The NFT Glossary: Every Term Collectors Actually Need to Know
Floor price, mint, reveal, wash trading and the rest of NFT-specific vocabulary, explained in one place rather than pieced together from context.
By Firoz Khan|22 September 2026|7 min read
NFT communities have their own specific vocabulary layered on top of general crypto slang, and a fair amount of it is genuinely useful to know before buying rather than a nice-to-have. Here's the terminology that shows up most often, organised by where in the buying process you'll actually encounter it.
Before you buy: discovery terms
Floor price is the lowest current listed price for any NFT in a specific collection, the most commonly quoted, and most commonly misleading, value metric since it reflects the cheapest listing, not necessarily an achievable sale price for the whole collection. Whitelist (or allowlist) refers to a pre-approved list of wallets guaranteed access to mint before the general public, usually earned through community engagement.
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At the point of purchase: minting terms
Minting is the act of creating a new NFT on-chain for the first time, usually during a collection's initial launch. A reveal is when a collection's individual pieces, initially shown as identical placeholder images, are randomly assigned their actual final artwork and traits, sometimes immediately, sometimes days after minting.
After you own one: holding and trading terms
Diamond hands describes holding through volatility rather than selling, paper hands the opposite. Wash trading is artificially inflating an NFT's trading volume or price by trading it between wallets the same person or group actually controls, a real, documented problem in NFT markets that distorts apparent demand.
Terms specifically worth treating as caution flags
'Guaranteed whitelist spot' sold outside official channels is a common scam vector, and a project promising outsized 'utility' with no working product yet live is a pattern that's repeated across a large number of failed collections. Neither term is inherently dishonest, but both warrant real scrutiny before committing funds.
A reminder
The FCA risk warning still applies to higher-risk crypto content. Always assess how much risk you are willing to take before buying.
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