Minting

Minting is the act of creating new tokens by writing them into a smart contract's records for the first time. For an NFT collection it usually means calling a mint function that assigns a fresh token ID to the buyer's address in exchange for a price plus the network gas fee. For fungible tokens, minting increases the supply in existence and may be open to anyone, capped at a fixed limit, or restricted to addresses holding a minter role. Who is allowed to mint, and whether that power can be revoked, is one of the most important things to check in a contract, because an open or upgradeable mint function lets an issuer dilute existing holders at any time without warning.