Why Mint

We hear wheremint, wenmint, but here's why you should mint.

We keep asking wheremint and wenmint, but not everyone knows whymint.

Minting is really important. It is vital to a pure internet – one that’s not dominated by platforms and ads, but free and open for creativity of all pursuits. Bringing things onchain reveals the economic demand for those objects or goods. When minting media, the exercise of minting reveals the economic demand for media across the internet that has otherwise been tucked away behind the walls of corporations.

Minting is in essence revealing the value of attention, which in our attention based economy is very important to transparently know. So no, I don’t want you to mint for me or for Zora’s sake. I want you to mint for you and for the internet’s sake. Because it’s important for each and every one of us to persist, own, and monetize our media on our terms.

Here’s why it’s important to mint in three easy bullets.

Whymint:

• Mint to save it for yourself
• Mint to share it with others
• Mint to earn if you want to

Mint = Save+ 

The best art is made for oneself. The same is true for minting. Mint as a means to save your work for yourself. Keep a record of your creativity that is not tied to any single platform. In a subtle way, minting is like scrapbooking on the internet. A place to save moments in time and of inspiration. Minting is like a super-save.

Mint = Share+ and Like+

Share your work with the world. Mint and your work instantly shows up across any onchain platform. People across the internet want to collect and engage with great work, including yours. That is why people like, repost, and share. The mint button for the collector is like a Super Like for content across the internet. Super charged with support for the creator.

Mint = Earn+

Earning is completely optional, but it’s nice to be able to capture value if you want to. Besides, making money from creativity is hard and it is a serious privilege to be beyond making money, or post economic. It feels like people often forget this, so it’s important to double click here.

The technology that underpins NFTs and minting has created an enormous amount of economic value and, to borrow a phrase from my alma mater, Coinbase, ‘economic freedom’ for people around the world. In recent weeks at Zora we’ve seen everything from mints that helped to get people out of Syria and even help people pay for rent.

Since launching Zora Protocol Rewards just over a month ago, creators and participants in our minting ecosystem have earned more than $1.1M in rewards from open edition mints. These participants include creators, platforms, and developers alike. In short, the economic component is optional and impactful. Minting works.

Closing thoughts.

Whymint? Because it’s important to building a pure internet where we own our content and our experience. If we don’t have this direct value capture available for the creators of media across the internet, then the media will get monetized for us on the platforms we engage with. This will bring us right back to square one – advertisers and platform overlords. That is not something the internet should want and that’s why you should mint.

P.S. You can mint the image above here