By: Eric, Peter

Minting an NFT means creating it on a blockchain for the first time.

For popular NFT projects, minting often lets you buy the NFT at a lower price than what it’ll sell on the secondary market. 

This guide walks through how you can mint an NFT for an NFT project that's not your own. We assume that you know how to set up a crypto wallet and find and evaluate NFT projects. We'll cover minting your own NFT in a future guide.

To mint an NFT for an NFT project, you need to:

1. Join the project’s community
2. Mint from the project’s website
3. Advanced: Mint from a smart contract

Join the project’s community

First, join the project’s community. The project’s creators will typically announce the mint 24-48 hours before it happens. 

Popular projects have a whitelist that grants early access to the mint. To get on the whitelist:

1. Contribute to the community and engage in discussions. 
2. Participate in giveaways in the community’s announcement channel.
3. Hold previous NFTs from the project. For example, all Wanderers NFT holders could mint a free Planet Pass NFT. 
   

Ignore any direct messages (DMs) from members in the community - they’re likely scams.

Mint from the project’s website

Before the mint, you should:

1. Know which blockchain the mint is happening on (e.g., Ethereum, Polygon, Solana).
2. Have your wallet loaded with enough tokens to pay for minting and gas fees. 
   

Most mints happen on the project’s website. You typically need to:

1. Connect your wallet
2. Click a button to mint the NFT
3. Pay the mint and gas fees
   

Consider minting multiple NFTs if you have conviction about a project. This way, you can sell some NFTs for a profit while holding the rest for long-term upside and community vibes.

Advanced: Mint from the smart contract

If the project is very popular, its website might go down during the mint. If this happens, you can mint directly from the project’s smart contract. Here’s how:

1. Find the contract by asking the community or searching on a website like Etherscan

2. Connect your wallet to the contract. On Etherscan, you can do this by selecting the “Contract” tab, tapping the “Write Contract” button, then tapping Connect to Web3 to connect your wallet.

3. Find the mint function on the contract. You should see a function that says “Mint” or something similar. Tap to expand it.

4. Fill in the fields and tap “Write.” Price is the amount you’re paying to mint. If you don’t know the price, you can try guessing. If your price is too low, you’ll see a high gas fee when you try to confirm the transaction. If your price is too high, any excess amount vs. the mint price will be refunded back to your wallet. Other than price, you also need to enter in quantity (the price multiplied by the number of items) and your wallet address (to receive the NFT). Each project might have slightly different fields, so try to get someone from the project’s community to help.
   
   

Once you execute the function, you can track the transaction on Etherscan to ensure success.

If you missed the mint, you can still buy the NFT on the secondary market. Let’s cover that next.

Up next: How to buy NFTs on secondary?