How we minted millions of NFTs in under an hour on the Aptos Blockchain

*By: *Mo Shaikh

Katy Perry is not impressed with NFTs.

Well not her specifically, but for argument’s sake, if she tried to connect with 1 million fans by dropping an NFT to them, it would likely take over five days to reach everyone — who has the time?! Even when Katy’s fans receive their NFT, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. The user experience is slow, and fans wouldn’t be able to take the NFT across multiple platforms. This is not the experience Katy would have hoped for. Don’t worry Katy, Aptos has your back.

Make it faster, but with purpose

Max, an engineer at Aptos, and I were taking a walk on a sunny Friday, wrapping up the week with our usual one-on-one when he had an idea: let’s put ourselves to the test to deploy a faster, more purposeful NFT mint. And so instead of enjoying the weekend, he rolled up his sleeves and got to it. Did Max solve the world’s NFT issues over the course of a weekend? Let’s find out…

Here’s what we did

We made spinning up and minting millions of NFTs painless:

• Aptos’ highly efficient parallel execution engine dramatically speeds up our ability to mint NFTs: both creating and funding new accounts and then minting NFTs for them.
• Our terraform configuration enables anyone to quickly spin up testnets and clusters of validators.
• Aptos CLI allows us to test the contract locally and then deploy it to the network seamlessly with confidence in its functionality.
• Our Typescript SDK lets us write a quick script that uses the faucet to create an account, fund it with test tokens, and then create and submit the transaction to mint the actual NFT.

Aptos’ tooling allows us to ultimately deploy hundreds of instances to our cloud while constantly submitting transactions in a loop. Aptos can issue a significant number of NFTs simultaneously, across multiple platforms, and make those Katy Perry fans extremely happy. Quite an impressive weekend.

How did we do?

Max’s just-for-fun weekend test shows that the Aptos devnet can mint millions of NFTs in under an hour, a significant step up compared to other solutions, while remaining completely decentralized — a huge win for both the web3 and creator worlds. That number will increase in multiples by the Aptos mainnet launch, or possibly by next weekend if Max doesn’t have any plans.

Now what?

We’re just getting started. The Aptos network is removing barriers to speed and has the infrastructure to increase reliability and efficiency for future NFT portability across platforms for the ecosystem at large. We’re inspired by the possibilities and dedicated to helping creators around the world by enabling the fastest NFTs to go wherever their audience is. Reaching audiences anywhere, at any time, is critical to empower the creator economy. If you haven’t checked out the concept around portability of subscribership and its importance to creators, listen to Adam Mosseri’s Ted Talk on the subject.

Now that* *we’re feeling inspired, maybe we’ll drop our first Aptos NFT soon 👀

If you’re interested in working with us, our DMs are open. Follow us on Twitter, jump into our Discord and get ready to mint some Aptos NFTs!