Lazy Mint in OpenSea for ERC-1155

Question

The concept of lazy-mint is deferring the mint until someone buy the item. By joining the mint and buy transaction together, the gas fee can be cut 1/2 and let the buyer to pay for it, so that the creator (seller) does not need to pay any gas fee. Opensea said it used the same approach to do lazy-mint. After I try to mint once in OpenSea, I found that it actually mint the item by search the transaction in blockchain, and also I can successfully include the mint item in metamask. In the whole process, I remember I did not pay any gas fee. How can OpenSea do this kind of lazy-mint? Or OpenSea subsidizes the gas fee?

Answer 1

Are you sure that the item was actually minted on-chain or did you use Collection Manager?

OpenSea makes a claim that you can create an NFT for free, but this is like saying "I have a JPEG and a smart contract on my local hard drive and therefore now I have an NFT," In other words. it's BS as the concept of "tokenization" and "minting" is an on-chain. Just because you have the inputs doesn't make it a token.

I find this very misleading, as they present it as if the item is on-chain: Contract Address (Contract=/Trx), Token Standard, Blockchain (Ethereum).

Here's what it looks like: enter image description here

If you go to my OpenSea account page as seen in bottom left of image, " OpenCWeb2 ", you can see my Ethereum address has no transactions.

I find this pretty deceptive, making people believe they own an NFT on-chain. When in fact, they're likely just storing the image and metadata required for the ERC-1155 contract on a centralized cloud server until you pay a fee to sell it. Of course, you could pay the gas on Ethereum to record it, but use a cheaper chain like Solana. I'm sure OpenSea will have integration with all soon anyways and this will never be discussed.