Quickstart ⚡

Mint and send an NFT in under 5 minutes

In this quickstart you will learn how to create an NFT and deliver it to a wallet or email address.

Integration steps

1. Create a Developer Account

To get started, create a developer account in the Crossmint Staging Console. Open that link, sign in, and accept the dialog to continue.

Crossmint offers two consoles: staging, for development and testing, and www, for production.

2. Get an API Key

Once you log in to the console, the next step is to create an API key.

Click the "Integrate" tab and click on the "API Keys" option on top.

Within the “Server-side keys” section, click the “Create new key” button in the top right. Then, check the scopes nfts.create and nfts.read under the “Minting API” category and create your key. Save this key for the next step.

3. Mint an NFT

We’re almost there! With our key created, we’re now going to write a small function that creates an NFT and delivers it to a user.

Create a file (e.g. mintNFT.js) and enter this code into it:

mintNFT.js

const apiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY";
const chain = "solana"; // or "polygon-amoy", "ethereum-sepolia", ...
const env = "staging"; // or "www"
const recipientEmail = "TEST_EMAIL_ADDRESS";
const recipientAddress = `email:${recipientEmail}:${chain}`;

const url = `https://${env}.crossmint.com/api/2022-06-09/collections/default/nfts`;
const options = {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
        accept: "application/json",
        "content-type": "application/json",
        "x-api-key": apiKey,
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
        recipient: recipientAddress,
        metadata: {
            name: "Crossmint Test NFT",
            image: "https://picsum.photos/400",
            description: "My first NFT using Crossmint",
        },
    }),
};

fetch(url, options)
    .then((res) => res.json())
    .then((json) => console.log(json))
    .catch((err) => console.error("error:" + err));

This code creates an NFT, uploads it to the blockchain, and delivers it to a user wallet, attached to the email address provided. Before running it, be sure to fill in values for:

• YOUR_API_KEY with the key obtained in the prior step.
• TEST_EMAIL_ADDRESS with an email address you control, for testing.

Now, run the mintNFT.js script.

node mintNFT.js

After a few seconds, it should return a response indicating the mint has started processing. Check the full response and save its actionId property, as you’ll use it later.

Sample response

Here is an example response returned from the API call above:

JSON

{
    "actionId": "6410b5a7-f6f8-4776-9480-13ef83389808",
    "onChain": {
        "status": "pending",
        "chain": "solana"
    },
    "id": "6410b5a7-f6f8-4776-9480-13ef83389808"
}

More info

What does this API do behind the scenes?

1. Deploys a smart contract for your NFT if you don’t have one

2. Validates and uploads your metadata to decentralized storage (IPFS)

3. Mints an NFT on a blockchain of your choice

4. If you are minting to an email address, creates a wallet for the user, accessible from Crossmint.com by logging in with the same email

5. Sends the NFT to that wallet

Send to a given wallet address

If you know your user’s wallet, you can send them an NFT directly. To do so, modify recipientAddress from email:$ {recipientEmail}:${chain} to ${chain}:${walletAddress}

Mint to another blockchain

You can create NFTs with Crossmint in more than 15 chains, including Aptos, Base, Polygon and Ethereum. Check the list of supported chains and just modify the chain variable in the example to match your blockchain of choice. You may need to create a collection in that blockchain if you didn’t have one already.

4. Confirm Delivery of the NFT

The mint has started processing. However, blockchains can take a few seconds (or, at times of extreme network congestion, even minutes) to confirm the operation.

Before showing the user a success screen, the next step is checking the status of the mint.

To do this, grab the actionId received at the end of step 3 and use it alongside your API key in one of the snippets below.

Example response

Here is an example response from calling the status API:

JSON

{
  "actionId": "6410b5a7-f6f8-4776-9480-13ef83389808",
  "action": "nfts.create",
  "status": "success",
  "data": {
    "collection": {},
    "recipient": {},
    "token": {}
  },
  "startedAt": "2023-10-02T22:10:41.000Z",
  "resource": "https://staging.crossmint.com/api/2022-06-09/actions/66881a4d-eff9-467a-b19d-a2ff76eef5c2"
}

Pay attention to the “status” field. Once it says “success”:

Congratulations. You have minted your first NFT 🥷 🎉

For scalable production applications, consider using webhooks to determine when your NFT has been minted, instead of periodically polling for its status via the API.

5. View your NFTs

1. If the NFTs were delivered to an email address, the recipient can see them by:

   • Logging into their wallet from Crossmint’s website. For staging, they must use https://staging.crossmint.com.
   • From your website if you use embedded wallets. See the API for getting the NFTs in a wallet.

2. If the NFTs were delivered to a wallet address, the user will be able to see them there directly, connecting to testnet if needed, or on the testnet blockchain explorer.

And voilá, there’s your NFT! Now think of all the cool things you can build with this, at scale :)

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Launching in Production

For production, the steps are almost identical, but some changes are required:

1. Create a developer account on the production console.
2. Add credits to your account from Billing & Usage.
3. Then, create a production key on the API Keys page with the same API scopes.
4. Modify all code snippets with const env = "www", so they use the production APIs. You may also need to change the chain variable to match your production blockchain.
5. Check the guide with best practices

Learn More

Create collections

Learn how to create and manage NFT collections.

Mint NFTs and other tokens

Check out more advanced options for minting.

Edit & Burn NFTs

Update and delete tokens after minting.

Identity

Issue credentialing primitives.

Dive into Advanced Topics

Dynamic NFTs

Set up Royalties

Webhooks & Status APIs

Bring your own Contract

Other Links

API Reference

Test any API in seconds from the docs.

Talk to an expert

Contact our sales team for support.