Custom whitelist application tool for an NFT project
Published: Jan 24th 2023
We recently published a custom whitelist application tool that we built for a client. It allows the project's early supporters to apply for a whitelist spot and invite their friends to increase their chances of winning!
What is a “whitelist application tool”?
Most NFT buyers are familiar with premint.xyz, which is a platform that projects use to raffle whitelist spots if an applicant passes some criteria. These include having enough balance in your crypto wallet, verifying your Discord account, verifying your Twitter account… and so on. After submission, the applications are collected and at the end of the application period, you can randomly raffle whitelist spots for your project.
But what if you wanted to integrate such a tool on your NFT project’s own website? That’s exactly what we did for Seelies NFT.
Getting started
Seelies NFT asked us to build a custom solution for collecting applications via their website. The applications consist of three questions that the applicant must answer and at the end they can include their Twitter username. Applicants can compete in who can invite the most people to apply, and the progress can be followed live via this leaderboard!
To achieve the desired outcome we had to build everything from the ground up starting with the look of the tool all the way to the backend database for storing the applications.
Technical description
Feel free to skip this chapter if you’re not interested in the underlying code
The website is built using Next.js and TypeScript. We chose Planetscale as our SQL database provider and Prisma as our ORM for handling queries between Next API routes and the database.
When a user connects their wallet on the website, we first ask them to sign a message verifying that they actually control the connected wallet. This prevents people from injecting someone elses wallet address on the website and being able to see their information. Even though the Seelies website doesn’t contain any critical information about the applicants, we always think it’s a good practice to add a bit of security.
After they sign the message, we can securely log them in and start the application process. First we check if they have already submitted an application and if not, the whitelist questionnaire is displayed. After submitting the application, we replace the page content with a form that allows the user to create a personalized custom invite. The invite requires a nickname and an invite code that the user can select to make the invite more personal. This is also great for influencers, whose invite will be easily recognizable thanks to their brand.
After submitting the application and creating an invite, the user can see the progress of their application status and how many people have joined via their link.
If you want to test the application yourself you can do so here!
Accessing submitted applications
To make it easy for the Seelies NFT team to go through the submitted applications, we built a simple custom web application for doing it. It is secured to only allow access by admin wallets and makes it easy for the team to check the submitted answers and grant whitelist spots with a click of a button.
If the amount of applications grows too high for just manually going through them, we can automate the process and accept / decline applications based on all kinds of criteria, like submission time and quality of answers.
It’s also possible to randomly raffle X amount of whitelist spots among all the applicants to make it fair for everyone.
Benefits of a custom whitelist application tool
We think the most important benefits of a custom whitelist application tool can be summarized to it being:
Accessible via your own website
Having your own custom tool on the website makes it easy for your customers to access and use. Eliminating the need for juggling multiple URLs in your marketing is great, because your customers will always know that everything important can be found under one website address!
Personalized to fit your project’s branding
Making the branding consistent across all access points around your project will strengthen your brand, but also look really nice for your customers.
Completely configurable based on your needs
No whitelist application tool can fit all projects perfectly. Some projects need Discord verification, some need Twitter verification, some don’t want anything special and that’s not a problem! We build all our whitelist tools according to your needs, so you can focus on more important matters.
Want to know more?
If you’d like to build a whitelist application tool for your project or just chat with us in general, head on over to our contact page! You can also email us at hello@lohko.io or join our Discord server where we can discuss your project in a private chat.
We’re also not exclusively working on NFT projects, so feel free to pitch us any ideas you have around web3 and let’s see how we can help!