The Ultimate Gas and Minting Guide for the Omnimorph Drop
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Special thanks to Rey#2114 & xyn/Serg#8459 for this guide.
If you’re reading this then you’re already winning!
How?
Well, you’ve decided to set yourself up for success in Omnimorphs’ extremely exciting upcoming mint!
Congrats! You’re taking your luck into your own hands.
The purpose of this guide is to give you some real-world information to make Mint Day a (relatively) stress-free one. We’ll go through the following (skip to #6 if you’re yellow status 🟡 or short on time and just want the most critical information):
- What are Ethereum Gas/Transaction Fees
- How to Plan Ahead for a Stress-Free Drop
- How to Use a Fast Transaction
- How to Speed Up Your Transaction Even More
- How to Cancel a Pending Transaction
- Super Important TLDR; FAQs
We want every one of you to have the best chance of copping an Omnimorph without getting rekt by gas fees and being left with an Omni-less wallet.
That said, it’s important to know from the get-go that, due to the limited nature of our NFT drop, everyone is not guaranteed an Omnimorph. So, if you read this article and decide minting is not for you then it may be one of the wiser decisions you’ve made.
How?
It’s simple: there will be plenty of Omni’s available on the secondary market shortly after mint.
You see, my friends, the last thing we want is for you to FOMO in.
Choose your strategy wisely but rest assured that it’s not ‘mint’ or ‘rekt’. Buying on secondary is often a better strategy than aping in on mint day with insane gas fees especially if you’re only looking to get yourself one or two.
Anyways, none of this is investment advice but we hope you take this information and use it to your advantage. :)
Right, enough rambling. Let’s jump right in.
1. What Are Ethereum Gas/Transaction Fees?
Gas is the fee you pay for your transaction to be processed on the Ethereum network.
Gas increases when there are a lot of people trying to complete a transaction at once. What happens is that people start “outbidding” each other by offering to pay the network a higher transaction fee (gwei) to process their transaction first.
This can get pretty crazy when a bunch of people are all competing for a limited item (such as an NFT drop). People will start offering the network higher fees to have their transaction processed first (and thereby securing themselves an NFT).
2. Plan Ahead for a Stress-Free Drop
Have you noticed how gas has been really high lately?
Well, there are a ton of NFT projects dropping and people are pretty thirsty for their NFTs! So to successfully navigate the upcoming Omni drop, there are two questions you need to ask yourself:
- How many Omnis would you like to mint? Duh, an obvious question we know but this is related to the next question.
- What’s your total budget?
The thing is, if you don’t carefully estimate what you’re willing and able to spend then you won’t know what to do when gas prices start increasing.
And it’ll really pain me to see someone in a situation where:
“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. Wondering how the Omni drop sold out already.”
So read on, please.
Planning to Have Enough for the Drop
As a rule of thumb, our experienced community members generally save enough for one mint and the price of that mint for gas.
For example, let’s imagine that an Omnimorph is going to cost 0.08ETH.
A community member, let’s call him Vitalik, will make sure that he has 0.16ETH, 0.08 for the NFT, and 0.08 for gas. Yes, that is a lot for gas but when things get crazy on mint day, even 0.08ETH won’t be enough (sometimes gas can cost upwards of 0.3ETH or even 0.6ETH on super-hyped days where the Ethereum network is particularly busy).
However, by setting this budget, Vitalik knows that if the gas is more than 0.08ETH, he cannot afford it and therefore have no choice but to drop out and wait to buy on the secondary market. Getting rekt sucks.
This is just how he views it. He sets a budget, and if the total price goes beyond that then he will just accept it and wait for someone who is looking to sell their Omni shortly after mint.
Maybe you want to ensure you get an Omni no matter what the gas is. Well, in that case, you need to know how to increase your transaction fee. It’s pretty simple but you must be aware of this very important fact:
Even if your transaction fails, gas will be consumed and you will lose ETH.
So be very careful when thinking of aping in hard as you can inadvertently lose a lot of money.
3. How to Use a Fast Transaction
Alright so here is how to speed up your transaction.
- After you have clicked “Mint” (or whatever they end up calling the magic button) on the Omnimorph website, your Metamask extension will open up and ask you for the gas fee. Select “Edit”.
- Omnimorphs are epic and we don’t mean to increase your FOMO here but several community members think it to be unwise to set gas to anything lower than “Fast” (unless this means the total cost exceeds your budget — even total ape degens have budgets, right?).
- Metamask will show you an estimated price for your gas selection and then you can go ahead and click “OK”. (You can set the “Max Gwei” manually at the bottom of the “Advanced Options” if you like (see image below) but generally the “Fast” option is sufficient)
- Don’t change the “Gas Limit”, however. If you want to set the gas price manually, consult gasnow.org to see what the current gas price estimates are).
Now if all goes well, you’ll have your Omnimorph after a couple of seconds although you may need to wait up to a minute or so. It always varies.
4. How to Speed Up Your Transaction
If your transaction is not being processed as fast as you’d like (scroll to the end of this guide to see the steps for viewing your transaction status) and you’re worried the collection might sell out before your transaction gets processed, there are two additional steps you can take to increase your transaction fee.
Click “Speed Up” here (see image below). You’ll be asked again whether you want gas (gwei) to be set to “Low”, “Medium”, “High”. Choose “High”. Again, you can also choose “Advanced Options” and set the Max Gwei manually as we showed in 3.1.
Once you’ve sped up your transaction as shown in a), there is one more way to speed it up even further.
