Before this week I thought you needed Metaplex to build a real Solana NFT. It turns out you can mint a full NFT, stamp metadata directly onto it, group it inside a collection, audit every byte, and mutate it live — using only the Token Extensions program and the SPL token CLI. No third-party framework required.
This post covers what I built during Days 44–47 of #100DaysOfSolana, what surprised me coming from a Web2 background, and what I would build next.
The Mental Model: What a Solana NFT Actually Is
Before writing a single command, I had to unlearn something. In Web2, an NFT feels like a record in a database that points to a JPEG. On Solana, it is simpler and more precise than that.
A Solana NFT is just a mint account with three properties set just right:
