Collections are smart contracts that creators deploy themselves — creators are empowered to create their own smart contracts and mint NFTs directly to those contracts, instead of minting works to our shared contract. Creating Collections this way ensures that your work is fully and entirely yours.
We’ve put together a checklist to make sure you have everything lined up before creating and deploying your Foundation Collection smart contract.
Let’s review the different parts that make up a Collection:
Name and symbol
Your Collection’s name and symbol is how your smart contract is represented on Foundation and on the blockchain. Both values will surface search results on Foundation when anyone searches for your work.
The name is essentially the title and top-level identity of your Collection - this is likely the first thing people will see when navigating to your Collection page.
The symbol is a shorthand representation of your Collection that acts as the token identity on the blockchain for any NFTs that you mint to this particular contract. Choose a symbol that’s relevant to your Collection’s title and overall identity.
It’s important to note that creating your smart contract with your Collection name and symbol will etch these details into the blockchain - they cannot be changed once your Foundation Collection has been created. If you’ve made an error, or you’d like to make a change, you’ll need to destroy the Collection and start again, which will incur gas fees. Gas fees are the cost of interacting with the blockchain. Gas fees are not set or collected by Foundation.
Collection page
The Collection page on Foundation is the hub of any collection of NFTs - here, you can add your own branding with a cover image and logo to help your Collection stand out from the rest.
When designing your Collection cover image and logo, here are some specs to keep in mind:
- Collection Logo: 1920 x 1920 JPG, PNG, or GIF. 10MB max.
- Cover Image: 2800x2000 JPG, PNG, or GIF. 10MB max.
- Collection Description: 500 words or less.
You can update these aspects of your Collection page at any time to keep things relevant as you add more NFTs in the future.
Collection NFTs
Your NFTs are held inside your Collection smart contract. You’ll want to make sure that your NFTs’ titles, descriptions, and assets are all aligned with the theme and overall message of your Collection. We also highly recommend reviewing our technical specifications for minting NFTs on Foundation as a guideline for optimizing your NFT assets.
When considering the order in which you’d like the NFTs to appear on the Collection page, keep in mind that they’ll appear from newest to oldest when first minting. After you’ve minted your NFTs, the default view on the Collection page will be set to “Most Active”, which shows NFTs that have higher activity first. At the moment, you can’t change the default view when landing on the Collection page, but viewers can select from the following views:
- Most Active
- Price: Lowest
- Price: Highest
- Newest
- Oldest
During the minting flow, it’s imperative to double check that your NFTs’ titles and descriptions are free of errors and aren’t missing any important information. Once your NFT is minted to the blockchain, it cannot be changed later.
If you find that you’d like to make changes, you’ll need to burn the NFT and mint it again, which will incur gas fees. Gas fees are the cost of interacting with the blockchain. Gas fees are not set or collected by Foundation.
Once you’ve considered these Collection details, you’re ready to start the process of creating and deploying your very own Collection smart contract on Foundation. Head over to our guide to creating a Collection and minting NFTs that will walk you through each step of the process.
Let us know if you have any feedback or questions while putting your Foundation Collection together - you can reach out to us at any time!