What is Minting?

What does it mean to mint an NFT?

Minting an NFT refers to the process of writing a digital item to the blockchain. This establishes its immutable record of authenticity and ownership. This process usually involves things like assigning metadata to the NFT, which can include information about the creator, a description of the content, and other relevant details. Minting establishes ownership and provenance of the digital item on the blockchain, ensuring its uniqueness and authenticity.

Both creators and collectors can mint NFTs. For both creators and collectors, minting NFTs establishes verified ownership and ownership history. For creators, minting their own NFTs gives them ownership and control of their own work, and allows them to build special communities and perks for those who hold their NFTs. When either the creator or a collector mints an NFT from a project, they become the first-ever owner of that NFT, since the NFT is written onto the blockchain during the mint.

Minting for creators

As a creator, minting your work allows you to establish provable scarcity and verified ownership. For the first time, creators can publish limited edition digital works, whose authenticity is validated on the blockchain. Ownership is undisputed and public, allowing creators to build special communities and perks for those who hold their NFTs.

Minting for collectors

Minting NFTs isn’t just for creators, however. NFT projects will often offer early access to their NFTs via a mint. When you mint an NFT from a project, you’re the first ever owner of that NFT, since the mint is when it’s written to the blockchain. Oftentimes, participating in a project’s mint is like buying a pack of Pokémon cards: you don’t know if you’ll end up with something rare. 

How to mint on Artflura?

Recently, Artflura has made changes to the way creators mint NFTs using our tools. Historically, creators used lazy minting to create items that were not on-chain until they were sold or transferred. While this provided an easy way for creators to experiment with NFTs in the early days, we believe that the future of NFTs is one where creators deploy and mint from their own independent contracts. We're letting creators do just that with our new functionality in artflura.com We’ve replaced lazy minting with Artflura. Effective June 3rd, 2023, users won't be able to create new items using the lazy minting tool. Existing items created using the lazy minting tool will still be able to be bought, sold, and transferred, but they won’t be editable going forward. You do not need to do anything in order for your collections with these items to persist.