A “Nifty Type”, or “NFT Type”, is a Nifty Gateway specific term that refers to a set of distinct ERC 721 tokens. Nifty Types are how Nifty Gateway handles editions of NFTs. If you want to token gate content based on an NFT you sold on Nifty Gateway, such as a large edition pass, this section is useful for understanding how Nifty Types work.
What is a Nifty Type?
A “Nifty Type”, or “NFT Type”, is a Nifty Gateway specific term that refers to a set of distinct ERC 721 tokens. Nifty Types are how Nifty Gateway handles editions of NFTs.
A single “Nifty Type” consists of the many distinct ERC 721 tokens that are connected because they are a part of the same edition.
For example, Slime Sunday’s “Last Stand of the Nation State”, which lives on the smart contract 0xB9a…60a, is a single Nifty Type, but it consists of 415 different individual ERC 721 tokens. The Token IDs for this Nifty Type are sequential - so if we look at the tokens for Last Stand of the Nation State, we will see that the lowest Token ID is 500010001, and the highest one is 500010415 - they count up from 50001001 to 500010415. (Note - earlier Nifty Gateway NFT drops had higher Token IDs - all the more recent drops have Token IDs that start at 1).
A drop such as Beeple’s The First Drop has 3 Nifty Types - CROSSROAD, POLITICS IS BULLSHIT, and CRYPTO IS BULLSHIT. CROSSROAD and CRYPTO IS BULLSHIT are both editions of 1, so there is only 1 ERC 721 NFT that is of that Nifty Type for both of them. But POLITICS IS BULLSHIT is an edition of 100 - so that means that there are 100 separate, distinct ERC 721 NFTs that all belong to that Nifty Type. This is why each edition on Nifty Gateway has an edition number - they are all distinct NFTs.
This is also important when Publishing - you are only charged for each new Nifty Type you mint, regardless of how many editions are minted of it. This is possible because of our state-of-the-art smart contract optimizations - see Smart Contracts, “Cost of Minting a Drop”.
You will also hear people colloquially refer to a Nifty Type as just an NFT - for example, if you own Last Stand of the Nation State Edition #19, and your friend owns Edition #11, you might say to them, “Oh, Last Stand of the Nation State? I own that NFT also”. The terms are often used interchangeably, but it’s useful to be precise if you want to dig into the details of how these NFT releases are architected.
Using Nifty Types as a Rule for Buyers
For native Nifty Gateway purposes, you can use Nifty Types as a Rule option (see Rules for Buyers/Allowlists).
So if you wanted to token-gate a drop to only users who own a certain Nifty Type, such as Slime Sunday’s Last Stand of the Nation State, you would just select that Nifty Type as a rule on the Rules for Buyers section of the “Add NFT” page. This is seamlessly built into our system.
Using the Token ID to Check Whether a User Owns a Nifty Type
You can figure out whether an NFT that a user owns belongs to a given Nifty Type by checking the Token ID of that NFT. This might be useful if, for example, you want to drop some sort of pass or ticket on Nifty Gateway, then you wanted to check on your own website whether a Nifty Gateway user owns that pass or ticket using the API.
The best way to check if a user owns an NFT that is of a given Nifty type is to figure out the Token ID range for that Nifty Type and then check the Token ID.
As an example, let’s look at a Nifty Gateway Drop with multiple different Nifty Types in a single drop:
Let’s use Victor Mosquera’s July 31st 2022 Nifty Gateway Curated drop - “Light Divide by Victor Mosquera” - in our example. You will notice the Token IDs for the Nifty Types are sequential. This collection consists of 3 Nifty Types -Slow Burn, Nadir, and Echoes, and it is on the Smart Contract 0xdb…0df (remember, each drop is a new, unique, creator owned smart contract - see Smart Contracts).
If you examine these pieces in the marketplace, you’ll notice that Slow Burn, an edition of 10, is 10 **separate ERC 721 NFTs with Token IDs 1 through 10 on the Smart Contract 0xdb…0df. Nadir, also an edition of 10, is again 10 separate ERC 721 NFTs on the same Smart Contract - and Nadir has the Token IDs 11 through 20 on this smart contract. Finally, the last Nifty Type, Echoes, has 30 editions, and its 30 editions have the Token IDs 21-50 on the Smart Contract.
So if you wanted to use the Nifty Gateway API to check what Nifty Type a user owned, as opposed to which specific ERC 721 NFT, you could check the NFTs they owned from a given smart contract, and see if they are the range that that Nifty Type corresponds to.
In this example, if you wanted to use the Nifty Gateway API to query whether a user owned a Slow Burn, you could check if they owned any ERC 721s from the smart contract for this collection (0xdb…0df) with a Token ID between 1 and 10. If you wanted to check whether they had an Echoes, you could check whether they owned any NFTs from that smart contract with a Token ID between 21 and 50.
This applies to all Nifty Types released on Nifty Gateway - they are all sequential on their smart contract. So if you want to tokengate based on a Nifty Type, check the marketplace to figure out its Token ID range - then you can check whether the user owns it.
To see what NFTs a user owns in their custodial Nifty Gateway account, you can do this using the Nifty Gateway API.
If you want to check what NFTs are held in a user’s self custodied wallet, we recommend using an API from another provider, like Alchemy’s.
Both of these APIs support filtering by smart contract if you only want to check if they own NFTs from a given collection.
Nifty Types in the Create Drop Section
When you create a drop, every time you click “Add NFT”, what you are really adding is a new Nifty Type. “Nifty Types” is used interchangeably with “NFTs” in this section.
The cost to Publish a drop only goes up with the number of Nifty Types you publish, not with the edition size of those Nifty Types. For more detail, see the cost to publish a drop in the Smart Contracts section.