The History of NFTs & How They Got Started

The CryptyArt category was started by cultural phenomena like CryptoPunks, Rare Pepe, and CryptoKitties. The viral network effects and the desire to buy these pieces helped these pieces of art to gain fame.

On May 3rd, 2014, Kevin McCoy minted his non-fungible token "Quantum" long before the crypto art market exploded. The "Quantum" art piece (2014-2021) is on sale for seven million dollars.

• 2012-2013: Colored Coins. These are tokens that represent real-world assets on the blockchain and can be used to prove ownership of any asset, from cars to real estate. The idea was to use the Bitcoin blockchain.
• 2014: Counterparty platform. Counterparty, a peer-to-peer financial platform, allowed asset creation and had a decentralized exchange, enabling users to create their own tradable currencies.
• 2015: Spells of Genesis on Counterparty. Counterparty partnered with Spells of Genesis. They were pioneers for issuing in-game assets onto a blockchain via Counterparty and also launched an ICO.

2016: Trading Cards on Counterparty. Counterparty teamed up with Force of Will, a trading card game, who launched their cards on the Counterparty platform.

2016: Rare Pepes on Counterparty. Memes entered the blockchain and made their way onto the Counterparty platform. People started to add assets to a meme called "Rare Pepes." By early 2017, Rare Pepes started to be traded on Ethereum as well. CryptoArt was born with the Rare Pepe Wallet. Now any creator could submit and sell their artwork.

John Watkinson and Matt Hall developed unique characters on the Ethereum blockchain, limited to 10,000.

The project name, Cryptopunks, was referenced to an experiment with Bitcoin in the 1990s.

• ERC20 is the most common Ethereum Token Standard that allows tokens to interact.
• ERC721 is the standard for NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. It helps track ownership and movements of individual tokes from a single smart contract.

CryptoKitties NFTs use ERC721. They are a blockchain-based virtual game that allows players to breed and trade virtual cats using Ethereum.

Between 2018 and 2021, NFTs moved into public awareness before mainstream adoption in early 2021.

The NFT market is more efficient and liquid than current methods of transferring assets.

• Opensea is the largest marketplace for art, music, domain names, collectables, and trading cards.
• Minable's platform focus on making the minting process easy for creators.
• Portion is an NFT platform that bridges NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs where the holders of the governance token $PRT are in charge.
• Niftex allows users to buy fractions of NFTs or "shards", which are ERC20 tokens.