Eclipse Smart Contracts: Understanding Gas Costs and Deployment Fees
Eclipse allows any artist to launch their own generative art NFT collection on Ethereum. The platform provides tools that simplify the process of launching a collection by helping artists deploy their own smart contracts on the blockchain without having to do any Solidity coding themselves.
Artists that launch their collections on Eclipse get the benefit of having full ownership of their smart contracts and collections. Full ownership implies full control over their OS page and royalties for their collection. Furthermore, artists get the ability to host their own drop pages should they wish to use their own domains.
However, deploying smart contracts on the blockchain comes with its own set of challenges, particularly in terms of gas costs and deployment fees. In this article, we discuss the gas costs and deployment fees associated with deploying smart contracts on Eclipse. We will also look at the ways in which Eclipse has managed to minimize these costs.
Contract Deployment Costs
When deploying a smart contract on the blockchain, one of the most significant costs is the gas fee. On Ethereum, gas is paid in ETH and it covers the computational resources required to deploy the contract. The usual gas cost for deploying a contract on Eclipse is ~0.05 ETH. Compared to other protocols that have similar logic, such as the deployment of UNI pools or Gnosis Safe, the costs for contract deployment on Eclipse are average.
Script Upload Costs
In addition to the contract, there is also a fee for storing the art and code on the blockchain. Persistent storage is one of the most expensive services in the cloud world, and it is also expensive on the blockchain. The costs for script upload on Eclipse depend on the size of the file being uploaded.
Minting Costs
Minting an NFT on Eclipse depends a lot on the contract's features. Eclipse ERC721 has implemented optional features such as ERC721Enumerable, which allows you to query token IDs by address, and IERC721Receiver to define on-chain royalties, among a few others. Moreover, it also depends on the number of mint share receivers and the gate. A gated mint will need to execute some owner verification and set a state to prevent users from double-minting, which will, of course, add to the minting gas costs.
Minimizing Gas Costs
Eclipse smart contracts have been written gas efficiently to minimize gas costs where possible. This means that the contracts have been optimized to reduce the amount of gas required for contract deployment, script upload, and minting. Overall, the mint costs on Eclipse's contracts are at the market average. There will be minimal updates in the future, which may bring the costs down by ~10%, but there isn't much room left for further optimization.
In the future, Eclipse plans to provide the option to choose from different ERC721 implementations as artists may not need all the features to reduce costs further. However, gas costs are unlikely to come down substantially without the Ethereum sharding update. Furthermore, Eclipse also plans on branching out to Ethereum L2s and other EVM chains to provide artists with other deployment options with lower gas fees.
Conclusion
Deploying and maintaining smart contracts on the blockchain can be expensive due to gas costs. However, Eclipse has implemented gas-efficient contract logic to minimize gas costs wherever possible. Contract deployment costs are relatively average, script upload costs can be high, and minting costs depend on contract features. In the future, Eclipse will offer the option to select from different ERC721 implementations to reduce costs. As always, it is important to keep an eye on gas costs and plan accordingly when deploying smart contracts on any blockchain platform.