Talking about an average NFT marketplace, perhaps not only on Ethereum:
who or what is it who issues or mints NFTs sold and bought on an NFT marketplace?
(1) Is it an NFT marketplace itself mints them? Meaning, participants/users of an NFT marketplace mint NFTs/tokens via an NFT marketplace.
(2) Or participants/users bring their own NFTs/token to an NFT marketplace? The ones bought elsewhere, that is.
(3) Or can it be both? Or either? Depening on a particular marketplace.
Which?
Minting and Exchanging are two separate operations.
On Opensea, you can mint your own NFT before listing it for sale. You can also mint it and sell it in a single operation, using the OpenSea Storefront Collection.
So basically, most marketplaces will support any ERC721 you mint yourself, but some will also give you the option to mint and sell in a single operation.
you can mint your own NFT before listing it for sale --> how does this correspond to the 3 options in my question? Which one will it be?
On Opensea, you can mint your own NFT before listing it for sale. --> this statement doesn't make sense: a) minting is multiplying already existent tokens; therefore, I can't mint my own tokens if I don't have one; I can only mint the token(s) of OpenSea;
At OpenSea you can create / mint your own token via their web interface.
At first, you create it and it becomes available in search, but not for sale. I assume at this point it's not minted yet and only exists in their database.
After that you have an option to "bake" the metadata whereby you mint it and your NFT can be sold / purchased after that.
In this scenario you mint it, interacting with the marketplace's smart contract factory.
Whoever pays the gas mints basically.
