Gas Optimization Techniques for NFT Platforms

Anyone who has tried to mint an NFT during a busy drop knows the frustration. You log in, get your wallet ready, click mint, and then watch as gas fees eat up more money than the NFT itself is worth. This is not a rare edge case. During the 2021 NFT boom, some users were paying over $100 just to complete a single mint transaction, and the average gas price shot past 500 Gwei at certain points.

Things have improved. By March 2025, average gas prices had dropped to around 2.7 Gwei, down nearly 96% from early 2024 peaks. Transaction costs that once reached $145 for an NFT mint now typically sit between $0.39 and a few dollars on the Ethereum mainnet. Layer 2 networks and alternative chains have pushed those numbers even lower.

But lower base fees do not mean creators and platform builders can stop thinking about gas optimisation. High-traffic drops still cause spikes. Poor smart contract design still wastes gas on every single transaction. And the platforms that build gas efficiency into their foundation from day one will always give their communities a better experience than those who ignore it.

This blog covers the most effective gas optimisation techniques for NFT platforms, from the way you write your Solidity code to the chain you choose to deploy on. Whether you are building an NFT marketplace, launching a collection, or trying to figure out how to reduce costs for your users, the information here is practical, specific, and backed by real data.

What Are NFT Gas Fees and Why Do They Matter So Much

Gas fees are the payments users make to compensate blockchain validators for the computing work needed to process a transaction. Every action on Ethereum, whether you are sending ETH, swapping tokens, minting an NFT, or interacting with a smart contract, requires a specific amount of gas. That amount depends on how much computing work the operation demands.

The gas fee is calculated by multiplying the gas units used by the current gas price. After the EIP-1559 upgrade in 2021, Ethereum introduced a base fee plus a priority tip system. The base fee is burned, and the tip goes to validators. This made fees more predictable but did not remove the core problem: when more people want to transact at the same time, block space runs out, competition rises, and fees spike.

For NFT platforms, this creates a real problem. Minting is a complex transaction. It involves writing ownership data to the blockchain, updating balances, and in many cases, executing custom smart contract logic. All of that adds up to a high gas cost per transaction. When hundreds or thousands of people try to mint at the same time during a popular drop, fees can become punishing.

Why does this matter beyond just the cost? Gas fees are one of the biggest barriers to NFT adoption, especially for platforms offering NFT marketplace development solutions. When a first-time buyer logs in to try their first NFT purchase and sees a fee warning that nearly doubles the price of what they wanted to buy, many of them leave. High fees hurt creators who lose potential buyers. They hurt platforms that lose potential users. And they hurt the NFT space as a whole by making it feel inaccessible.

Gas optimisation is not just a technical exercise. It is a product decision that directly affects how many people can afford to participate in your platform.

NFT Minting Gas Costs Across Blockchains (2025 Data)

Blockchain	Avg. NFT Mint Cost	Network Type	Key Notes
Ethereum Mainnet	$15 to $50 (peak: $50+)	Layer 1	Largest collector base, highest fees, strongest brand value
Polygon	~$0.10	Layer 2 / Sidechain	EVM-compatible, OpenSea supported, avg fee ~$0.003
Solana	~$0.005	Layer 1 (alt chain)	Ultra-low fees, fast transactions, strong gaming NFT ecosystem
Arbitrum	~$0.05	Layer 2 (Optimistic Rollup)	90% cheaper than L1, full EVM support, growing NFT presence
Binance Smart Chain	~$0.50	Layer 1 (alt chain)	Low fees, less decentralised, fiat-friendly via Binance NFT
Avalanche	~$0.20	Layer 1 (subnet model)	Subnets allow customised fee structures for specific projects

Smart Contract Level Techniques to Reduce NFT Gas Fees

The biggest opportunity for gas savings in NFT platforms lives inside the smart contract itself. Poor contract design can cost your users two or three times more per mint than well-optimized code. Here are the most impactful changes you can make at the smart contract level.

1. Skip ERC721Enumerable

ERC721Enumerable is a very common choice for NFT contracts because it makes it easy to look up which token IDs a particular wallet holds. But it comes with a steep gas price. The extension uses four mappings and an array internally, and it writes to all of them on every single token transfer. That overhead makes the first mint roughly twice as expensive compared to a plain ERC721 contract, and subsequent mints can be nearly three times more expensive.

