| Minting is just essentially purchasing something with a couple of extra steps behind the scene. What pretty much happens when you are minting an NFT is: 1. The owner of the collection uses a program that controls everything around the NFT sales, like the start date, the price, the order of art that is distributed, the owners of the collection where the funds get transferred, and other settings. This happens before users can mint. 2. User wants to buy art, they launch a webpage that interacts with the above program. They pay the amount of money that the art is configured to sale for, and the program will process these payments in the order they are received and distribute art based off of the order the art is to be distributed. The above program also has safeguards that prevent users from being charged in the case that the art is out of stock at the time the user attempts to pay for it. 3. The 'minting' process is taking the art that was configured from this program, creating (minting) a token for it, and creating any underlying token accounts that are needed to store the art in the user's wallet, and transferring ownership. NOTE - there are definitely other ways to distribute NFTs, such as generative art that is created at the time of the transaction based off of the block hash. The above example is how this particular NFT collection was to be distributed, it's a common model used by probably the majority of NFT projects. The actual 'minting' step (#3) is pretty much the same though, the process of creating the token and associating the metadata and transferring ownership. |