Hi Pals !

We finally did it ! Zima was launched a few days ago,

Enjoying a sip of Lemonade after a difficult few weeks !

If you have missed it, you can check it out here (it's still minting) at highlight.xyz/zima

Today I show you Why I paid almost $3,000 to put Zima onchain, and how YOU can pay twice less !

What I did (AKA "What not to do")

Zima NFTs are a combination of:

So I focused on reducing image size the most 👾

(you can try compressing your image using the squoosh.app made by Google)

AVIF is the best extension to get the smallest file possible

Remember, I even used AI ✨ to make the images smaller in one of my previous articles !

I'm quite proud of this article !

But I hit a wall, I had 83 files to upload,

At that scale even $20/image is expensive ( 83 x $20 = $1,660 already !).

Also, at some point you can't compress images any further, it starts losing meaning. 😶‍🌫

...

But wait, let's step back...

WHY do I have to pay $20 again ?

WTF is Gas ?

Gas on Ethereum is like Gas for your car (Surprise, Surprise ! 🤣)

Travel from Vegas to LA ? you'll need 40 Liters.

At 3$/Liter that's $130 for the trip !

I'm quite proud of this analogy, hope it works well !

Ethereum transactions are the same...

but there's only one Gas station,

and you don't pay with dollars, you pay with ETH !

(specifically gwei, where 1 gwei = 0.000000001 ETH)

Like in real life, the price of gas is not constant (FAR from it) !

This year, you can see gas prices fluctuated A LOT, in fact in March it spiked at almost 100 gwei (10 TIMES more than today)

This is why onchain art is so cheap right now !

Even worse,

this week if you had transacted on Wednesday you would have paid 6 TIMES MORE than on Sunday ! 😱

For a 5$ transaction ? Sure, why not, but for a $2,700 one ? OUCH

See, I deployed at 11 Gwei (I completely forgot that gas is cheaper on weekends!)

Don't make this mistake, you should:

I could have saved THOUSANDS of dollars ! 🥶