Intro
Burning NFTs is something that people hear about often but the actual practice of doing so safely isn’t as known.
When you’re making moves in the wild west of web3 it’s good to know how to look at contracts and interact with them directly.
Two projects in particular have had burn mechanics included in their lore, We Are All Going to Die and Moonrunners. Between the two there have been close to 800 NFTs burned.
Because of that we are going to use the Moonrunners contract as our example. Moonrunners Contract Link
Burn at your own risk
Before we dive in, burn your NFTs at your own risk! When a NFT is burnt it is gone forever and there is no support line you can call to get your NFT back.
It’s also very common to have the burn function included in a NFT contract. It allows the owner of the NFT to do whatever they want with it. Just because a burn function is in a contract doesn’t imply anything.
How to burn
Step by step guide:
- After navigating to the contract link above connect your wallet to etherscan by clicking on “Connect to Web3”
- Under the “Contract” tab click “Write Contract” to view functions
- If the contract has one, find function named “burn”
- Add the token ID of a Moonrunner that is in the connected wallet. Burn function should only ask for a
tokenID - Click “write”, complete the transaction and that Moonrunner will be burned
How to find the contract link
When interacting with anything from a NFT project it’s important to be incredibly certain to interact with official links. In general going to the projects official twitter page is a good place to start.
With Moonrunners the contract link is in the link tree link on their twitter page. It’s incredibly important to take your time and make sure you are interacting with the official contract.
Always look for contract links via the projects official twitter profile or website. Don’t randomly search the project name on google. Taking shortcuts can result in more pain and loss of funds/NFTs.
A way to confirm you have the correct contract is to copy the contract address and paste it into LooksRare to see if it’s the official collection.
Contract address on Etherscan
Paste contract address into LooksRare global search
Notice the collection is verified and contract address link opens correct contract
What happens to a burnt NFT?
The burn function sends the asset to a “burn” address. In other words an address that has no owner and can’t be controlled by anyone.
In Moonrunners over 500 NFTs got sent to the burn address via the burn function.
This is the first Moonrunner burnt by the Moonrunners team, Moonrunners #8895 - Moonrunners Official | LooksRare. Checkout the Moonrunners lore to find out why they burned the NFT.
Notice the owner 👀
This address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 receives the burnt NFT and it’s locked in there forever if the burn function is standard.
Caution
Contracts are simply code, code can be written to do particular things and take advantage of users who don’t understand what that code does.
Anyone can make a fake contract with any project name. This code can ask you to sign an approval transaction that gives the owner of that contract permission to move your crypto and NFTs.
read the article Breaking Down the Steps of Token Approval from Zapper learn to get a deep dive into approval transactions.
Burn at your own risk and always expect a burnt NFT to be lost forever!
How to mint this article on Optimism
- Go to Hop Exchange Bridge
- Send a small amount of ETH to Optimism Layer 2 from ETH mainnet (EXAMPLE)
- Navigate back to this article
- Click on the “Collect” button in the upper right and if needed switch to the optimism network when prompted by metamask
- With the ETH you sent to Optimism Layer 2 you can mint the article by clicking “Collect” again and completing the mint transaction
- Congrats you now have a NFT on Optimism and you might be eligible for future airdrops from Optimism
Written by Squirt11e
Dev / PM @DeadHeadsNFT
Team Lead @rebudNFT
Twitter @squirt11e
Web3 builder | NFT collector | DeFi believer | Glass always half full