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The Solana flow deploys a Metaplex Core Candy Machine. Artwork goes to Arweave through Irys, and your sale phases become candy guards.

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Before you start

  • A Solana wallet with enough SOL for Candy Machine rent and Arweave storage.
  • Your artwork, either finished or as layers for the generator.
  • The addresses your royalties split to.

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The steps

1

Collection

Name, symbol, description, total supply and your collection artwork.Pick the symbol carefully — it’s what Magic Eden and Tensor key their listings on, and it isn’t something you’ll want to change later.
2

Royalties and pricing

Your mint price in SOL, your creator royalty, and the addresses it splits to.A collection whose parent royalty reads 0 isn’t necessarily royalty-free — zero on the parent is often just an unset field. Royalty checks at sale time read the token itself.
3

Sale phases

Whitelist and public windows, each with its own price, start time and per-wallet cap. → Sale phases
4

Reveal (optional)

Set your placeholder art here if you want a delayed reveal. Skip it and the collection mints revealed.
5

Artwork

Your images and metadata. If you used the layer generator, they arrive here as recipes and previews — the full-resolution files get built during deployment.Metadata is checked before anything goes on-chain, so a malformed file is caught here rather than after you’ve paid for it.
6

Review and publish

Deploys the Candy Machine and loads your items in.

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Compressed NFTs

You can launch as compressed NFTs, which cuts the per-mint cost dramatically at large supply.
Compressed NFTs work differently enough that some third-party tools mishandle them. They have no token accounts, so anything that checks ownership the usual way will think a transfer never happened.We handle it. Not everyone does — worth testing your collection against any tool you depend on before you commit to compression.

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When something goes wrong

Usually a stale checkpoint rather than a real failure. The deploy resumes from where it thinks it got to, and if a previous attempt got further than that, it tries to redo finished work.Check the draft’s stage before re-running.
Arweave uploads need a funded balance, and the launch screen shows a banner when yours is short. Top it up and retry — don’t start the draft again.
Usually a missing properties.files block, a missing category, or attributes that aren’t a flat list of { trait_type, value } pairs. → Artwork and metadata
Metadata refresh is separate from minting. If your images resolve in the metadata but not in wallets, run a metadata refresh from /mint/manage.
Phantom classifies newly created Core assets automatically, and there’s no setting on our side that changes it. It sorts itself out as the collection picks up activity.

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Getting your rent back

When a collection has fully minted out, closing the Candy Machine returns most of its account rent to your wallet. On a large collection that’s real money — worth doing.