Merkle Tree Whitelist
Using a Merkle Tree whitelist provides a cost-efficient way to distribute NFTs to a predefined list of addresses. It ensures that only whitelisted addresses can mint the NFTs, enhancing security and efficiency. Writing a whitelist of thousands of addresses directly within a smart contract would result in significant gas costs, and additionally, due to the maximum transaction gas limit restriction, it might be impractical to update such a large whitelist in a single transaction. However, since in the Merkle Tree verification process, leaf nodes and proofs can be stored off-chain while only the root value needs to be stored on-chain, this method significantly saves on gas costs and enables whitelist setup with only one transaction.