Zora: What It Is and Why It's Essential for NFT Creators

Dear HackerNoon Nation,

Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

One of the things I’m thankful for is having the opportunity to explore and work around NFTs, which offer new and more open ways for creators to advance their practices.

That said, one of my favorite NFT projects is Zora because of its impressive suite of creator resources. And I’m excited and grateful that the Zora team just released their new Drops tool, which makes it easier than ever to deploy large unique NFT collections.

Want to learn the basic ins and outs of this new resource? I’ve got you covered for today’s post!

-WMP

What Is Zora 🌜🌞🌛

Zora is a universal media registry protocol on Ethereum. This protocol, or hyperstructure, makes it easy to buy, create, or sell NFTs in a decentralized and permissionless fashion, forevermore.

Why It matters ❓

There is a range of do-it-yourself NFT solutions for minting 1/1s (unique standalone pieces), 1/x limited-edition collections (e.g., 1/10s, which have 10 copies of one piece), and Nounish drops (e.g.m 1 NFT published every day).

However, Zora Drops is the first service anyone can use to create 1/1/x drops, where every piece is unique but part of a larger cohesive collection.

Why Zora Drops Are Useful 📁

Zora Drops are user-controlled and user-friendly tooling. They offer:

• Gas-efficiency — *Minting costs are inexpensive *

• In-built sales — Native public and presale mechanisms available for dropping tokens

• No-code UX — Deploy your own NFT metadata and smart contracts without being a programmer

• Simple uploads — Batch upload prepared folders of unique files

Creating Your Own 1/1/x NFT Drop 🖱️

To use Zora Drops you would follow these simple steps:

1. Navigate to create.zora.co/create, and connect your wallet

2. Click the “Drops” button

3. Upload your desired metadata folder

4. Preview and tweak your prospective mints

5. Finish your collection parameters

6. Complete the mint transaction with a wallet signature, and that’s it!

More Flexibility for Creators 🔥

Let’s say you’re a poet who wants to mint a collection of 100 unique poems all at once.

Previously, you could have gone to an NFT minting platform and manually minted one poem at a time. The process would’ve probably taken a couple of hours in requiring you to deploy each one of these NFTs individually with hundreds of clicks after all was said and done.

This approach isn’t efficient.

With Zora Drops, though, now creators can simply upload a folder of unique pieces, e.g., 100 poems, and use a streamlined UI for preparing and publishing these works into a large NFT collection.

What would’ve taken hundreds of clicks otherwise now just takes a handful, so the UX leap forward is significant here. This leap forward is why Zora Drops is the latest great resource that NFT creatives should consider working into their web3 toolboxes!

Action Steps

• 🎴 Check out Zora’s new Drops tooling

• 💎 Read my previous post Finding new NFT mints with Gem if you missed it!

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!