Glossary
Mint
Creating new tokens from a contract — typically governed by a permissioned function (an issuer, a staking reward, an NFT sale, an issuance schedule).
Minting is the inverse of burning: increase a token's supply by emitting new units. Who can mint and under what conditions is the core economic question of a token's design.
Stablecoins mint in response to fiat deposits; DeFi protocols mint
governance tokens to reward users; NFT contracts mint on payment of
the mint price; PoS chains mint native tokens as block rewards to
validators. Anywhere new supply enters circulation, some mint
function was called.