Can NFTs Be Issued at Scale?

On Jan. 19, Worldwide Asset eXchange, or WAX, celebrated the opening of its 10 millionth cloud wallet by dropping 10 million non-fungible tokens.

To celebrate its community loyalty and underscore how this is intrinsically linked to WAX’s success, each account holder will get their own provenance-proven digital pin.

If you’ve ever minted and sold an NFT, then you know there’s complexity to the process. Now imagine doing that 1x107 times. WAX had to figure out how to do that before the platform crossed this milestone. And considering it’s the global number one blockchain site by daily transactions, and number two blockchain site by daily users second only to Binance, that moment was coming up fast.

“Arguably, the real flex here is the 10 million NFTs we’ll be dropping when we hit the milestone. It’s nearly 10 times larger than the largest NFT drop in blockchain history,” says WAX co-founder William Quigley. “A drop of this magnitude has never been attempted before. WAX is the only blockchain to attempt something of this scale.”

The process isn’t as daunting as one might expect because WAX is built for the purpose of crafting and distributing NFTs. So for Quigley’s organization the process of dropping 10 million NFTs isn’t much different from that of dropping a single NFT. Still, the drop will represent the speed and scalability of WAX, all while remaining carbon-neutral by using a proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work blockchain.

The trick, then, isn’t the ability to distribute NFTs – it’s the ability to distribute digital assets regardless of form. Wax was built to process tens and even hundreds of millions of transactions per day. It already exceeds 15 million per day in real-world operation, so a 10 million-unit drop might push the system near its limits for a short period but it won't break it. That being the case, this event could instill greater confidence in WAX’s ecosystem as it gears up for an expected increase in volume, not just in 2022, but in each year of the foreseeable future.

WAX built its blockchain for the sole purpose of minting and dropping millions of NFTs – a process that, on Ethereum, would be devastatingly slow, astronomically expensive and environmentally unsound.

That’s because creating NFTs on Ethereum involves a number of steps. The first is creating a wallet – and MetaMask is neither easy nor secure enough for use by the average user. But let’s move past that. Once users have a wallet, now they need to buy ETH.

And that’s before NFTs even enter the picture. Creating an NFT, as with any transaction on Ethereum, is both cost-intensive and bad for the environment. Let’s not forget that, whatever Vitalik Buterin’s utopian plans might have been, his brainchild still runs on a proof-of-work protocol, so minting 10 million NFTs right now would cost $331,200,000 – much of that going into coal-fired energy. Another slice of that pie goes to preventing or mitigating the effects of spammers on the network. That’s a hidden expense – it’s just part of the fee structure – but it’s a real cost nonetheless and the NFT issuer is stuck with the bill.

WAX, though, has engineered the process so that the only truly labor-intensive activity in the process is creating the NFTs. Maybe it’s possible to just go on Fiverr and hire 10 million graphic designers to mint one NFT each, but that’s not the way WAX decided to go.

To assure smooth sailing, the drop is being broken up into 10 segments. Each segment of 1 million account holders will receive a unique pin celebrating WAX’s most important milestones:

Driven by gaming, WAX is the most highly utilized blockchain in the world, processing more than seven times more daily transactions than any other blockchain. Some days, it processes more transactions than all other blockchains combined – all without charging gas or other fees for minting or gifting transactions.