How to launch an NFT collection on Base

Base is Coinbase's L2. Two practical reasons it gets chosen over Ethereum mainnet: deploying and minting costs a small fraction of mainnet, and buyers are already there, because anything on Base surfaces inside Coinbase's own wallet and NFT views without you doing anything extra.

The trade-off is that Base is a younger market. Collections there tend to be priced lower and to move faster. If your buyers already live on mainnet and the art is expensive, mainnet is still the better venue.

• Finished artwork, every piece numbered and in its final form.
• Metadata, one JSON per piece with name, description, image and traits.
• Image hosting that will outlive the launch, meaning IPFS or Arweave rather than a server you pay for monthly.
• Supply, price and mint cap decided together, not one at a time.

If the artwork does not exist yet, that is the actual first step. Generating 10,000 pieces with AI takes about an hour; commissioning them takes weeks. Both paths are covered in how to generate a 10,000 piece collection.

PNG is the safe default and what every marketplace handles. SVG is worth using when your art is flat and geometric, because the files are smaller and stay sharp at any zoom, but check how your target marketplace renders it before you commit a whole collection to it.

A collection is an ERC-721 contract. You either write and deploy one yourself or use a no-code tool that does it for you.

Deploying by hand means you control everything, including the royalty settings, and you also own the risk: a mistake in a deployed contract is permanent. Using a tool means checking three things before you commit. Who owns the contract afterwards. What the creator fee is set to. Whether you can change it later.

The Amnt collection studio deploys for you and writes the platform cut as 0%, so you set the price and keep the proceeds.

These three are one decision rather than three.

• Supply sets the scarcity story. Ten thousand is the profile-picture convention. Five hundred to two thousand suits art-led collections where each piece is meant to be looked at.
• Price sets who can buy. Low price with high supply is a different product from high price with low supply, even at the same notional market cap.
• A per-wallet cap stops one buyer taking the mint. Without one, a single script can.

OpenSea indexes Base collections automatically once the contract exists and the metadata resolves. There is nothing to submit. A brand new contract can take a little while to appear, and the usual reason a collection shows up with blank images is a metadata base URI that is wrong, or an IPFS gateway that has not cached yet.

Mint one piece to yourself as soon as the contract is live. If that piece renders with its traits, the collection is fine. If it does not, you have found out at piece one instead of at piece ten thousand.

Separate the two, because only one of them is a fee.

Gas to deploy and to mint. On Base this is small, but the number moves with network conditions, so check a gas tracker on the day rather than trusting any article, this one included.

The platform cut, if you launch through a tool. This is the one that matters. It is usually a percentage of every sale, written into the contract, applied for as long as the collection trades. Read it before you deploy.

Most of the work is afterwards. A collection that launches and then goes quiet does not recover. What tends to help: a roadmap short enough to be believed, the traits and rarity explained somewhere collectors can find them, and a reason to hold that is not just price.

Decide in advance what you will do if it does not sell out. Discounting later is obvious to everyone who bought at launch and it is the fastest way to lose them.