Quick answer: the NFT space runs on a handful of terms that get thrown around without explanation. Mint means creating a token on the blockchain. Gas is the transaction fee you pay to make that happen. A wallet holds your keys, not your NFTs themselves. Once those three click, most of the rest of the jargon falls into place fast.
Why the vocabulary trips people up
NFT terminology borrows from three different worlds at once: cryptocurrency, traditional art collecting, and software development. That mix is why a beginner can read a single tweet and hit five unfamiliar words in a row. None of the terms below are complicated on their own. The confusion comes from nobody explaining them in order.
The core terms
Mint: the act of creating a new NFT on a blockchain. Minting turns a file (or a reference to one) into a unique, ownable token. Every NFT you see for sale was minted by someone at some point, whether that was an artist, a project team, or an automated contract.
Gas fee: the cost of processing a transaction on a blockchain like Ethereum. Gas isn’t paid to the marketplace or the seller. It goes to the network itself, as payment to the computers that validate the transaction. Gas fees rise and fall with network congestion, which is why the same action can cost very different amounts depending on the time of day.
Wallet: software (or hardware) that stores the private keys proving you own certain assets. A common misconception is that your NFTs “live” in your wallet. They don’t. They live on the blockchain; your wallet just holds the keys that let you prove ownership and move them.
Smart contract: self-executing code deployed on a blockchain. Most NFT collections are built on a smart contract that defines the rules: total supply, royalty percentage, transfer logic. When you buy an NFT, you’re really interacting with that contract.
Floor price: the lowest price currently listed for any NFT in a given collection. It’s the most commonly cited number for a collection’s value, but it only reflects the cheapest item for sale, not the average or the median.
Royalty: a percentage of secondary sales paid back to the original creator. Royalties were a major selling point of NFTs early on, though enforcement has become inconsistent as more marketplaces make them optional. Our guide to how NFT royalties actually work covers this in more detail.
Provenance: the verifiable ownership history of an NFT, recorded permanently on the blockchain. This is one of the genuine advantages NFTs have over a plain digital file: anyone can trace exactly who owned a given token and when it changed hands.
On-chain vs. off-chain: whether data is stored directly on the blockchain (on-chain) or referenced from an external server (off-chain). Most NFT images are stored off-chain for cost reasons, with only a pointer to that file recorded on-chain. This matters because if the off-chain storage disappears, the image can become inaccessible even though the token itself still exists.
Terms worth knowing before you buy
- Airdrop: free tokens sent directly to wallet addresses, often used to reward early community members or promote a new project.
- Allowlist: a list of wallet addresses granted early or guaranteed access to mint a new collection before the general public.
- Rug pull: when a project’s creators abandon it and disappear with investor funds, typically shortly after launch.
- Burn: permanently destroying a token by sending it to an unusable address, usually to reduce total supply.
- Metadata: the descriptive information attached to an NFT (name, image link, traits) that most marketplaces read to display the item correctly.
How to actually use this list
Don’t try to memorize all of it in one sitting. Bookmark this page and come back when a term you don’t recognize shows up in a marketplace listing or a project’s Discord. In practice, five or six of these words cover 90% of what you’ll encounter as a buyer: mint, gas, wallet, floor price, royalty, and provenance. Once those are second nature, the rest of the vocabulary is easy to pick up as you go.
If you haven’t bought your first NFT yet, our step-by-step guide to buying your first NFT walks through the process using the terms defined here.
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