We at byteblock.art charge ZERO platform fee

4 min readMay 18, 2021

In most cases, selling crypto art can come with huge hidden fees, leading some people to lose hundreds of dollars. To support our artist, we have a ZERO platform fee for 6 months.

Many are trying their hand at buying or selling NFTs amid the headline-grabbing sale prices.

Sometimes artists lose over $200 in gas fees. This varies from time to time.

What is a gas fee?

The primary currencies used on NFT trading platforms include Ether, WAX, BTC, and Flow. On most NFT trading platforms, users are responsible for paying for the computing energy required to process and validate transactions on the blockchain network. The gas/network fees fluctuate depending on the time of day.

An artist bought an NFT for about $30 worth of Ethereum on Rarible and ended up losing over $200 on the NFT, even after a buyer offered over three times the token’s original price less than 24 hours after he bought it.

While additional fees fluctuate between sites, many popular sites charge users a gas fee for minting a token, as well as a fee for selling and buying.

So, there are charges in three places. Most platforms also require digital wallets, so users must take into account conversion fees between different forms of ether.

How Much It Actually Cost to Sell an NFT?

Say you see on the cover is the “CROSSROAD”, which is an NFT created by the digital artist Beeple. It features anti-Trump messaging, and an enlarged Donald Trump-like figure laying in a defeated heap with profanities written across his naked body. The artwork was designed to change based on the outcome of the 2020 election. Had Trump won, it would’ve depicted him wearing a crown and striding through flames.

People are talking about how much money is everyone making, and not a lot of people seem to be talking about the cost of selling a piece of crypto art. So… I think is really necessary to talk about the fees and how much I made from the sale, all the dirty little details.

There is a minting fee for creating your NFT, there is a listing fee for listing it on a website like opensea. there is a commission fee from the platform itself and then there’s another fee to transact getting your money out of escrow after you’ve been paid.

Let’s dive into it.

It’s important that I mentioned that the cost of Ethereum was around $1.740 per unit when I made this process.

To go through the numbers here, to make it one of one Non Fungible Tokens, that fee was 0.050421 to one Ethereum which works out to $87.53. That’s the cost of minting the NFT.

Then there’s another fee to list the artwork on the platform so that was 0.035822 to Ethereum which is $62.19.

So, we’re talking about $87+$62 equals $149.72 just to get my first piece of artwork on the platform.

The way the platform works are, it’s a 24-hour auction and that auction begins when the first bid is placed. The first it was placed, the auction began, and when the auction ended it was a little bit higher than my reserve price which is basically that the starting bid so it was sold for 0.165 Ethereum and that is $286.44.

Believe me, that’s an exciting amount of money to sell a first art piece for. Especially, if you’re not someone famous.

From that, there is a 15% commission fee that goes to the platform, so in this case, that was 0.02475 Ethereum which works out to $42.97. Remember, that’s another $42.97 in addition to the rest of the commissions so far.

Then there is the transaction fee of actually getting my money out of escrow. So my $286.44 in revenue is now tied up, and I have to transfer it to my wallet. So… when transferring into my wallet there’s a transaction fee of 0.018 Ethereum which works out to $31.25 just to get the money out. This doesn’t include getting the money into my bank account. This is just getting it into my wallet, which I then have to work out into my bank account if I wanted to become real money.

Let’s make quick maths here. So there was $149.72 just to get my first piece of artwork on the platform. Then we have to add the 15% commission fee that goes to a platform ($42.97) plus the commission to transfer the money into my wallet ($31.25). So, it reached up to $223.94. on my sale of $286.44. Therefore, my profit is $62.50 which means that 78.2% went to fees.

That is pretty insane that I kept a smaller percentage of my sale than Apple keeps when a software developer sells an app.

The fees are a lot, but again the minting fee, listing fee, and transaction fee are all fees to process a transaction on the blockchain. This means they’re not really percentages so much that they’re considered a gas fee. And on the Ethereum blockchain there’s this concept of gas, which is basically how much energy, how much electricity, how much processing power is it going to take to process the transaction right, and that electricity, that’s real electricity.

The fees are substantial especially if they’re selling on the platform. I think is something worth knowing before you get too excited about selling a piece of art for a little bit of money.