPTCHA form to prove that they are indeed, human.
Doing so not only will stop bots from purchasing all of your NFTs but it also means that we limit the number of API calls made to reserve your NFTs, as only real humans can pass the reCAPTCHA, so only real humans can reserve an NFT.
If you do decide to go for a more custom solution and use the API, it is important that you consider the following:
- NEVER call the API directly from the front end of your website, abstract it to the backend code
- NEVER call the API based on the loading of a page (especially not the homepage)
- Make sure the API is called only when a user deliberately takes a relevant action
- Make sure to implement CAPTCHA elements to deter bots.
- Only call the API when needed
Note - the API has a rate limit of 300 Calls Per Minute
Cardano Blockchain
The Cardano Blockchain is constantly being improved and now has higher TX speeds than ever. Having said this, as creators in the community we should be what we can to limit waste.
The good news is that both the NFT-MAKER Payment Gateway and API solve this problem by default, as both solutions use our Reservation System. In doing so, we ensure that people will only be able to send transactions for an NFT that is still available. This completely removes one of the early issues with minting on Cardano (where people would post a single address) and this often lead to people sending more ADA than there were NFTs in stock.
Because of this, the rest of this section only really related to the Single Pay-In Address, which is a very early part of our infrastructure but we keep this active as it does still have a use case.
Before using this, please consider where this particular solution is most appropriate
- Small scale projects
- Unable to create a website
If you still believe that this is the right solution for you (and not the NFT-MAKER Payment Gateway), please consider the following to help with scaling:
- Be very clear and careful with your community when communicating the minting wallet address AND the pricing structure.
- During minting, keep your community update to date when you are nearing (and have) sold out to reduce the number of TX's sent once all NFTs have been sold.
- Once you have sold out, all TX's will be refunded
Last modified 3mo ago
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