What Can You Do With 5 (free) tez?

With the recent Freetez initiative , we saw a number of people starting to join the Tezos community from other platforms. People that have spent over $100 in gas fees on Ethereum in the last 6 months, are eligible to claim 5 free tez to try out the Tezos ecosystem.

This got me thinking, what could someone do with just 5 tez? I mean it’s just ~5 bucks, it can’t be enough for much, right? Wrong.

Well, these 5 tez, are enough for so many things that you will be very pleasantly surprised! In this article we will see some of the things that 5 tez allow you to do!

1. Setup Your Tezos Profile #

Whether you are an artist who is looking to start minting on Tezos or a collector who is looking to explore the ecosystem, setting up your Tezos profile will help you establish your name/brand and help others know that your wallet is indeed yours and not of a copyminter/impersonator.

To do that I would recommend 2 things you should do.

• Set up your profile on Tezos Profiles
  Fill in your basic information, connect the accounts that you would like to be associated with you (Twitter, Discord, Ethereum address etc.) and then deploy your TZProfile smart contract with a few clicks. The whole process including the deployment of the smart contract will cost you less than 0.5 tez!
• Buy a Tezos Domain
  Tezos domains with 5 letters or more cost 1 tez per year so you should definitely go and register your own “.tez” domain to make it easier for people to find you!

Doing both of these things will cost you ~ 1.5 tez and it will get you ready to start collecting or minting on NFT platforms eponymously.

2. Mint and Collect NFTs #

There’s no question that NFTs are one of the biggest Tezos use cases and it’s obvious if you consider the ridiculously low fees that allow users to mint, sell, and collect without having to pay an arm and a leg on fees.

To give you an example of the fees, I minted and listed this test NFT on the Teia NFT marketplace for a total cost of ~0.11 tez! That means you could probably mint and list more than 40 NFTs with just the 5 free tez you got!

On the other hand, if you prefer to collect NFTs there is an abundance of great art selling for affordable prices on all the Tezos NFT platforms. A brief mention of some of the platforms:

• Teia.art
  The community driven continuation of the Hic et Nunc marketplace that counts more than 800k NFTs minted!
• Objkt.com
  The largest NFT marketplace on Tezos with a ton of features!
• Versum.xyz
  Another one of the most popular NFT marketplaces on Tezos with a lot of 1 of 1 NFTs and great features for artists!
• fxhash.xyz
  The “go to” place for generative art with a lot of innovative features for generative artists, and great generative art for collectors!

Overall, as an artist with 5 tez you could mint and list a whole NFT collection on any of the NFT marketplaces and start your NFT journey without worrying about the gas fees you pay and without having to set high prices so that you can compensate for those gas fees. Further, if you mess up, it’s ok, as the costs are negligible. Just try again!

3. Try Out Games on Tezos #

Another promising and fun side of Tezos is gaming! With a number of games being live already and even more being built, you could use your 5 tez to try them out to have fun as well as get rewards for playing them.

As an example, in Tezotopia you can buy 3 battle units for under 1 tez directly from their marketplace and immediately start battling against other users to win rewards. Those 5 tez will be more than enough to buy the battle units, buy some ENR (the resource you need for repairs), cover the transactions fees for battling, repairing, etc. for a number of times!

If you are interested in more games, feel free to check out my “Tezos Gaming Map” article!

4. Experiment With Defi #

If you always wanted to experiment and learn better on how DeFi works but fees on Ethereum have held you back, here is your chance to do it. With the super low fees of Tezos, those 5 free tez you got are enough to try out a number of different DeFi projects and concepts and better understand how they work.

Swap or add a tiny amount of liquidity on decentralized exchanges, try out lending platforms, dex aggregators, farms and anything you can think of without having to pay tens upon hundreds of dollars in fees for every contract call you make. For a (non-exhaustive) list of DeFi projects, check out the “Tezos Defi Map”!

Fun fact: 5 tez are actually more than enough to even create your own token on Tezos!

5. Use Them To Bridge Assets From ETH to Tezos #

Once you have tried some of the cool stuff that are built on Tezos, you might want to bridge more assets from Ethereum to Tezos so that you can collect more NFTs, or buy better units for a game etc.

In that case, those 5 tez (or what’s left of it) is enough to cover the gas fees required on the Tezos side when you try to bridge assets from Ethereum using the Plenty bridge! As I covered in my “How To Swap ETH for XTZ Without a Centralized Exchange” tutorial, you only need 0.1 tez to cover the transactions on the Tezos side! But, do not forget this is for the Tezos side, as you will need to do some things on the Ethereum side the costs associated with Ethereum.

From buying a Tezos domain, to collecting or minting NFTs (or a whole collection!), to having fun playing games and so many other things, 5 tez is more than enough to try one or many of the things above mentioned!

This is all possible thanks to the constant developments that the Tezos blockchain is undergoing that ultimately allow everyone to use its technology regardless of the depth of your pocket. Inclusivity is always better than exclusivity! Add to that the vibrant Tezos community that is always welcoming and ready to help out and there is no reason to not give it a try. So go for it: play, mint, experiment, learn, grow, and most important of all, have fun!