Deploy a Smart Contract on Avalanche (AVAX)

This guide will show you how to deploy any smart contract to the Avalanche network.

By the end, you'll learn how to create a simple Edition Drop smart contract, deploy it to the Avalanche Fuji Testnet, and mint an NFT on the smart contract.

Let's get started!

What is Avalanche?

Avalanche is Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (POS) blockchain which has a low cost to use and fast transaction finality times.

Projects built on Avalanche are typically in the De-Fi (Decentralised Finance) space, such as the Trader Joe trading platform.

Building projects on Avalanche has the benefit of lower gas fees than Ethereum and will expose your project to users in the AVAX ecosystem. It uses a novel proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, making it energy-efficient and sustainable, consuming the same energy as 46 US households or 0.0005% of Bitcoin's energy.

Create a smart contract on Avalanche

To begin, head to the Contracts page in your thirdweb Dashboard and hit "Deploy new contract":

You will be taken to our Explore page — where you can browse smart contracts built by the top protocols in web3 and deploy them in just a few clicks!

Note: You can also use the thirdweb CLI to set up a smart contract environment by running the below command from your terminal:

npx thirdweb create contract

This will take you through an easy-to-follow flow of steps for you to create your contract. Learn more about this in our CLI guide.

Otherwise, let's get back to Explore:

Here, select your smart contract of choice. For this guide, we're going to use the Edition Drop (ERC1155) contract to create our NFT collection:

Set up your smart contract with an image, name, description, etc., and configure which wallet address will receive the funds from primary and secondary sales:

In the network/chain section select Avalanche C-Chain or Avalanche Fuji Testnet as you wish. For the sake of this guide, I am going to use Avalanche Fuji Testnet

Once you have selected the network, click on deploy now. It will prompt you to switch your network to Avalanche Fuji Testnet.

Click on the switch Wallet button and if you don't already have the network in your wallet it will prompt you to add the network and then switch to the network:

Now let's deploy the smart contract on the Avalanche Fuji Testnet! But before that, we need testnet funds.

Get Avalanche Fuji Testnet funds in your wallet

Once you have added the Avalanche Fuji Testnet to your wallet. You can either navigate there directly or open the Wallet button and hit "Request Testnet Funds" in the thirdweb dashboard:

This will take you to the Avalanche faucet. Here, paste your wallet address and click on "Request 2 AVAX"

Once you have completed this process, you will have testnet funds in your wallet on Avalanche Fuji Testnet, meaning you're now ready to deploy your smart contract!

Deploying the contract on Avalanche

Now that you have your testnet funds, let's go back to the thirdweb Dashboard where we were building our Edition Drop contract.

We have already filled out the metadata so click on "Deploy Now" after selecting the chain. It will prompt a transaction, you have to approve that.

And you're done! You have just deployed to the Avalanche Fuji Testnet.

Calling Smart Contract Functions

Let's see how we can use the smart contract by calling some functions on it, such as minting an NFT into our collection!

From the Explorer tab, you can view all of the available functions on your smart contract and execute them directly from your connected wallet:

Setting Up Our NFT Collection

In our example, we created an Edition drop smart contract, so we'll quickly set it up and mint our first NFT by performing the following steps:

1. Lazy mint some NFTs.
2. Configuring our claim conditions.
3. Mint an NFT from the drop!

Once we've set up our NFTs, we can click the Claim button in the NFTs tab to mint our first NFT, and voilà! We just minted an NFT on the Avalanche Fuji Testnet!

What's Next?

Now that you've deployed your smart contract, you can use our SDK to build a web3 application! Where users can connect their wallets and interact with the functions of your smart contracts. Learn more from our guide below:

Wrapping up

In this guide, you've learned how to create a simple Edition Drop smart contract, deploy it to the Avalanche Fuji Testnet, and mint an NFT on the smart contract. We hope it was helpful!

If you have any questions jump into the thirdweb Discord and join 32,000+ other builders! And if you're looking to build on Avalanche and want to learn more about how to do that with thirdweb's tools, reach out to the team directly. Please let us know if you have any feature requests or guide requests here.