What Is Minting?
NFT minting is the process of turning an asset into a non-fungible token (NFT) on the crypto blockchain. People can turn their cars’ ‘pink slip’ into digital assets and sell them on a secondary marketplace. They are unique assets that represent ownership of the item. Anyone can turn a song, poem, or personal photo into an NFT.
The minting process involved using a decentralized application (dApp) website, uploading the picture/song/poem, and paying a fee.
Minting is also the process of buying an NFT on its release day. A user will be purchasing a random one from the collection. Depending on the project, the art can instantly be revealed after the purchase, or they can delay the reveal and stall the trading of them.
Projects can decide to launch on their custom-made site or can release with popular launchpads. The price of an average mint can vary from free to a couple of hundred dollars. Sometimes projects mint with the cryptocurrency that they created or a parent token like Cardano or Ethereum.
Topics Covered
- Links to create your own NFTs
- Forms of Minting
- Whitelist
- Common Issues
Links to create your own NFTs
You can create NFTs on any blockchain. This guide is about making Solana and Ethereum NFTs. It requires a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) account such as Coinbase to buy crypto. Then users need another type of crypto wallet to use decentralized applications (dApps) that turn their assets into NFTs.
Solana Links (click on them):
- Phantom = Solana Wallet
- FoxyMint = Turn any picture into an NFT
- BoomBox Marketplace = Making songs into NFTs
Ethereum Links:
Forms of minting:
Whitelist (WL) Token: A project will send you an NFT that acts as a token to mint. You can earn them by being active on their discord or Twitter. Alternatively, you can buy a projects wl or sell your wl token on the Famous Fox Federation Token Market. However, each project token has an official address. Usually, you can get the correct address from their discord channels in #announcements.
Wallet-Based Minting: You must submit your Phantoms wallet address to a 3rd party website such as Magic Eden or Blocksmith Mercury. You will not receive a token to mint. Your wallet address will be saved to their database and will be allowed to mint.
Degen: When you buy into a project that can be free or extremely cheap to mint. Usually, they go with Launch My NFT (LMNFT) and have little to no information about them. Most degen projects are scams but some do reach the moon.
Dynamic Minting: Projects mint out in tiers, sometimes they choose to mint out over several courses of a couple of days and increase their price. They also have presales.
Whitelist (wl):
People grind for this discord role. It is free money. They spend hours talking on their discord, retweeting their posts, making fan art, making articles, and anything creative to earn them a spot to mint.
The most popular way to earn wl for projects in demand is called First Come First Serve (FCFS) collabs with other NFT projects. You must screenshot proof that you are following their Twitter and owning an NFT from the project they are collaborating with. Sometimes instead of FCFS, it’s raffled, you post the requirements, and then they randomly choose ‘x’ amount of people for the spot. However! When completing requirements read through their template and follow exact instructions, if you miss 1 step, projects will skip you.
In any NFT ecosystem, some people are called Alpha Hunters and they go into new discord projects and open up a support ticket asking the team to allocate a certain amount of wl spots for the project they represent. The team will respond with a template (their business plan) to repost on the project the hunter represents. You can apply to be a wl hunter yourself by opening support tickets in projects and getting wl spots for yourself by doing this!
Some projects launch wl applications and the best application marketing was done by t00b.
Common issues:
Slow mints: Projects do not sell out instantly and that drastically changes the mood of the market. Most of the time, projects cut their supply, reduce their mint price, refunds or airdrops (send free NFTs) to those who minted.
Forgetting to submit your wallet. Projects do not always use a 3rd party to collect wallets. Sometimes you must go into their discord channel and post it by a deadline.
Solana TPS (transactions per second): Networks get clogged up when people use a ‘bot’ (a program that sends thousands of transactions per second) to mint a project. It brings down the network and nothing goes through, your NFTs and funds are frozen. Solana use to have a TPS of 50K+ but has been struggling for months now and is usually around 2500 TPS.
Custom-made sites: When projects choose not to go with a launchpad, they risk a bunch of holes in their coding contract. For example, Tokyo Saints had its minting site. Someone exploited the contract and was able to mint over 100+ NFTs for free and then proceeded to dump on everyone.
Summary:
Creating your digital assets is a powerful way to monetize your work. Creators earn royalties from every sale and it is an important part of the growing world. Once an NFT has been minted, it can be traded on different blockchains.
Projects have the choice of deciding the way they mint. They can release their NFTs in waves, as a group of people can mint an NFT for one hour, and then the next group can mint one in two hours.
When minting, people should create a wallet specifically designed to mint projects, it is straightforward to connect to the wrong website and have your money stolen. A user should only keep the amount needed to mint in that wallet.
