“Mint” is the word crypto uses for creating new tokens or NFTs on-chain. When a project launches an ERC-20 token, the initial supply is minted into an address specified by the contract. When someone buys an NFT from a new collection on launch day, they are minting it — the smart contract assigns them a brand new token ID and records them as the owner in the same transaction that debits their ETH for the mint price. The word applies equally to fungible tokens and non-fungible ones, and to any mechanism where a contract function adds new tokens to the supply.
The opposite of mint is burn — sending tokens to a dead address or calling a destroy function so that they are permanently removed from the supply. Most token contracts have both mint and burn capabilities, though the access control on the mint function is usually tighter (often restricted to a specific admin or to a minter role) to prevent someone from creating unlimited supply out of thin air.
Mint Mechanics for NFTs
For NFT collections, “mint” usually refers to the specific event where the public is allowed to buy into a newly-launched collection. The mechanics vary. Some use a fixed-price sale where anyone can mint at a set price until the supply runs out. Some use a Dutch auction with a price that drops over time until buyers start clearing the supply. Some use an allowlist where only specific wallets can mint, either at a discount or earlier than the public. High-demand mints from well-known collections often sell out in minutes, which triggers a gas war as buyers bid higher and higher fees to get their mint transactions included first.
The 2021-2022 NFT boom produced some spectacular mint events. The Yuga Labs “Otherdeeds” mint in April 2022 paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in ETH gas fees to miners over a few hours as thousands of buyers tried to mint at once, briefly pushing Ethereum gas prices to thousands of gwei. Bored Ape Yacht Club’s original mint in April 2021 went for 0.08 ETH per NFT — about $200 at the time — and the floor price later peaked above 150 ETH, meaning anyone who minted and held briefly held a 1,800x return. Most NFT mints, however, go to zero quickly, and the average buyer at the average mint loses money.
Mint-Related Scams
Malicious mint contracts are a recurring scam vector. A common pattern: a project promotes a highly-anticipated mint, drops a link to a supposedly-official frontend, and the frontend is actually a phishing site that connects to a malicious contract. Users click mint, approve what they think is a NFT purchase, and instead sign a transaction that drains their wallet of unrelated assets. The main defence is to check that the frontend URL matches the project’s verified social accounts, verify the contract address against an independent source, and use a wallet with transaction simulation (Rabby, MetaMask with blockaid) that shows you what the transaction will actually do before you sign.
A more subtle version is mints that actually deliver an NFT but with a malicious “sweepTokens” or “approveAll” function embedded in the contract that the project team can call later to take back tokens or approvals. These are rare because they get detected quickly, but they happen, and they are one of the reasons the “read the contract code” rule exists even though almost nobody actually does it.
Token Minting on L1 vs L2
Because mint transactions are usually simple — just a function call to a mint function — they work the same way on L1 and L2. The main difference is cost. Minting a single NFT on Ethereum mainnet during a hot mint can cost tens or hundreds of dollars in gas. The same mint on Base or Arbitrum costs cents. Most new NFT collections launch on L2s now, or on Solana where mint costs are also negligible, and mainnet launches are reserved for projects that specifically want the prestige and security of L1 settlement at the cost of high gas.