Why your mint should be unrevealed

There are a lot of questions and doubts when it comes to NFTs, the first one comes before you even get to own it.

“Minting” the NFT is the first step towards ownership and the question that arises is “Why would anyone buy something without seeing what they are getting first?”.

But let's start from the beginning, what is “minting”?

In simpler terms, minting is basically creating the NFT on the blockchain. The NFT and its metadata are stored on-chain and the metadata is stored in a decentralized storage like IPFS. Until the NFT is minted, the NFT does not exist and cannot be seen or accessed anywhere.

Having cleared what minting is, we can now focus on the big question, why would I buy something if I can not know what I am get until after I mint?

Well, the answer is really simple actually, to prevent scammers and bots. Let me elaborate on that, if a project were to mint with a public IPFS directory, anyone with some basic knowledge on how IPFS and directories work would have the chance to download all the metadata and see which NFTs are rare and the position they have on the collection. This method is called “snipping”. After this they would just have to set up a bot that would trigger the minting transaction when the NFT they want is next in queue.

By not revealing the NFTs, you are giving everyone a chance to get a rare NFT when minting and not just benefit those who know how to handle their way through the blockchain or have a deeper understanding of IPFS. With OneMint, every collection deployed is “unrevealed” by default in order to prevent “snipping”.