Recently, several NFT galleries have contacted me with a desire for a collaboration that involves publishing my artwork on their blockchain.

The questionable thing about this is that they ask artists like me to pay for the publication/minting on their marketplace with a price that is currently 100-500x higher than the price that open marketplaces charge, e.g. Foundation and OpenSea.

Therefore, stop wasting my time and exploiting me and other artists with “offers” for collaboration, when in reality, it only benefits you and is a pure loss-making project for us.

An example of an offer for collaboration provided the following calculation: Minting Price: 0.2 ETH and 15% of the sales price to the artist. So if the artwork sells for 2ETH, which is quite unrealistic given the current market, it gives the artist 0.3ETH – 0.2ETH that he has to pay upfront for minting on the marketplace. The possible profit is then a total of 0.1ETH, where the artist bears all the risk and risks losing 0.2ETH if the artwork does not sell at all. This is what they called “collaboration”. The minting price at marketplaces on the ETH blockchain is at the moment 0.0015ETH. So to other artists who get such “offers”. Do your research and be critical. These galleries have little or no customer base, so the probability of a sale is almost zero, and you are paying for them to build the gallery.

If you are from a gallery like this AND are interested in a collaboration, then pay the artists to get onboard. Not the other way around!