The key question to ask yourself is whether you actually need that on-chain enumeration. In most cases, the answer is no. You can get the same information by calling the ownerOf(tokenId) function for each token from your backend, or by reading Transfer events from the blockchain. Both approaches give you token ownership data without forcing your users to pay extra gas for every mint and transfer. If your application does not need on-chain enumeration from inside the contract, skip ERC721Enumerable entirely.

2. Use ERC721A Standard

The Azuki team released the ERC721A standard with one core goal: making it possible to mint multiple NFTs in a single transaction for close to the cost of minting just one. The way they achieved this is smart. Standard ERC721 contracts write ownership data once per token. ERC721A instead sets ownership only once for a batch of consecutively minted tokens, dramatically reducing the number of storage write operations.

The numbers are striking. Minting one NFT via the standard ERC721 (Enumerable) costs 154,814 gas. Minting the same single NFT via ERC721A costs 76,690 gas. For five NFTs minted at once, standard ERC721 requires 616,914 gas, while ERC721A handles the same job in just 85,206 gas. That is more than 7 times more efficient for a five-token mint. For batch minting use cases, ERC721A can deliver over 80% savings in gas costs.

One tradeoff worth knowing: because ERC721A does not store individual owner records for each token in a batch, transfer operations later cost slightly more gas (about 55% more on average) since the contract needs to look up ownership. If your users primarily mint single tokens and then frequently trade, that tradeoff may not favour ERC721A. But for projects where large batch minting is common, and transfers happen less often, the savings are significant.

3. Mappings Over Arrays

Whitelist minting is standard practice in NFT launches. It gives early supporters priority access and often a lower price. But how you store that whitelist in your contract makes an enormous difference to gas costs.

An array-based whitelist works by storing all whitelisted addresses in an array. When someone tries to mint, the contract iterates through the entire array to check if they are on it. The problem is that this loop gets more expensive as more people are added. A user near the end of a 1,000-person whitelist could pay dramatically more gas than someone near the beginning, and the cost grows with every addition.

A mapping-based whitelist stores a key-value pair: address maps to a boolean. Checking whether a wallet is whitelisted takes a single lookup operation regardless of how many addresses are in the mapping. The gas cost is constant whether you have 10 people or 10,000 people on the whitelist. For any whitelist with more than a handful of addresses, mappings are the correct choice.

4. Merkle Tree Whitelisting

Even mappings have a cost if you are writing hundreds or thousands of addresses to the blockchain. When you add an address to an on-chain mapping, you are writing to the blockchain, and that costs gas. If your whitelist has 500 addresses, adding them all with a mapping approach can cost thousands of dollars in gas fees alone.

Merkle Trees solve this problem elegantly. A Merkle Tree is a data structure where the entire list of whitelisted addresses is hashed together into a single root hash. The only thing you write to your smart contract is that one 32-byte root hash, regardless of whether your whitelist has 100 or 100,000 addresses. The cost of setting up the whitelist on-chain becomes practically nothing.

When a user wants to mint, your frontend application generates a proof from the Merkle Tree and submits it alongside the transaction. The contract verifies the proof against the stored root hash to confirm the user is on the list. The overhead of Merkle proof verification adds about 15% more gas per mint compared to a plain mapping approach, which is a worthwhile exchange when you are saving thousands of dollars on whitelist setup. For any collection planning to whitelist more than a few hundred wallets, Merkle Trees are the industry standard approach.

5. Pack Variables Smartly

Solidity stores variables in 32-byte slots. A uint256 variable takes up a full slot by itself. But smaller types like uint8, uint16, and bool Only use a portion of a slot. If you declare two small variables that could share a slot but do not organise them correctly in your code, Solidity will store them in separate slots, doubling the storage reads and writes needed.

When functions access multiple variables that sit in the same storage slot, the EVM only needs to load the slot once. If those same variables are spread across different slots, the EVM has to perform separate load operations. This sounds minor, but for functions called thousands of times, misaligned variable packing can add thousands of extra gas units. Simply reorganizing your variable declarations so that smaller types are grouped together can make a noticeable difference in how much each function call costs your users.

6. Use Unchecked Arithmetic

Since Solidity 0.8.0, all arithmetic operations include automatic overflow and underflow checks by default. These checks add extra opcodes to your compiled bytecode, which means extra gas per operation. For situations where you know for certain that an operation cannot overflow or underflow, wrapping it in an unchecked block tells the compiler to skip those extra checks.

