Web3 Platform Alchemy Has a Plan to Thwart Bad Actors in NFT Mints

Web3 developer platform Alchemy has opened the waitlist for Spearmint, a technology it designed to keep speculators and bots from hiking gas fees and otherwise messing with the process of minting non-fungible tokens (NFT).

The product will support collections on Ethereum, as well as rollup chains including Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon.

Spearmint implements an “allow list” feature that helps creators vet the individuals who sign up to mint tokens in an artist’s collection. Product Manager Mike Garland told CoinDesk that this model will keep out bad actors who worsen the communities that creators have built around their collections.

“Spearmint can help you focus your collection on the folks who have genuine interest in what you're building, rather than just trying to flip and make a quick buck,” Garland said in the interview.

Jay Paik, lead engineer at Alchemy, told CoinDesk that oftentimes, manually creating these lists can be work-intensive, thus providing the infrastructure to automate these rosters can help developers focus their attention on building out their NFT project.

Alchemy has been building out its suite of products to support developers in the past year. After earmarking $25 million to support Web3 developers in June, it acquired Web3 educational platform ChainShot in August to provide resources for builders to learn more about blockchain technology.

The waitlist opened Thursday morning, and those who signed up can begin using Spearmint before the end of November.