The meteoric rise of NFTs needs no further introduction, considering how valuable they have become in recent times. But do you know who created the first NFT?
NFTs were first introduced as Colored Coins in 2012, designed for issuance on Bitcoin since Ethereum had not yet been created.
Later on, the evolution took hold and NFTs advanced into a more developed idea. So, with so many new NFT projects launching every week, let's take a step back and look at NFT expansion throughout the years. Here are some of the first NFT projects that shaped our current crypto reality.
Where Did NFTs Start?
NFTs can be traced all the way back to 2012 when a paper released by Meni Rosenfield described the NFT tech as "Colored Coins".
These were initially supposed to be issued on the Bitcoin blockchain. Colored coins were then pitched as the class of methods for representing and managing real-world assets on Bitcoin.
However, as smart contracts and more advanced NFT ideas came forward, this initial project faded into the background of NFTs.
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What Was The First NFT?
The first known NFT was minted on May 3, 2014, by digital artists Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash. The NFT, called Quantum, was a short video clip of McCoy's wife Jennifer. McCoy later minted this clip on the Namecoin blockchain and later sold it to Dash for $4.
The tech slowly caught up with the world in 2015. Here, the first NFT project called Etheria was launched. It was then displayed in DEVCON London, three months after the launch of Ethereum.
The term NFT gained wider momentum after the launch of the Ethereum blockchain, when the blockchain protocols introduced an ERC-721 standard, promoting the issuance of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
In 2017, many new NFT projects were born. Of these, Cryptokitties was the most notable, being many NFT holders' first insight into this new crypto asset.
Later on, the growing NFT tech was incorporated with multiple metaverses and gaming industries. These new NFT games provided an important use case for the NFTs to expand ahead.
The first company to explore the gaming/NFT world was Decentraland. Here, gamers could mint these game NFTs and derive value from them through trade and exchange.
The First NFT Game
The first-ever known NFT game was Etheria, which was created back in 2015. Etheria also followed a similar NFT roadmap,where it enabled users to buy digital lands as NFTs.
Etheria sold plots of land in the game at a price of less than one US dollar.
Later on, CryptoKitties was launched as a second NFT game which took the internet by storm by implementing unique NFT elements into it's gaming format.
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