A common case where this applies is counter increments in loops. If you are iterating over a bounded set with a loop counter that you know will not overflow auint256, wrapping the increment in an unchecked block saves a small but real amount of gas per iteration. On its own, the savings from one operation are small. But in contracts with many arithmetic operations or functions called at high volume, the cumulative effect adds up meaningfully.

7. Start Token IDs at 1

In Solidity, changing a storage variable from zero to a non-zero value is significantly more expensive than changing it from one non-zero value to another. Setting a variable from zero to a non-zero value costs 20,000 gas, while changing it from one non-zero value to another costs only 5,000 gas. First mints are expensive partly because several variables change from zero to non-zero for the first time.

If you initialise your token ID counter at 1 instead of 0, the first user who mints from your contract pays considerably less because fewer of those expensive zero-to-non-zero transitions happen. Well-known projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Azuki start their token IDs at zero, which means the project creator bears the cost of that first expensive mint. If one of your community members is going to be the first miner, initialising at 1 is a simple way to lower their costs and improve their experience.

8. Split Minting Functions

It can be tempting to write one flexible mint function that handles multiple phases, whitelist conditions, and sale stages using if statements and conditional logic. From a code organisation standpoint, a single function seems tidy. But every additional condition check in a smart contract costs gas. Each if statement that the EVM evaluates adds opcodes to the execution path.

Separating logic into distinct functions for each phase or condition moves the decision-making off-chain. Your frontend reads the current state of the contract and then calls the appropriate function. The individual functions are simpler, shorter, and cheaper to execute. A straightforward if statement can add around 300 extra gas per call. Across thousands of mint transactions, that adds up to a real cost for your users that could have been avoided with a cleaner contract design.

9. Enable Solidity Optimiser

The Solidity compiler comes with an optimiser that you can enable in your development environment settings. With the optimiser off, both deployment costs and function call costs are noticeably higher. Turning the optimiser on almost always reduces the gas users pay to call your functions.

The optimiser also takes a “number of runs” parameter, which tells the compiler how often you expect each function to be called over the lifetime of the contract. A lower number like 1 or 200 optimises for cheaper deployment at the possible expense of slightly higher function call costs. A higher number, like 5,000, optimises for cheaper function calls but increases deployment size and cost. For most NFT contracts where the mint function will be called thousands of times, a moderate run setting is appropriate. Always test your specific contract with different settings to find the right balance for your use case.

Choosing the Right Blockchain for NFT Gas Optimisation

Smart contract optimisation can only take you so far. The blockchain you choose to deploy on sets the ceiling for how cheap or expensive your platform can be, no matter how well you write your contracts. Understanding the cost landscape across major chains is one of the first decisions any NFT platform builder needs to make.

1. Ethereum Mainnet

Ethereum remains the dominant chain for high-value NFTs. The collector base is the largest here, the secondary market liquidity is highest, and the brand credibility of an Ethereum-based collection still carries weight. Average fees in 2025 sit around $3.78 per transaction for standard operations, but an NFT mint can cost $15 to $50 during normal conditions and climb far higher during peak demand events.

For platforms targeting collectors willing to pay for prestige and established marketplaces, the Ethereum mainnet makes sense. But for platforms where volume, accessibility, and low barriers to entry matter more, the alternatives below offer compelling economics.

2. Layer 2 Networks

Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync process transactions off the Ethereum mainnet, batch them together, and settle the results back on-chain. This dramatically reduces costs while keeping the security guarantees of Ethereum underneath. Arbitrum and Optimism combined now handle about 47% of all Ethereum transaction executions, showing how widely adopted this approach has become.

NFT minting on Arbitrum typically costs around $0.05. Projects using zk-rollups have seen transaction cost reductions of around 60% compared to the standard Ethereum mainnet. After the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced proto-danksharding, Layer 2 data posting costs dropped by 50% to 90% on many networks. For NFT platforms that need Ethereum compatibility but cannot afford mainnet fees, Layer 2 is the most direct path forward.

