How to Build and Deploy an NFT Whitelist Smart Contract

Artists and content creators have a unique potential to monetize their work due to blockchain technology, especially NFTs.

Artists are no longer reliant on galleries or auction houses to sell their art. Instead, they can sell it directly to the consumer as an NFT, allowing them to keep a more significant portion of the profit.

This article will guide us through building and deploying an NFT whitelist smart contract, enabling us to add, remove, validate, and verify if a user is part of a project’s whitelist.

Prerequisites

Make sure to have Node.js or npm installed on your computer. If you don’t, click here.

Project Setup and Installation

Let’s create a new folder/directory for our project, whitelist-project in the terminal. We’ll work in this directory through the course of this tutorial. In the directory we just created, run the following commands:

npm init -y npm install --save-dev hardhat

Let’s get a sample project by running the command below:

npx hardhat

We’ll go with the following options:

A sample project.
Accept all other requests.

Having hardhat-waffle and hardhat-ethers installed is required for the sample project.

Just in case it didn’t install automatically, we will install it manually with the following command:

npm install --save-dev @nomiclabs/hardhat-waffle ethereum-waffle chai @nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers ethers

To make sure everything is working, run the following code:

npx hardhat test

If everything is working as it should, you’ll see a passed test result in your console:

Now, delete sample-test.js from the test folder, sample-script.js from the scripts folder, and Greeter.sol from the contracts folder.

The folders themselves should not be deleted.

We’ll create a Whitelist.sol file inside the contracts directory. When using Hardhat, file layout is crucial, so pay attention! We’ll start with the most basic structure of any contract.

 pragma solidity ^0.8.0;  import "hardhat/console.sol";  contract Whitelist {     constructor() {         console.log("Hello! from Whitelist Contract");     } }

To build and deploy our smart contract, we’ll navigate to the scripts folder, create a new run.js file, and update it with the following code snippet:

const main = async () = {      const whitelistContractFactory = await hre.ethers.getContractFactory(     "Whitelist"   );   const whitelistContract = await whitelistContractFactory.deploy();       await whitelistContract.deployed();    console.log("Whitelist Contract deployed to: ", whitelistContract.address); };  const runMain = async () = {   try {     await main();     process.exit(0);   } catch (error) {     console.log(error);     process.exit(1);   } };  runMain();