First, you’ll need to deploy your collection’s smart contract. Deploying a smart contract onto a blockchain requires gas fees.
⚠️ This step must be completed before you move on to other steps.
To deploy a contract for the first time, connect your wallet to OpenSea and click Create in the upper left corner.
For a Drop, you’ll select Drop a collection.
Next, you'll need to add a logo image, contract name, and token symbol for your contract. While you will be able to change the logo image and contract name later, you won't be able to update your token symbol or chain.
You’ll also need to select which type of contract you’d like to use from the two options.
The default selection is a proxy contract, which we estimate costs approximately 10% of the gas fee cost of a standard contract to deploy. Proxy contracts forward their calls to an implementation contract that stores all the logic. Deploying a proxy contract is cheaper than a standard contract because you aren’t paying for the space for all the core contract logic, since it’s delegated to an existing deployed implementation contract.
On the other hand, using a proxy contract adds additional overhead cost to every transaction against the proxy contract, including minting, sales, and transfers. You may want to use a standard contract if you anticipate having more than 1,500 transactions on your contract: at this point, we estimate the cost savings on deployment will be outweighed by the additional cost incurred by your collectors.
Extensions for additional functionality (such as splitting earnings or adding a burn function) can be added to your Seadrop-compatible contract. If you need custom functionality for your contract that would require you to extend our standard NFT contract, you can find more details about custom contract deployment in our developer documentation.
Next, it's time to prepare your drop schedule.