# Minting Magazines By [Drop Magazine](https://paragraph.com/@dropmagazine) · 2022-01-20 --- A quick history of Drop Magazine -------------------------------- Drop Magazine first minted on 21st October 2021. Our tagline: **_“A magazine, an NFT, an NFT magazine”._** Flash forward 3 months - and we have released 15 magazines, covering over 30 NFT projects, artists and communities. From zero connections and followers to over 1000 active readers all the while producing completely free, accessible content. Why? [https://twitter.com/NFTnelli/status/1483190288860553221?s=20](https://twitter.com/NFTnelli/status/1483190288860553221?s=20) Our Readers. People that enjoy our content week after week. Watching our idea turn to life. Covering projects we believe in. Knowing we’ve got a pretty good eye for projects that were GMI. 1. **NFTWorlds** (Then **1Ξ** Now **3.68Ξ**) 2. **Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult** (Then **0.9Ξ** Now **2.35Ξ**) 3. **The Littles** (Then **0.35Ξ** Now **0.65Ξ**) 4. **Boss Beauties** (Then **0.6Ξ** Now **1.641Ξ**) Of-course the success of these projects is credit to the amazing teams behind them, we’re just proud that we got to cover them in the early days. Anyway, what has this got to do with minting magazines? When we started the project we knew how to talk about NFTs, but we didn’t really know how to _make_ NFTs. We published our magazines via OpenSea directly, that was great for getting started, but ultimately we wanted to build special utility and features for our holders. To do that, we needed to write our own contracts. Luckily, our [Editor In Chief ETH](https://twitter.com/editor_in_eth) is a Software Architect and had begun to learn Solidity in his spare time between magazine releases. After learning how to write gas efficient contracts with help from [Lizard Labs](https://lizardlab.io/reports/smart-contract-optimization/) and advice from [Forgotten Rune’s Dotta](https://twitter.com/dotta). We’ve since deployed our own smart contract that had a record mint of [$10 gas](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x38ab2b50751358d59d0fd15878ab3147a191a30f795c19a9148e8634350e19da) GREAT! Except for one thing, nobody can mint the magazines except us... What’s the point of having a really lean contract if nobody can mint from it? Mint your own magazines ----------------------- Introducing the next big feature and new smart-contract for Drop Magazine: **Drop Magazine Mintables.** Coming soon for all future Drops, users will be able to mint their own covers for a price of **0.01Ξ.** Not just a single cover either, you’ll be able to choose from multiple, one for each project or community we feature in our magazines. That’s not all, we’re working on a special membership card that will allow users to mint covers for free, every week, for a year. It will cost **0.1Ξ** and provide users with exclusive content, early access and lots more. Oh, and did we mention 50% of all sale proceeds will go to a community vault to form a **DAO?** Probably nothing… ![https://www.dropmagazine.io/membership](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/11df642fd77b11c6125f780f859fec47eb6b8e4b2212cef8a35e617a0a16cd9d.gif) https://www.dropmagazine.io/membership --- *Originally published on [Drop Magazine](https://paragraph.com/@dropmagazine/minting-magazines)*