Crypto glossary
Lazy minting
Lazy minting delays creating an NFT on-chain until it is first bought, so the creator can list it for free and the buyer pays the minting gas.
With lazy minting, a creator uploads their work to a marketplace and signs a message authorising the creation of the NFT under certain conditions, such as a price. Nothing is written to the blockchain yet. When a buyer purchases it, their transaction submits the signed voucher, mints the token and transfers it to them in a single step, paying the gas.
Marketplaces adopted the method so that artists could list work without paying fees upfront, which lowered the barrier for new creators, especially when Ethereum gas was expensive. It is also used for large collections where many items may never sell, avoiding the cost of minting tokens that nobody wants.
Until it is sold, a lazy-minted NFT exists only in the marketplace's database, and the buyer bears the minting cost. Many lazy-minted works are created in a contract shared by everyone using the platform rather than the artist's own, which can affect provenance and portability. Metadata storage often depends on the marketplace, so checking where files are hosted is worthwhile.
Example
An illustrator lists 20 drawings on a marketplace with lazy minting and pays nothing; when a collector buys one for 0.1 ETH, the collector's transaction mints it and pays the gas.