NFT reveal

Many generative collections mint with identical placeholder images, such as a mystery box, and update the metadata hours or days later to show each token's actual appearance. The delay prevents minters from picking rare items during the sale, since nobody knows which token ID will become which character. Reveals became community events, with holders rushing to check their traits and marketplaces repricing items by rarity.

Fair reveals rely on randomness and commitments. Projects publish a provenance hash of the final image order before minting, proving it was fixed in advance, and then use a random offset, ideally from a verifiable random function, to map token IDs to artwork. Contracts may also freeze metadata after the reveal so it cannot be changed again.

Reveals have been abused. Teams or insiders with access to the metadata have sniped rare items before or right after reveal, and some contracts exposed metadata early enough for bots to mint selectively. If metadata stays editable or hosted on the team's server, the art can be altered later. Checking for a provenance hash and frozen metadata is a reasonable precaution.