3. Polygon

Polygon sits at an interesting middle ground. It is technically a sidechain and Layer 2 solution that maintains full EVM compatibility, meaning Solidity smart contracts written for Ethereum deploy on Polygon without modification. Average gas fees on Polygon sit around $0.003, and NFT mints typically cost about $0.10. For creators who want Ethereum tool compatibility without Ethereum mainnet pricing, Polygon has strong marketplace support, including OpenSea and Rarible.

4. Solana

Solana offers some of the lowest NFT minting costs available, typically around $0.005 per mint. The network processes transactions in parallel rather than sequentially, which gives it extremely high throughput and predictably low fees even under demand. Average transaction fees on Solana sit at roughly $0.00025, compared to Ethereum’s $0.44 average as of 2025. Solana has a strong and growing NFT ecosystem, particularly in gaming NFTs and high-frequency trading collections through platforms like Magic Eden.

5. Multi-Chain Strategy

An increasingly popular approach among NFT platforms is to support multiple chains simultaneously. Collectors can choose the chain that works best for their needs and budget. High-value one-of-one pieces might live on the Ethereum mainnet for prestige. Gaming items and high-volume collections might deploy on Solana or Polygon. Cross-chain bridge functionality lets collectors who buy on one chain move assets to another when needed. This flexibility is now a baseline expectation for competitive NFT marketplace platforms.

Platform-Level Strategies to Reduce NFT Gas Costs for Your Users

Beyond smart contract design and chain selection, the way your platform is structured and operated has a significant impact on what your users pay. These are the strategies used by the best NFT platforms today to keep fees manageable across the board.

1. Lazy Minting

Lazy minting delays the actual on-chain minting of an NFT until the moment it is sold. Instead of writing the token to the blockchain when a creator uploads their work, the marketplace stores the metadata off-chain and only triggers the mint transaction when a buyer completes a purchase. This means creators never have to pay gas upfront to list their work. The minting cost is either passed to the buyer or absorbed into the platform fee.

OpenSea popularised this approach. For platforms with large numbers of creators uploading work speculatively, lazy minting dramatically reduces wasted gas on items that never sell. The tradeoff is that the buyer’s transaction is slightly more complex since it includes the minting step, but for creators, it removes a major financial barrier to participation.

2. Batch Multicall Transactions

Every transaction on Ethereum has a base cost of 21,000 gas, regardless of what it does. If your platform requires multiple operations in sequence (for example, approving a token, listing it, and setting a royalty), doing those as three separate transactions wastes 63,000 gas in base costs alone. Batching them into a single transaction using multicall contracts cuts that base cost to 21,000 gas for the whole set of operations. Studies show batching can reduce per-operation gas costs by 30% to 50%.

3. Smart Drop Mechanics

One of the worst contributors to high gas costs is gas wars, where everyone tries to mint at the same moment and drives fees through the roof. Platforms can design their minting mechanisms to prevent this. Three approaches that work well are Dutch auctions, time-staggered whitelists, and lottery-based minting.

In a Dutch auction, the price starts high and decreases over time until all tokens are sold. This spreads demand across a longer window instead of concentrating everyone into a single instant. Time-staggered whitelists give different groups access at different times, so different segments of your community mint in waves rather than all at once. Lottery-based minting lets interested buyers register during an extended window, then randomly selects who can mint. Since there is no advantage to being first, the panic-driven gas bidding disappears entirely.

4. Off-Peak Timing Tips

Not all hours are equal for gas fees. Ethereum fees follow predictable patterns tied to network activity, which is largely driven by US and European business hours. Weekends, particularly early Sunday mornings in UTC, tend to have the lowest fees. Weekdays between 9 AM and 5 PM Eastern time are typically the most expensive windows. For Ethereum specifically, minting during off-peak windows can reduce fees by 25% to 40% compared to peak hours.

Providing your users with a gas tracking tool or displaying live gas fee estimates in your platform helps them make informed decisions about when to transact. Tools like Etherscan Gas Tracker show real-time Gwei prices and historical patterns. Integrating this kind of information directly into your minting interface reduces friction and saves your community money.

5. Off-Chain Storage Strategy

Storing NFT metadata and media files on the blockchain itself would be extraordinarily expensive. Most NFT platforms store the actual image, audio, or video file on decentralized storage systems like IPFS or Arweave, while the smart contract only holds a URI that points to that storage location. This approach keeps on-chain data minimal, reducing the gas cost of the mint transaction significantly.

