Creators can easily deploy their membership contracts (called Locks) using the Unlock dashboard. Each Lock has different membership terms: membership price, number of members, duration of the membership (yes, the NFT does expire!)... etc.

Memberships can then be purchased directly by the fans. This happens by calling the purchase function on the Lock contract. In practice, this function can actually be called with another recipient's address, in order for them to receive the NFT (instead of the buyer).

However, in a lot of cases, creators may want to "give away" or airdrop NFT memberships for free to some of their users. Here are examples of why this is useful:

• This is how our credit card flow works: the NFT is paid "off chain" via a credit card transaction, and granted on chain (technically, no on-chain payment happens).
• Someone might want to give a "limited time" trial. For example, my personal blog has a membership of its own, where NFTs expire after 1 year, but where anyone who follows me on Twitter can claim a 30 minute trial!
• Finally, some communities and memberships cannot be purchased, but only be granted. That is the case for the PlannerDAO certifications.

How to airdrop NFT memberships

Using the Dashboard

We have created a comprehensive guide to airdropping NFTs using Unlock Protocol using the Dashboard.

Using code

Of course, granting keys is possible through code! The grantKeys function on the lock can be called by any lock manager or key granter (read more about the roles). In order to reduce risks, we recommend using a dedicated key granter in your application so that if that account (or contract) was compromised, the attacker could "only" grant new keys (which could be cancelled by a lock manager too...).

Then, on your code you would call the grantKeys function](https://docs.unlock-protocol.com/core-protocol/smart-contracts-api/IPublicLockV10#grantkeys). This function can in fact be called to grant multiple keys to multiple users at once. There is a practical limit based on the block-size of each chain. You would call this function with 3 arrays of the same size:

1. the recipients
2. the expiration timestamps
3. the key managers

Airdropping memberships is a very important part of the Unlock protocol because it enables not only multiples types of memberships, but also new ways of rewarding or incentivizing community members!

Updated: 9 January 2023