You’ll need to view the transaction under the “Activity” tab of your Metamask wallet. Once you click on the pending transaction, you’ll be able to view information about the transaction such as its nonce, the total price, etc. You’ll notice a “Speed Up” button near the bottom of this page. Click on that and then select “High”. (If you are in the public mint and the Gas War is going on the “High” setting from Metamask might not be enough, so try to use the advanced options to set up custom numbers, see more about it at the end of this guide)
It’s important to note that both a) and b) incur additional fees (in case it’s not obvious from the text).
5. How to Cancel a Pending Transaction
Let’s imagine a scenario quick:
You’ve gone through the steps above but the collection sells out while your transaction is still pending. Your transaction may just fail by itself but sometimes transactions can get stuck. And a stuck transaction means you cannot send anything from your wallet until that transaction either fails or succeeds.
In cases like these it’s a good idea to cancel a pending transaction using the following method:
Enable “Custom Nonce” in your advanced Metamask setting. A nonce is like a transaction ID where a transaction with a nonce of 3 gets processed before a transaction with a nonce of 4.
Now that you’ve enabled “Custom Nonce”, you can cancel your pending transaction by sending a transaction to yourself and setting the nonce to the nonce of the pending transaction.
For example, if your pending transaction has a nonce of 4 (you can also see the nonce on Etherscan using your transaction hash), then you’d send a new transaction to yourself with a nonce of 4.
The transaction amount can be left as 0ETH but the gas should be higher than that recommended by etherscan.io/gastracker or gasnow.org.
Now your transaction should be canceled and you can go hunting on the secondary market for your favorite Omni!
6. Minting FAQs
You should already have Metamask Wallet installed, and ETH loaded on it.
What are Gas Fees?
The fee you pay to the Ethereum network to process your request, e.g., buying or minting an NFT. The price you pay for your transaction: PRICE of the NFT + GAS FEES.
How much are the Gas Fees?
It depends on how many requests are going on at the given moment. Imagine it like traffic on the highway. All projects on Ethereum use the same highway. Visit the following visualization to understand it better: https://txstreet.com/v/eth
What will the fee be to mint an Omni?
You can check the current prices on https://www.gasnow.org/
FOR PRE-MINT
If you do the pre-mint (yellow pass), you don’t need to worry about the fees, as you can use the timetable estimation on gasnow.org and mint when the gas fees are at a reasonable level. You don’t need to change anything in MetaMask so leave everything on default and wait a couple of minutes until your request is processed.
How much ETH should I prepare to mint 2 Omnis during the pre-mint?
An estimation: we have 2x 0.08 ETH so that’s already 0.16 ETH. Let’s say you mint around the time with the GAS being 100 Gwei, so that would make 0.02–0.03 ETH per NFT. Resulting in 0.22 ETH to pre-mint 2 Omnis.
FOR PUBLIC MINT
If you do the public mint (date and time will be announced), you will need to enter the GAS WARS
What are Gas Wars?
Remember how everyone is using the same highway? Since there are a limited number of OMNIs, only the people who arrive first at the finish line will get some (first come, first served). How to arrive first? Pay more GAS -> entering the GAS WARS.
The transactions of the people who pay more GAS FEES will be processed before the others (even if they submitted them a minute later). So people are overbidding each other putting more and more GAS into the transaction (you have the option to speed up your transaction on Metamask).
What Gas Fees to expect during the Gas War?
No one knows for sure. From the experience of our community members minting high-profile projects, they have estimated required gas fees to be up to 2000 gwei. In more practical terms, to mint 4 of the hyped project’s NFTs, each priced at 0.1 ETH, community members had to pay 0.8 ETH in gas fees using 1800 Gwei. This equates to 0.2 ETH in gas per NFT.
If I mint multiple NFTs in 1 transaction (tx) will I only pay a 1-time Gas Fee?
No, you will pay the Gas Fee for every mint “command” in the transaction. Still, it is better to have them all in one transaction since it is not guaranteed that your other transactions (in cases where you’ve queued them) will go through.
How to set up 2000 Gwei Gas in my Metamask during the potential gas war?
See attached screenshots
How to speed up the transaction during the gas war?
If you are entering a gas war for the first time, it might be safer not to further speed up your transaction and rather go straight to canceling it. Speeding up the transaction will result in an even higher cost for you with the same risk of the transaction failing.
Once you’ve opened Metamask, you will see your transaction pending and a button titled “speed up”. Click on it and set an even higher “Max priority fee” and “Max fee” as before.
How to cancel the transaction?
You can leave the transaction as “pending”. Once the contract has minted all 10k Omnis, the gas price will reduce to a more stable price (unless another hyped drop is happening at the same time), your transaction will go through and fail. This will result in you losing a portion of your gas fees. The ETH price of the Omni NFTs will be returned if the transaction fails.
If you want to cancel while the contract is still processing
Open MetaMask, you will see your transaction pending and the button “cancel”. Click on it, you will need to enter even more “Max priority fee” and “Max fee” as before.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, we applaud you!
As always with crypto, do your own research and take responsibility for your actions. But we sincerely hope that this guide may help you on that road.
If you’d like to know more or want to have a chat with the community and team, be sure to check out our Discord channels. Also, keep an eye out for our daily meditations happening over on Radio OM (the voice channel in our Discord server) — we all need to give ourselves time to slow down and catch our breath in the insanely fast-paced world of crypto and NFTs…
Can’t wait to see all your epic Omnimorphs!
Thanks for reading and good luck! :)
Additional Information
How to View Your Transaction Status
- Select the “Activity” tab on your Metamask.
- Select the transaction that was submitted to mint your Omnimorph (the one at the top of the list unless you did something else after minting)
- At the top right, you’ll see an arrow pointing to the top right. Select this.
- You’ll now be taken to https://etherscan.io/ where you will find the relevant information such as status, gas consumed, price, etc.