When evaluating your storage strategy, consider what happens to the NFT if that storage URI ever breaks or becomes inaccessible. IPFS content is addressed by hash and stays accessible as long as at least one node is pinning it. Arweave is designed for permanent storage with a one-time upfront payment. Choosing a durable storage layer for your metadata protects your users and avoids the worst-case scenario of NFTs pointing to nothing.

Gas Optimisation Techniques Compared: Impact and Complexity

Optimization Technique	Gas Savings Potential	Implementation Complexity	Best Used For
ERC721A Standard	Up to 80%+ on batch mints	Low (drop-in replacement)	Collections where users mint multiple tokens
Remove ERC721Enumerable	50% to 200% reduction	Low (code change)	Most NFT contracts that do not require on-chain enumeration
Merkle Tree Whitelisting	Thousands of dollars saved on setup	Medium (frontend integration needed)	Large whitelist collections (500+ wallets)
Layer 2 Deployment	90% to 99% vs mainnet	Medium (bridge and chain setup)	High-volume platforms, gaming NFTs
Lazy Minting	100% savings for creators upfront	Medium (platform architecture change)	Creator-focused marketplaces with many listings
Variable Packing	Up to 5,000 gas per function call	Low (code organization)	All Solidity contracts
Batch Transactions	30% to 50% on multi-step flows	Medium (multicall integration)	Platforms with multi-step user flows
Off-Peak Timing	25% to 40% lower fees	Low (user guidance)	Any Ethereum-based platform

 

EIP-1559 and Ethereum Upgrades That Changed the Gas Landscape

Gas fees on Ethereum are not static. The network has gone through several significant upgrades that changed how fees work, and understanding that history helps you understand where the current optimisation opportunities lie and what to expect going forward.

EIP-1559, introduced in the London Hard Fork of 2021, fundamentally changed how Ethereum gas pricing works. Before EIP-1559, users had to guess what fee to set and often overpaid to ensure their transaction got processed. EIP-1559 introduced a base fee that the network adjusts automatically based on current demand, plus an optional priority tip to validators. The base fee is burned, meaning it is permanently removed from the ETH supply rather than paid to miners. This made fee estimation much more predictable.

The Merge in 2022 shifted Ethereum from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. This cut energy consumption by approximately 99.95%, but as the Ethereum Foundation clearly stated, it was a consensus mechanism change and was never intended to directly lower gas fees. Fees are driven by demand for block space, not by the energy model.

The most impactful upgrade for NFT platforms in recent years was the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, which introduced EIP-4844 and proto-danksharding. This upgrade added a new data structure called “blobs” that allows Layer 2 networks to post data to the Ethereum mainnet at drastically lower cost. L2 data posting costs dropped by 50% to 90% in many cases after this upgrade. It is the primary reason why Layer 2 minting costs dropped so sharply through 2024 and into 2025.

The Pectra upgrade, currently in progress, promises additional Layer 2 optimisations and further improvements to network efficiency. Sharding, still on the long-term roadmap, could increase Ethereum’s base-layer throughput significantly. But for the near term, Layer 2 solutions are positioned to handle most of the scaling work, and building your NFT platform with Layer 2 compatibility from day one is the most future-proof approach available.

Testing and Monitoring Gas Costs in Your NFT Smart Contracts

Gas optimisation is not a one-time decision you make before deployment. It is an ongoing practice that requires regular testing, measurement, and adjustment. The best developers approach gas costs the same way they approach code performance: measure first, then optimise.

1. Measure Gas Changes

In your development environment, every test of a smart contract function should include gas measurement. Development tools like Hardhat allow you to log the gas used by any function call in your test suite. The correct workflow is simple: measure the gas cost of a function, make a code change intended to reduce that cost, then measure again to verify the improvement. If the second measurement is not lower, the change did not help or may have made things worse.

Focus your testing attention on the functions your users will call most frequently. For most NFT contracts, the mint function is the obvious candidate. If your platform also has a batch listing or transfer function that users call regularly, test and optimise those too. Small improvements to high-frequency functions deliver the most value in aggregate.

2. Use Gas Trackers

Once your contract is live, tools like Etherscan Gas Tracker let you monitor real-time and historical gas prices on the Ethereum mainnet. These tools show current Gwei prices, historical averages, and sometimes heatmaps of the cheapest and most expensive hours to transact. Building a gas tracker integration or recommendation feature directly into your platform’s minting interface helps users identify the best times to mint and can meaningfully improve their experience.

