For some time now I've held the belief that crypto isn't about "solving existing problems", but instead creating new behaviors. Humanity is still adjusting to the internet; we don't know what a true digitally-native society or economy really looks like. What we do know is it won't just look like our physical institutions slapped on a computer (e.g. "putting newspapers online”) -- it will likely be something entirely different. The behaviors and norms of a digital society will be downstream of the technology it's built upon, which means that cryptonative rails for media, commerce, socialization, etc. will lead to corresponding and emergent cryptonative behaviors.

"Minting" is one such behavior. Over the last year or two, a new norm has emerged where people like you and I put media onchain via releasing an NFT open edition, and it gets collected (“minted”) by our peers for a small fee — which varies per protocol, but generally is anywhere in the range of 50 cents to $3 (or more if the creator sets their own price on top). That money ends up getting distributed such that the creator of the media, plus anyone who helped distribute it (the minting platform, referrers), earns from the mint. 

As a creator, the reason to engage in this emergent behavior is quite clear. It’s almost uniquely +EV to mint the media you create - you will earn something if you get even one mint, as opposed to the default, where you earn nothing. In addition to being financially rewarded, you can establish some onchain provenance over the work, increase and strengthen a network of collectors, identify your “true fans”, so on and so forth. Much has been written about this so I won’t go into it much further. 

The other side of the transaction (collecting) is much less obvious. Why should you pay money to collect onchain media? In the 2021 NFT cycle the reason to mint NFTs was clear - you thought you would be able to sell it later for a higher price. Or there was a chance that you would collect a “rare” which you could sell later at an even higher price. These were mostly PFP or art collectibles, and the thesis often played out correctly as these collections generated significant secondary demand. A few years have passed since then, however, and the NFT meta has transitioned from scarce, expensive mints to abundant, low cost mints. Now, people post a single piece of media onchain, which is eligible to be minted by anyone for some set period of time for a very low cost.

This was exciting for a long time - it’s fun to support your friends and artists you like. Minting this way was also the first broad crypto behavior that many people felt was net productive and positive-sum, without being hyperspeculative in the way that other forms of asset trading were. But today, it feels like people might be starting to get mint fatigue. Increased ETH prices also mean that mint fees now cost more in USD, and people are also realizing they don’t really engage with what they’ve collected after the point of mint. Further, there has been little to zero liquidity or secondary demand for these NFTs, so these mints have been more akin to purchases than shared-upside investments (even though they are all still technically assets that might appreciate in the future), another difference to last cycle. 

This begs the evergreen question - wat mean?

I can’t speak for others, but when I collect something, I do so because it feels like the only sufficient way to engage with a piece of media. I have a few options for such engagement - liking, replying, recasting, quote casting. Sometimes, I feel the desire to mint it too. It makes me part of the onchain story of that media, and establishes some sort of energetic relationship between me, the creator, and the media itself (and even other collectors). It’s the highest form of signaling to the creator that their work resonated with me. It’s all very hard to explain, and if my mom were reading this she’d think I’m crazy, but I think I’ve engaged in this practice enough to where it makes sense to me. My belief is that it’s a behavior that will increase over time, and just as it makes sense to me, it will simply make sense to more and more people as time passes. It also helps that there are various companies and people working hard towards this vision. 

The deeper you are in this world, the more you might buy into this idea of wanting to economically signal resonance, and the more you might be inclined to mint. For some people it doesn’t make sense, and liking is sufficient. For others they mint nearly everything they come across. I’m not too worried about trying to increase the amount of people who collect NFTs (though I'm sure other people are) - if people want to they will, and if this new behavior is real (which it is to me) then my bet is that it will grow in general as a core behavior in an internet-native society.

Terminology (“mint” vs “collect” vs whatever else) and price-point are secondary and will be figured out by the market over time. The primary concept here though is that of some sort of new form of signaling, enabled via the transaction - a new medium of communication that holds money as a core component. You either feel compelled to communicate this way or you don’t; either is fine. 

In the process of writing this, I've also realized that "minting as a form of communication" also implies that the NFT's existence as an object is less important. For these types of NFTs, the value is in the transaction, the message that minting creates, rather than the ownership of the token post-mint. We often think about NFTs as "collectibles" or "digital goods", but that might actually be secondary to the kinetic act of minting itself.