This week, we rolled out an upgrade to stories on OnchainMagic to make them an ERC1155 instead of an ERC721. This saves 77% of gas costs. Our goal is to make it stupid simple for creators to put content on Zora. The challenge with our first iteration of stories was cost to deploy & ease of use filling the wallet.

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How can we drive down the cost of the everyday user? Both the amount of money they spend, the time and the energy they spend to put moments and memories onchain. With our original use of Zora ERC721 drops on OP Mainnet cost about 0.001 ETH or about $1.50 with creators earning, 0.000444 ETH on free mints. They need to mint approximately three additions to break even.

While this is way better than Ethereum Mainnet, where the costs are like $10 - 20 to deploy a contract. We still have a lot further to go. And so, what did we get by switching to the ERC1155?

The cost to deploy a new ERC1155 is 0.0005 ETH. It's already about 50% less than deploying an ERC721 on OP mainnet. If you want to add a new story to an existing collection, it's 0.0003 ETH, which is about 25% of the cost to deploy a ERC721 on OP Mainnet. AKA a reduction of 75% from the ERC721A. And it's significantly less than the cost to deploy an equivalent ERC721 on Ethereum Mainnet.

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And so, at this point, if you sell one edition, you earn 0.00444 ETH

This allows our costs to be low enough for local communities to subsidize gas fees because at this point for a creator they're earning right out the gate 0.0001 ETH in revenue for a story that they would not have earned for on Instagram.

So how can we make it really easy to refill the wallet for the first time? We also rolled out auto-refill for creators. So if you're about to create a post or a story and you don't have enough energy or ETH or fuel or gas, we automatically refill your wallet.

This eliminated, one of the most challenging parts which was funding the social wallet. All of this is enabling our creators who have never used Zora before to upload content directly from live music events. What are the dashboards we need to build to measure the few specific outcomes that we're optimizing for? And if you're going to post on Instagram, why not post it as a story onchain as well?