Update Authority of Candy Machine Project

Question

My question is regarding taking over a partially minted CM project. I'm not too familiar with Solana development.

A buddy of mine is taking over ownership of a project. I just wanted to confirm: if the authority of the candy machine is updated to his wallet and he has the CM id that's all that would be required to relinquish previous ownership? He'd be free to make changes to the CM configuration at that point.

Also, the authority of each minted NFT would have to be updated as well? Would the only downside of not updating the existing NFTs be not being able to change the royalties?

Is there anything else to consider in transferring ownership? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

An already partical mint has a few things that need to be updated to fully take over a project.

You'll need to have on hand the update auth keypair for the Candymachinne given to you by the old owner or have them perform some of the actions here if they do not hand it over as some actions need to be performaned by the original keypair.

1. Update the CandyMachine CM to a new authourity . This will grant access to the new wallet full controll of the CM only and all NFT's minted from that point forward will their update authoritys will be set to the new candymachine authority on minting.
2. Get Treasury Balance (optional) . If you are taking over the original treausry then getting the old owner to either hand over the private key to treasury account (extremely unlikely) or by getting them to transfers the funds to wallet of your choosing. If they for what ever reason give you the keys to the treasury wallet then you then transfer this balance out to a wallet of your choosing.
3. Update the CM treasury - When a purchase is made from a candymachine the SOL is sent to the treasury address, this obviously needs to be a wallet that new owner owns.
4. Updating already minted NFT's to the new authority . If minting has already happened then the update authoritys for these NFT's will belong to the old candymachine authority (the old owner). To secure these NFT's you'll have to update the update authority of them to the new owner. So this means you will need the original private key of the candymachine auth or you will have to get the original owner to transfer the auth over to you.

A tool to update the authority of NFT's is Metaboss . If you look at this page here https://metaboss.rs/set.html there are a few commands you can use for updating the authority. You'll also obviously need a snapshot of all the current NFT's that have been minted so you can run the set auth commands. https://metaboss.rs/snapshot.html

Once you have update authority over the NFT's you can then change royalty % and everything else.

Answer 2

1.- Yes, if the authority is changed he just need to provide the New wallet address, and that New wallet will be the only one that can modify the Candy Machine configs.

2.- All the already minted NFTs will be attached to the old wallet, the New minted NFTs should be attached to the New wallet. In order to change the authority of the already minted nfts to the New authority the old wallet have to do it using metaboss for example.

3.- The old wallet can update every data of the NFT (if the nft is marked as mutable that normally everyone does it), it can change the images, the attributes, the royalty fees, the creator array, names, etc. Its really important that the New wallet have the authority of all NFTs in order to not get malicious attacks from the old owners of the project that you wont be able to fix after.