Minting
Creating a new token on a blockchain — for a domain, issuing the NFT that represents its ownership.
- glossary
Minting is the act of writing a new token record to a blockchain — analogous to striking a coin, except the "mint" is a smart contract function that creates an entry in the contract's on-chain state and assigns it to an owner address. For domain tokenization, minting is the critical step where a real DNS name becomes a blockchain-native asset: a smart contract calls mint, creating an ERC-721 NFT whose token ID maps to a specific domain. From that moment the domain can be transferred peer-to-peer, listed on an NFT marketplace, or used in DeFi without touching the traditional registrar workflow. Minting requires gas to pay for the computation, and the tokenize process also involves locking the registrar record so the on-chain owner controls DNS configuration. Once minted, the NFT is the source of truth for ownership; burning (destroying) it returns control to the conventional registration system.
Related keywords
- minting
- mint
- NFT creation
- token issuance
- on-chain
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.