So Joe Blau just mentioned that someone batched 99,850 XEN mints for about $360,000 at todays ETH prices.
I did some digging and this is the address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x7f9a3d6ef88885f2a48d28f9b1481edcf8bf53e7
To begin with, the timeframe isn't just over 24 hours; it spans 326 days, tracing back to November 20, 2022. Their minting costs aren't particularly impressive either, averaging at $3.60 per mint. In contrast, throughout this past weekend, we observed individuals minting XENFTs at rates between $1.35 to $1.50 per VMU.
Hence, even if one were to remint all their assets without any cost using Cointool (which we know isn't true, with most reporting savings around 15-25% on reminting at most), their costs would still be less efficient than someone minting a XENFT with the current gwei rates because they minted the first mint at double the cost.
Ultimately, it seems the price of gwei and the value of ETH are the most influential factors in the minting cost equation. These will determine your minting success and ability to profit on XEN mints more than the specific minting software that you choose. As an example I wrote my own minter in Python and shared it with the community, this was at the time when XENFTs were around. It wasn't as efficient, but it was automated and waited for the best gwei. I released a similar script that was minting XENFTs at lowest gwei possible. Many people used it to mint XENFTs at as low as 4.7 gwei.
Anyways, that said, I personally tried Cointool for some of my mints, but a very small portion of my minting process. One significant reason why I didn't go with it, was that its contract was never audited. At the time of XEN release and later on as well, there was a buzz in the community, and various videos popped up from users, including one on YouTube:
While I'm not convinced of these claims, I felt that XENFTs, with its audited smart contract by Certik, and the plans by XEN team to leverage XENFTs for various purposes, was a safer choice. Now, of course, the future is not as much fun now, for example, the recent ban by OpenSea might have shaken things up, but given there are over 15 different marketplaces available, finding a new trading platform shouldn't be a challenge.
So to summarize, in my view, XENFTs as oppose to other minting tools are audited, supported by XEN team, can be used for example to create DBXENFT giving them another utility, can be claimed without ETH using Xenon... and will likely get some share in the X1 ecosystem (speculative).
So, all that said, I just wanted to provide my opinion and go a bit beyond the buzz. If you do not agree with me, it's perfectly fine, let me know your own thoughts and reasons and perhaps also vote in the poll, I kind a want to see which platform is most preferred by Xenians.
