This is how NFTs have evolved.
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, 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’s expansion over the years.
Here are some of the first NFT projects that shaped our current crypto reality.
Where did the NFTs start?
NFTs can be traced back to 2012, when a paper published by Meni Rosenfield described NFT technology as “Colored Coins.”
These were initially to be issued on the Bitcoin blockchain. Colored coins were then presented as the class of methods for representing and managing real-world assets on Bitcoin.
However, when smart contracts and more advanced NFT ideas came forward, this initial project vanished against the backdrop of NFTs.
What was the first NFT?
The first known NFT was coined on May 3, 2014 by digital artists Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash. The NFT, called Quantum, was a short video clip by McCoy’s wife, Jennifer. McCoy later coined this clip on the Namecoin blockchain and later sold it to Dash for $4.
Technology slowly reached 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 blockchain protocols introduced an ERC-721 standard, promoting the issuance of NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.
In 2017, many new NFT projects were born. Of these, Cryptokitties was the most remarkable, being the first insight of many NFT holders on this new crypto asset.
Later, the growing NFT technology was incorporated with more metaverses and gaming industries. These new NFT games have provided an important use case for NFTs to expand in the future.
The first company to explore the world of games/ NFT was Decentraland. Here, players could mint these game NFTs and derive value from them through trade and exchange.
The first NFT game
The first known NFT game was Etheria, created in 2015. Etheria also followed a similar NFT roadmap, where it allowed users to purchase digital lands as NFT.
Etheria sold plots of land in the game at a price below one US dollar.
Later, CryptoKitties was launched as a second NFT game that took the internet by storm by implementing unique NFT elements in its gaming format.