3. Audit Before Launch

A professional smart contract audit serves two purposes. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities that could put user funds at risk. Second, a good auditor will often flag gas inefficiencies in your contract that you missed. Audits have shown that optimising function calls can decrease execution costs by up to 30%. For any NFT platform expecting significant transaction volume, an audit is not optional. The smart contract audit process examines your code for both security weaknesses and performance issues, and the findings typically include recommendations for gas improvements alongside security fixes.

NFT Smart Contract Implementations Built in the Real World

The following project shows how smart contract development and blockchain optimisation principles have been applied to real products. Each case highlights how the design decisions discussed throughout this blog translate into working platforms.

Common Gas Mistakes NFT Platforms Still Make in 2025

Despite the wealth of information available on gas optimisation, many NFT projects launch with contracts that cost their users far more than they should. Here are the most common mistakes still seen in production NFT contracts today.

1. Using ERC721Enumerable by Default

Many developers copy starter templates from popular tutorials that use ERC721Enumerable as the base. This is one of the most widespread gas inefficiencies in the space. BAYC, Doodles, and Cool Cats all used ERC721Enumerable in their original contracts, which made their mint functions significantly more expensive than they needed to be. With the information now widely available, there is no good reason for a 2025 NFT contract to use ERC721Enumerable unless on-chain enumeration is genuinely necessary.

2. Array Whitelists at Scale

Whitelist management with arrays is a classic rookie mistake that becomes more expensive with every address added. Platforms that launch with array-based whitelists and then later add hundreds of entries find that both the setup cost and the per-user check cost balloon. Switching to mappings or Merkle Trees before launch avoids this entirely.

3. Drops at Peak Hours

Setting an NFT drop for a Tuesday or Wednesday at noon EST is practically asking your community to overpay for gas. Many platform teams schedule launches during US daytime hours because that is when their team is working. But gas fees during those windows are consistently among the highest of the week. Giving your community a chance at lower fees through weekend or off-peak launches is a simple gesture that can save your buyers real money.

4. Skipping Gas Cost Tests

Some teams build their NFT contracts, test them for basic functionality, and deploy without ever measuring gas consumption. This leaves unknowable amounts of wasted gas in the contract. A simple gas measurement pass during development can reveal issues that have major cost implications for users. Smart contract development without gas testing is like launching a web app without checking page load speeds.

5. Ignoring Layer 2 Options

Some creators default to the Ethereum mainnet because it feels like the obvious choice without stopping to ask whether their collection actually needs to be there. For a gaming collection where users are expected to mint dozens of items, trade frequently, and interact with in-game smart contracts, the economics of the Ethereum mainnet are often completely unsuitable. Polygon, Solana, or an Ethereum Layer 2 would deliver a dramatically better cost experience for users in those scenarios.

Conclusion

Gas fees have been one of the most persistent friction points in the NFT space since the earliest days of the market. The good news is that the tools and techniques available to developers and platform builders today make it genuinely possible to bring those costs down dramatically, often by factors of five, ten, or even twenty times compared to naive contract designs on Ethereum mainnet.

The most impactful changes happen at the smart contract level. Removing ERC721Enumerable from contracts that do not need it, adopting ERC721A for batch minting, replacing array-based whitelists with mappings or Merkle Trees, packing variables correctly, and keeping mint functions lean and separated all contribute to meaningful gas reductions. These are not theoretical improvements. They are verified, tested techniques with real numbers behind them.

Chain selection matters just as much. Building on Polygon, Solana, or an Ethereum Layer 2 can reduce per-transaction costs by 90% or more compared to the Ethereum mainnet. With Layer 2 networks now handling over 60% of Ethereum transaction volume, and with upgrades like EIP-4844 having already cut L2 data costs by up to 90%, the infrastructure for affordable NFT platforms has never been better.

Platform-level decisions about lazy minting, batch transactions, drop mechanics, and off-peak timing round out the picture. Every one of these decisions affects the real cost experience of the real people using your platform. Gas optimisation is ultimately a form of respect for your users’ time and money.

If you are building or upgrading an NFT platform in 2025, start with gas efficiency as a first-class design consideration rather than an afterthought. The platforms that do will attract creators and collectors who have learned to tell the difference between a platform that thought about them and one that did not.